Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [112]
Bletchley Park decrypted an Italian message stating that Rommel owed all his good fortune to the fact that an American cipher sent from Cairo was being read regularly. Churchill was informed, and the Americans were swiftly on to the case. The unfortunate leaker was one Colonel Fellers, who had simply been sending news of British positions back to his superiors in Washington. An enquiry found that he was innocent of treachery; the problem was that the code he had used was too easy to crack.
The men and women of Bletchley would have to live with the effects of this intense and obsessive secrecy for decades to come. But at the time, with the tremendous pressures that they were all facing, what sort of pressure valves were there? One extraordinarily fruitful one was the Park’s artistic life: what had started in the early days with little clubs and societies forming was, by 1943, a wide-ranging mix of classical music, opera, dancing and amateur dramatics. Hard as Bletchley’s people worked, they knew on some level that it would be necessary to play hard too, in order to keep their minds fully refreshed. And the nature of the cultural activities that they engaged in tells us much about the aspirations of a smart young generation.
23 The Cultural Life of Bletchley Park
When one listens now to wartime songs and entertainers, one is generally listening to the material that was performed to the troops, and played into the dance halls and the factories: Flanagan and Allen; George Formby; Tommy Trinder; Arthur Askey; the Andrews Sisters; Anne Shelton; Billy Cotton and his Band; Jack Buchanan; Vera Lynn. The tone was ceaselessly uplifting and ceaselessly uncomplicated, from George Formby’s risqué suggestions of knowing what to do with his gas-mask to Vera Lynn and her white cliffs. This is not to say that such entertainments were naive, or even simple; merely that they were pitched at a certain emotional level that could be enjoyed by all – popular culture at its best.
Tellingly, though, the sort of culture that the denizens of Bletchley Park went in for was, from the start, markedly more highbrow. One senses that this was not in any way deliberate; it was simply that many of the young codebreakers and linguists had been pulled away from their university lives (and in an age when fewer than five per cent of young people in any one year would attend university), and part of their education had been to inculcate an interest in the arts.
Indeed, outside the Park, even for those who had had relatively rudimentary primary educations – such as the philosopher Bryan Magee, who recalls, as he became a teenager during the war, how he would be suffused with a desire not only to hear the finest classical music, but also to see the best theatre – the arts were becoming seen as something that all should aspire to appreciate and enjoy, as opposed to being the preserve of a wealthy metropolitan elite. Inside the Park, they managed to enjoy an extraordinary range of cultural – and indeed, entertainment – pursuits.
Oliver and Sheila Lawn have especially fond memories of the way that Bletchley-ites contrived to use their leisure time: ‘There was music,’ says Mr Lawn, ‘Play readings. And play actings. Quite a bit of amateur dramatics. And concerts of all kinds.’
‘Some very gifted people were there,’ adds Mrs Lawn. ‘Some concerts were given by people who were already there.’
Specially invited artistes would make the journey up to Buckinghamshire as well. Says Oliver Lawn: ‘I remember Myra Hess coming. And one or two – at that time, well-known – quartets came.’ One wonders quite how much – if anything – these artistes were told about the nature of the audience they would be facing. Some musicians were told nothing at all. They would travel up in vans, clamber out with