Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [115]
‘There were plenty of clubs: chess club, drama club,’ he continues. ‘And people who lived nearby, or had bicycles, tended to go to that sort of thing. If you lived half an hour’s walk away, you weren’t going to walk all the way back again from the drama things.’
This was a memory echoed by Irene Young, although she did recall managing to get to the 1942 Christmas revue, despite being wholly dependent on local buses: ‘Enjoying this recreation, I could not banish the occasional thought that although work at BP was undeniably of vital importance, we were living a comparatively sheltered life.’3 The show clearly did not succeed in lifting her out of herself. Clearly, however, a walk of half a day would not have deterred a lot of the young codebreakers, and perhaps the more senior ones too.
There was also an enthusiasm for keeping fit and outdoor pursuits. In 1942, one L.P. Wilkinson, chairman of the Bletchley Park Recreational Club, sent this wheedling memo to Commander Bradshaw: ‘It would be a great convenience if the Summer House beside the tennis courts could be used as a changing room for tennis players. It would require little or no alteration. May we have your permission for this?’ The gracious answer was a yes.
There were other clouds on the tennis players’ horizons: not only a shortage of balls (a wonderfully polite surviving letter in the National Archive from manufacturer Dunlop regrets the inevitability of this), but indeed a struggle to keep the court itself smooth and even. A specialist firm – En Tout Cas – ‘The largest makers of hard lawn tennis courts in the world’ – was consulted by Commander Bradshaw over the matter of the cost of putting these faults right.4
Emboldened, the Bletchley Park Recreation Club also put in a request for ‘a radiogram’ and Commander Bradshaw investigated the cost of getting a good one. The model favoured cost £45 – at the time an extraordinary sum of money. But a further technological innovation had caught the eye of the Recreation Club: ‘a combined television radiogram’ which would have cost an eye-watering 65 guineas. Sadly the records do not disclose if this item was ever purchased.
Of course there was live music too. Bletchley had tremendous choral societies; Gordon Welchman’s fond memories of code-breakers singing madrigals on a summer evening by the side of the Grand Union Canal were but a single example.
Again, some of the Bletchley staff had a specialised interest in their civilian lives. One was a director of music with the BBC, while by 1942, one team was led by opera singer Jean Alington, and various categories and files in Bletchley Park huts came to be named after composers and conductors. These more musical Bletchley-ites would give recitals of Brahms, and of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Added to this, they were able to draw specialised artistes to the Park to give performances. Oliver Lawn is not the only veteran to recall the occasion when world-famous pianist Myra Hess came to give an evening performance. Opera singer Peter Pears also went to the Park.
Equally impressive was the fact that Bletchley Park organised a couple of ballet performances, again bringing professionals up from London. When one looks at the opening scene of Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 film The Red Shoes – a jostling crowd of young people desperate to get into the Covent Garden opera house to see the premiere of a new, specially composed and choreographed ballet – one thinks about a generation starved of this sort of artistic stimulation. One can easily envisage how the young of Bletchley eagerly leapt on these highbrow diversions as a means of forgetting their vital but otherwise often very repetitive and grinding work.
As the war went on, there also emerged a Cinema Club, again presumably in stark competition with the two commercial cinemas that graced Bletchley town centre. This was, of course, a period in which cinema attendances in Britain were still enormously high; most people would go once, if not twice a week. Oliver Lawn recalls catching such epics as