Flashback

Life at Bletchley Park

WHEN I WAS 18 YEARS OLD, I applied for the national service as Britain was fighting in the Second World War. After a successful interview, the woman in charge of the hiring process offered me a role working at somewhere called Station X. I hadn’t the faintest clue what the job was and she couldn’t tell me anything about it, but I thought that it sounded intriguing, so I accepted it.

It has now been 78 years since I started working at Bletchley Park as an operator of Alan Turing’s codebreaking invention. Our purpose was to crack the daily code of intercepted German messages and the role was highly secretive. It was a far cry from my south London upbringing, where I was raised with my two younger brothers.

There were 10 of us in my unit and our instructions for the work came from another hut through a pressurised tube. Out would fly a piece of paper called ‘a menu’ with letters dotted about the page and we had to set up the decoding machines to that particular pattern. On a few occasions, the pressure tube contained wrapped sweets and a large spider. We never met anyone from the other hut and had no idea where it was located, but someone in there obviously had a sense of humour.

While working at Bletchley, I was very lucky to live in a beautiful old house called Crawley Grange in north Buckinghamshire. That’s where this picture was taken, myself and the nine other women from my team all sitting on the wall with the house in the background. I stayed in touch with four of the women in the picture but only one is still alive. She lives in Newcastle and we often speak on the phone.

The house had a huge room at the back, which we called the ballroom, and every month we would hold a dance, inviting all the Allied air force and army units that were in town. We were very happy to welcome the Americans because they always brought sweets and cigarettes. The parties would finish around 10.30pm and we enjoyed them very much. I made some good friends – I lost a few too, especially the men, over the three years I worked there.

However, I recently discovered that another resident where I now live in Tunbridge Wells also worked at Bletchley on Japanese codes, but he won’t talk much about it – it was so drilled into us that we must not say a word. Neither of my parents knew what I did and nor did my husband for the first 20 years of our marriage. I told him one evening after we introduced a friend of mine from my Bletchley days to her future husband. The men asked how we knew each other and their jaws dropped to the floor. My husband couldn’t believe it. But he eventually took it in.

Despite being right at the heart of Britain’s war-winning operations, I have learnt more about Bletchley Park since its existence was made public – in the mid-’70s – than I knew while I was working there, particularly from the numerous books that have been written about it. It may sound strange, but we didn’t really know anything about the operation other than what we did in our hut. Apart from that, we just got on with life, did the job and rarely asked any questions. We were more concerned about whether we had a fresh shirt for our date that night – we were, after all, only teenagers.

— Interview by Izzy Lyons

Bletchley Park is keen to speak to veterans willing to share their stories. Please contact enquiries@ bletchleypark.org.uk , or call 01908-640404

Joyce Davey (middle row, second from right) with the women she worked with at Bletchley