Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [114]
‘They started to form these clubs within about a couple of years. That was how I went to some of the music recitals. They were with records in the big main lounge, the club lounge. Once they had built the cafeteria, I believe then they built a concert/dance hall at the end of the road.
‘The revues were usually put on once a year and I went to a number of those. They were marvellous, fantastic – the people were so mad.’
Another great admirer of the seasonal revues was Hut 4 veteran Diana Plowman, who recalled: ‘At Christmas time, all these great beings put on a revue. I’ve never seen anything like them before or since – wit, colour, eloquence, beauty, breathtaking …’
Bletchley Park’s revues were also noted for their professionalism. Other veterans recall the care that went into the writing and performance of shows such as The Naming of Parts. And in this, we hear an echo of what might have been for these young people; in a university career uninterrupted by war, they might well have been performing in the Cambridge Footlights and similar undergraduate shows. Certainly these variety shows were pitched at a higher brow than those entertaining the troops in ENSA.
But it wasn’t just revues, and Dorothy Hyson and Frank ‘Widow Twankey’ Birch were not the only theatrical talent; according to Mimi Gallilee, ‘There were many acting professionals at Bletchley.’ Despite the 24-hour shift system and the constant grind of work, the Bletchley Park inmates – prominent among them gifted mathematician Shaun Wylie, who became head of the Bletchley Park Dramatic Club – also contrived to stage theatrical productions such as French Without Tears, Much Ado About Nothing, Candida, Gaslight and J.B. Priestley’s They Came to a City.
This last play, almost never seen now, seems to have been one of the most popular and fashionable works of the war years. In essence, it is a Utopian fantasy: nine people arrive from nowhere into a city where poverty and hardship and prejudice are unknown; these people are from different walks of life and all respond to this dream city in different ways, with five of them eventually finding themselves quite unable to stay there. It is a sort of quasi-socialist middle-class vision of a type that was to prove extremely popular in the post-war period, examples being the productions of Ealing Studios and the richer imaginings of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
It is equally beguiling to see these serious young codebreakers and linguists throwing themselves with the same gravity into amateur dramatics. Some suggested that it was simply a valve for releasing all the tension of work, a means of forgetting the nature of their working lives. But it was not simply escape on stage. The amateur dramatic companies also produced professional-looking programmes for their performances; and in the photographs that survive, one can see the astonishing ingenuity that went into both the costumes and the stage design. In a production of By Candlelight, a young John de Grey is clearly portraying a footman of some sort – but where the Dickens did he get hold of that elaborate eighteenth century-style coat? And the set behind the two elegant ladies in simulation of an elegant drawing room has been styled and painted with bewildering attention to detail.
Not everyone joined in with the amateur dramatics. Indeed, Captain Jerry Roberts, busy trying to crack the ‘Tunny’ decrypts in the later years of the war, felt distinctly out of it. He recalls: ‘I didn’t get much of a sense of culture. But other people I knew did. Perhaps the reason was that I had a long walk home to the billet. I used to go to cinema meetings in the town, and the Wrens who worked in the Newmanry used to have dances occasionally out at Woburn Sands. They would invite us to a dance and we would have a coach to take us out there and bring us back. But it was difficult