Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [100]
Teenage runaround Mimi Gallilee – just fourteen when she was taken on as a messenger in this top-secret establishment – recalls her induction very well. ‘There was the Official Secrets Act to sign. There wasn’t a lecture – I can’t even remember if they said “This is the Official Secrets Act.” I didn’t know what kind of a place I was going to work in. I didn’t know what my mother did there. And there was no reason for me to have ever asked. I just know that I had signed the Act. And of course we were told that we mustn’t breathe a word to anybody of where we were working.’
The nature of her job meant that she could at least attach names to certain huts, which is a good deal more than any of the cryptographers or linguists could do. But, she says, this was a period in which all natural curiosity was numbed. ‘You just accepted everything you saw and you didn’t ask. If there was a need to know, you were told. Because of the job, I used to walk around all day. The Park used to get deliveries of messages, communications – a minimum of four deliveries a day each, which I then had to make to the huts.
‘And that entailed knowing where everything and everybody was – including who was in charge of the huts – but you weren’t allowed to roam around the house.
‘And some huts you weren’t allowed to go into at all. For instance, there was Hut 11 – where you had to ring the bell outside. Then one of the Wrens or someone – who were locked in – opened up and you just handed across the doorway what you were carrying.’
The odd technological glitch could result in alarms being triggered. In May 1943, H. Fletcher of Hut 6 sent this warning memo to his superiors: ‘I think it should be seriously considered whether the fitting of scramblers is necessary. A Wren, using a public call box in Newport Pagnell, and conversing with her mother in a trunk call, was able to overhear a menu being telephoned to [the Bletchley Park outstation at] Gayhurst. Her mother also heard this conversation and remarked on its curious nature.’1
What seems rather striking now to the Hon. Sarah Baring is the fact that she cannot remember what the penalty would have been for any slip of the tongue. ‘The people I worked with in Hut 4, we could talk between each other,’ she says. ‘We were doing the same thing. I’d be translating, another friend would be doing something else. So we could talk. But only within your hut. You never talked outside your hut.
‘But the awful thing was they couldn’t give you the sack. Because you knew too much. So God knows what they would have done if anyone did talk. And nobody ever did.’
Oliver Lawn recalls: ‘There was certainly absolute secrecy in that sense, that you didn’t talk about your work to anyone outside your section. Some people have criticised that, saying that it was unnecessarily blinkered. We should have been able to be a little freer in knowing what was going on. It would have helped our work.’
Even though recruits might maintain secrecy within the establishment, however, the question arises: how could Bletchley Park security be expected to police those who were on leave? When these codebreakers and linguists and clerks went home for time off, what did they tell their families, their friends, their neighbours, their local communities, about the nature of the work they were doing?
This was a particularly germane issue for the young men, for it would be natural for many people to think of them: ‘Why is he not in uniform?’ Gordon Welchman recalled in his memoir that the issue became a source of acute discomfort for some:
Some of the young men who were sent to Hut 6 because of their brains found themselves trapped there by the demands of security. They longed for active service in the air force, the navy, or the army, but they knew too much about our success with the Enigma for their capture by the enemy to be risked.
They were doing an exhausting job, and it was obviously helping the war effort, but many of