Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [10]
There was no embarrassment about this extension of the upper-class ‘shooting party’ idea. Debutantes and daughters of ‘good families’ were actively sought after, apparently to ensure the very highest levels of security and secrecy; Alistair Denniston felt that the smarter girls would have a more acutely refined sense of duty. Such wildly generalised social assumptions were not unusual at the time. But questions of class aside, that sense of duty led these well-bred girls to undertake with great good humour some of the most breathtakingly tedious work.
On top of all this, the Park needed secretaries, office managers and messengers, even waitresses for the canteen of the House. Quite a lot of people, all in all, to descend on a very small, un-noteworthy town.
3 1939: Rounding Up the Brightest and the Best
Almost instantly, Commander Denniston found himself sinking in a quagmire of difficulties. Indeed, he complained at the time that he was ‘most anxious to take my share of the work on the increasing numbers of cryptographic problems confronting us’. Such a desire was simply not practical.
So, on 4 September 1939, further summonses to Bletchley started to go out discreetly. A surviving memo states: ‘immediate personnel for Hut 3: I suggest 15 people be asked for at once. As you know I have already approached Pembroke College Oxford and they have promised to send me some names in a few weeks time.’
This need for discretion was paramount, which is why so many of the first codebreaking and translating recruits were known personally and socially to their recruitors. But there was much more than just plain nepotism and snobbery going on. For the linguists recruited to translate the German messages, there is a suggestion that the security services played a part in the approaches. Certainly, reasonably stringent background checks were made on these early young arrivals. Other than this, though, there seemed to be a pleasing breeziness about the way candidates were picked.
Mavis Batey is one of the few people to have worked closely alongside the volcanic Dilly Knox, and she herself was to play a key role in the Park’s story. She was by no means a debutante. Rather, she was a fiercely intelligent middle-class girl.
Today Mrs Batey, whose husband Keith is a fellow Bletchley Park veteran, is wryly amused by the reasoning that led to the Park’s upper-class recruitment drive: ‘The first two girls in the Cottage were the daughters of two chaps that Denniston played golf with at Ashtead. Denniston knew the family, he knew that they were nice people and … well, that their daughters wouldn’t go around opening their mouths and saying what was going on. The background was so important if they were the sort of people who were not going to go around telling everyone what they were doing.’
For Keith Batey, a 20-year-old undergraduate reading mathematics at Cambridge – who was to participate in some of the greatest inspirational leaps made at the Park, and who was to meet his future wife Mavis there after a chance encounter in one of the huts – his own recruitment was reasonably straightforward. So much so, in fact, that unlike many of his fellow codebreakers-to-be, he realised instantly as soon as he received the summons. He recalls: ‘They [the university authorities] were allowing mathematicians to stay on to finish degrees. I took my maths finals in Cambridge in May 1940 – it all seemed highly artificial, with the Germans charging across Europe – anyway, I took it and then one had to wait to be told what to do.
‘I went home to Carlisle. A letter arrived, scruffily handwritten, from a chap called Gordon Welchman. He was writing to offer me a job. He couldn’t tell me what it was, where it was, or anything of that kind, but he could say that it was very important, very interesting, and that the pay was lousy.
‘Such was the security,’ continues Mr Batey with a certain