Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [113]
Sheila Lawn adds, ‘A little later the authorities built an assembly hall outside the Park, where we could have dances, meetings, all sorts of things, so that other people from Bletchley could enjoy some of that too.’
Both Oliver and Sheila had an abiding passion for the pursuit of Highland dancing. Unlikely though it may seem, the Park had its own home-grown expert in this pursuit, in the shape of Japanese codebreaking genius Hugh Foss. As well as being renowned for his good-humoured, easy manner, he was also apparently a fantastically elegant figure on the dance floor. ‘Highland Reels was one of the very active social clubs,’ says Mr Lawn.
‘He was tall, elegant, danced beautifully,’ adds Sheila. ‘But of course we had no idea what he did.’
Oliver Lawn goes on to evoke an amusing and rather lovely image of those evenings when the dancing took place: ‘We did our Scottish reels first of all in the hall of the mansion. It was a long hall, which was ideal for Scottish reel dances. And when they built the assembly hall outside the Park, we moved there. And then in the summer, when the weather was good, we danced by the lake, on the croquet lawn.’
Another veteran recalls how Hugh Foss would practise during lunch hours and hold ‘more elaborate dances every three to six months with a full dress dance on St Andrew’s nights. We wore out his record of Circassian Circle and had a collection to buy him a new one.’
Dancing seemed to be one of the great overriding passions at Bletchley. One codebreaker recalled being so keen to get to a dance that he managed, by dint of getting the date wrong, to turn up an entire week early. It also broke out in amusingly informal ways. One Wren recalled: ‘The kitchen at BP House was so large that one could dance. During supper break I taught one of the men to waltz. We only had one record – “Sleepy Lagoon” [now better known as the theme tune of Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs].’
Even Bletchley’s fiercest figures could not resist the call of the hop. Mimi Gallilee recalls that her boss Miss Reed – so severe and so unyielding – was nevertheless transformed completely when it came to her leisure hours: ‘Doris Reed used to go to the dancing. The Highland reels. And she would always go during her lunch hour.’
Lucienne Edmonston-Lowe, who worked in Hut 6’s Registration Room from 1942 to 1945, also had extremely warm memories of these entertainments. ‘If one was involved in a play or a concert, there were rehearsals and so the shift-list was very much referred to if one was on night or evening shift,’ she recalled. ‘I remember a song from the first Christmas revue I ever went to – sung by three smart girls. It went something like this:
“Six days out of seven we do penance,
In this awful God-forsaken place,
Six days out of seven we do penance,
For a single day of grace,
Cast aside what our mothers knit us,
Put on clothes that really fit us,
Sophisticated black is de rigueur,
And a smart hat a woman’s cri de coeur.”’1
Even the Soviet spy/fellow traveller John Cairncross expressed an admiration for the creative side of Bletchley life. In his memoir, he wrote:
The … high spots I recall on our limited social life were a concert of German Lieder sung by a colleague, and the Christmas pantomime where we were regaled with such items as a Russian partisan in a fur cap singing about his life, and revue items with cracks such as ‘working and partly working’ – courtesy of T.S. Eliot – and saving water by having baths à deux.2
For young Mimi Gallilee, whose age would have precluded some of the straightforward socialising opportunities, this array of activities was extremely beguiling to behold. ‘There were lots of different clubs,’ she says. ‘There was country dancing, morris dancing, different kinds of music, and you’d sit and listen to gramophone records in those days. One of the rooms at the front of the house became like a lounge really. There was