I spy the REAL stars of Bletchley — women!
HISTORY THE DEBS OF BLETCHLEY PARK by Michael Smith (Aurum Press £20) THE BLETCHLEY GIRLS by Tessa Dunlop (Hodder £20) BEL MOONEY
Sitting in the cinema watching The Imitation game, I just about quelled my irritation at the ridiculous mis-casting of pretty, vacuous Keira Knightly as the plain, bespectacled, brilliant mathematician Joan Clarke, when I realised something else was wrong.
There weren’t enough other women. Oh, there was a shot of a room full of women wearing headphones and Wrens walked by — but you wouldn’t have realised that during the war women outnumbered men at Bletchley Park four to one, making up threequarters of the workforce.
Eight thousand women were code-breakers, linguists, Wrens, Waafs, and so on, fulfilling a vast number of complex roles in this quietly magnificent ‘backroom’ part of the war.
With the huge success of bestsellers such as Andrew hodge’s biography of Alan Turing and Sinclair McKay’s The Secret Life Of Bletchley Park, as well as a lengthy back-list of books by and about the code-breakers, you could be forgiven for asking if we need more.
For years the people who worked at Bletchley Park loyally kept schtum about their secret activities; now we know almost everything about the hush-hush work which shortened WWII by up to three years and saved more than 14 million lives.
Yet these two new books are a welcome addition to the Bletchley list. Each interweaves individual stories with historical events — although Dunlop is far more engaging in her personal approach. her obvious feminine empathy with the venerable ladies she spoke to gives her book an immediacy and intimacy Michael Smith lacks.
Of the 15 surviving ‘ Bletchley girls’ interviewed by Dunlop, only four feature in Smith’s book — proof enough that this kind of rich, word- of-mouth historical research is essential while the memories are (literally) still alive. When the german Enigma encryption machine was captured, the desperate, secret race to crack the code began.
Churchill prioritised recruitment to Bletchley and so maths graduates (like Joan Clarke), military personnel, linguists, a handful of code-breakers and debutantes were all signed up — together with many other women with crucial organisational skills, whom Dunlop has called ‘the worker ants’. The youngest, Jewish Muriel Dindol, was a messenger girl at 14.
Dunlop points out: ‘The early