The tales of code-breaking women during the Second World War
Michael Smith is fascinated by spies. The former reporter for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times was a correspondent in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan. Then he turned his attention to the world of espionage in the Second World War, writing a bestseller, Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park. He recently turned his sights on the women who worked undercover at Bletchley, the British country mansion that became a hub of intelligence activity. The result is The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories. Our conversation has been edited for length.
Coded messages and spymasters were a fact of history. Queen Elizabeth I was a noted employer of spymasters.
It goes back to the ancient Persians, the Romans. They all encoded the messages so couriers carrying them couldn’t read them. The complexity of the ciphers and codes started in the First World War. There was the introduction of wireless communications. Anyone could intercept those so you needed codes. It became clear at the end of the First World War that the Brits had broken most of the German codes. As a result, Germans wanted to upgrade their coding systems and they mechanized them with the Enigma machines. You mention Alan Turing as an interesting eccentric (he is played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the recent film The Imitation Game). He buried silver bars and had an elaborate set of instructions for how to locate them once the war ended, but he never did find them. The genius fooled himself. But though he devised the idea of a computer, it was Max Newman, his tutor from Cambridge University who was also at Bletchley, who ended up building one. Why wasn’t Turing involved in the development of the Colossus, as the computer was named?
Turing by this stage had moved on. He was working on correcting the huge problem the Brits had with transatlantic communication between Roosevelt and Churchill. They had to encrypt the messages in some way and developed a machine which was huge, 20 feet by 20 feet. Turing was trying to create a smaller version of this. He was also doing some liaison with Americans on codes and breaking them. But most of the time he was working on Delilah, a speech-scrambling device. He was consulted occasionally about the Colossus.
Tell me about Mary Wisbey.
Mary’s family was quite well-to-do but she, like a lot of young women, wanted to join the female services during the war. Against her father’s wishes, instead of going to Oxford, she decided to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Her story then becomes like an episode from The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
After she joined the auxiliary air force, she was sent to Cambridge to study the psychology of the interview. Because she could speak German, she was told to go to London, to a wine shop, and she was to pass a coded word to the man behind the counter. She went to this wine shop in Soho and said what she was supposed to say and she went through the back door of the shop. There she discovered a huge group of offices and she was interviewed and didn’t really know why or what she was doing there. She was then sent off to Russell Square in Bloomsbury and was taught Japanese.
After a few weeks, she was told to go to Euston station and get off the
train at the third station. She was met by someone who took her to Bletchley. She had obviously been picked out as someone who might be good for MI6 (the British secret service), which controlled Bletchley Park. You are a journalist who has spent a career writing about Bletchley as well as true stories about British spies. Now you are a trustee of Bletchley Park. Since Bletchley was top secret, how did you first learn about it and why did you get so deeply involved?
I first heard about it in 1993. I hadn’t really looked into the idea of Bletchley Park before that, even though I had worked in military intelligence. It is not until I left the army that I learned anything about what happened at Bletchley.
I became a journalist and in 1993 there was a campaign to save Bletchley Park from destruction. I reported on it and I wrote a book on intelligence, which included a chapter on Bletchley Park. Then I was asked to write another book, Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park, which became a bestseller.
It was subsequently televised and updated in 2011 as The Secrets of Station X: How the Bletchley Park Codebreakers Helped Win the War. I had interviewed women who had worked at Bletchley for my other books, but The Debs of Bletchley is the first time the role of women has been closely examined. Many Torontonians are familiar with the PBS television series The Bletch-
ley Circle. In that program there are these brilliant women who seem to be able to figure out the German codes from the Enigma machines. How true is this?
I thought The Bletchley Circle told the story very well. By 1941, they were breaking lots and lots of codes on a daily basis and, in order to keep that going, they needed more manpower and since there was no more manpower, they brought in women. They worked in Hut 6, which is where all the Enigma ciphers were broken for the German army and air force.
These were young women. Many of them had boyfriends off fighting. After the war, many of them became housewives, the life that their mothers had always wanted for them — getting married, having children and a house and a car. But it was very, very constrained. It was a mind-numbingly boring thing for many of them.
One of the things The Bletchley Circle did was show the women’s lives after Bletchley. The character Susan Gray, played by Anna Maxwell Martin, is typical of that. Here is a clever woman who ends up tending house. There is a quote in my book from Mavis Batey that young girls were treated equally with the men at Bletchley. She says Bletchley Park was “a remarkable community where neither rank nor status counted and a girl of 19 with a bright idea would be encouraged to take it forward, long before any official equality for women.”
That was one of the things the television show demonstrated quite well. jhunter@thestar.ca