I spy the REAL stars of Bletchley — women!
SITTIng in the cinema watching The Imitation game, I just about quelled my irritation at the ridiculous mis-casting of pretty, vacuous Keira Knightley 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
BEL MOONEY 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 Bletchl ey li s t . Each i nterweaves 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 i mmediacy and i ntimacy 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 machi n e 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
history of BP has fed us an image of curious academics supported by a bevy of debutantes.’ The title of Michael Smith’s book (although not all the content) does nothing to dispel that somewhat misleading impression. But it’s true that at the beginning recruitment did target ‘people who were known to come from reliable families’, as Smith puts it.
‘Reliable’ meant people with pukka contacts, yet we should realise, too, that girls with access to the finest education had usually also been taught languages.
One of Smith’s case histories is Sally Norton, later to marry an Astor and gain a title. Brought up in her parents’ 18thcentury mansion near Edinburgh, Sally was taught German, French and Italian, and sent to Munich in 1937 to perfect her German.
She worked briefly for Vogue, before obeying the call to Bletchley in 1941 because of her known language skills. In Hut 4, the German naval section, she had to log details from decoded messages and file them. Such work could be dull, as one of Dunlop’s interviewees makes clear. It’s refreshing (given the top-secret glamour that has been attached to Bletchley Park) to read Lady Jean Fforde’s admission of how much she loathed the mind-numbing tedium.
Now 93, Lady Jean remembers: ‘If three holes matched it was most likely der, die or das and you passed it through the hatch to the next room. There was one coder who put Heil Hitler at the end of his messages. That was helpful. Doing this for a year sent me nearly crazy.’
These women worked very long hours in uncomfortable circumstances, put up with poor food, spartan lodgings and many rules — with few complaints. Again and again, in the interviews, you hear the phrase commonly used by the war generation: ‘You just got on with it.’
Yet the women also recall a ‘rather happy atmosphere of tolerance’ where ‘very eccentric behaviour was accepted fairly affectionately’. There are stories of practical jokes, of madcap dancing at the Dorchester on days off, of sport and musical societies — touching accounts of very young women finding moments of fun and romance as the storm-clouds of war rumbled in the background.
Nowadays, those who are still alive seem to delight in their new celebrity status — and well they deserve it. Shall we ever see their like again?