Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [11]
His wife-to-be, a linguist and student of German literature, also had the benefit of a certain amount of inside knowledge. Just as the war broke out, she had been seconded to the old GC&CS near St James’s Park – a distinctly unusual position for a young woman at that time. ‘I worked at Broadway Buildings first, in the Ministry of Economic Warfare,’ Mrs Batey says. ‘The job involved blacklisting all the people who were dealing with Germany – through commodities they were using. Then I got called for the interview at the Foreign Office – conducted by a formidable lady called Miss Moore – I don’t know whether she knew what we were going to do. At the time of the interview, we didn’t know whether we were going to be spies or what. But then I got sent to Bletchley.
‘I didn’t want to go on with academic studies,’ Mrs Batey continues. ‘University College London [where she had been studying] was just evacuating to the campus at Aberystwyth, in west Wales. But I thought I ought to do something better for the war effort than reading German poets in Wales. After all, German poets would soon be above us in bombers. I remarked to someone that I should train to be a nurse. But that person told me: “No you don’t, you go and see someone at the Foreign Office. They can use your German.” And so I did.’
Harry Hinsley, who was later to become the official historian of British wartime intelligence, recalled being interviewed in St John’s College, Cambridge by Alistair Denniston and Colonel John Tiltman. Of this experience Hinsley said: ‘The kind of questions they asked me were: “You’ve travelled a bit, we understand. You’ve done quite well in your Tripos. What do you think of government service? Would you rather have that than be conscripted? Does it appeal to you?”’1
This, at least, was rather more subtle than an approach made two years before to Professor E.R.P. Vincent, who was invited to dinner by Room 40 veteran Frank Adcock. Professor Vincent recalled: ‘We dined very well, for he [Adcock] was something of an epicure, and the meal was very suitably concluded with a bottle of 1920 port. It was then that he did something which seemed to me most extraordinary: he went to the door, looked outside and came back to his seat. As a reader of spy fiction, I recognised the procedure but never expected to witness it.’2
However corny, the approach worked, and Professor Vincent was to join the team engaged with wrestling with the Japanese codes.
For Sheila Lawn there was a definite element of taking an active role in the conflict. ‘I was in my second year in Aberdeen University studying for a Modern Languages honours degree. But I was very troubled because I was reserved as a future teacher. I felt I ought to be doing something – like so many of my friends – about fighting Hitler. So I took my name away from the Reserve list, didn’t consult anyone, just took it away. I waited for developments, which came very quickly. A letter from the Foreign Office in London, asking me to go down for an interview.
‘I had my interview,’ Sheila continues. ‘And shortly after that – it was the vacation – I got another letter, simply asking me to report to Bletchley.’
The man whom she met at Bletchley Park, and whom she was later to marry – Oliver Lawn – was similarly young and eager when he found himself being approached. Mr Lawn was later to find himself overseeing one of the most important technological breakthroughs of the entire war. But for this young man, only nineteen years old, not long out of a respectable minor public school, there was little hint at the beginning of the intellectual excitement that lay ahead.
Now he finds himself recalling the start of his Bletchley Park career with a certain amused seriousness. ‘At the time, I was doing maths tripos at Cambridge. When I finished my tripos, my Part Three, in 1940, I expected to