Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [116]
One film from that period not only tells us much of the national mood at the time, but also illustrates this thirst, manifested so clearly at Bletchley Park, for something a little better. In 1944, Laurence Olivier left the navy and went to great trouble to film Shakespeare’s Henry V. Commentators have long noted how the political motivations of Henry were toned down for this film, so that the audiences might not miss the patriotic echoes of what they saw on screen: English soldiers preparing to fight on French soil, behind a charismatic leader.
But this Henry V is far beyond a simple tub-thumping exercise in morale-boosting fervour just months and weeks before the D-Day landings; its determination is to take Shakespeare’s language – and by extension, the heritage of the audience, the culture for which they had been fighting – and make it live fully. With its score by William Walton, it was almost self-consciously a film designed to proclaim the indomitability and brilliance of English art and culture.
At Bletchley, the Park inmates were keen cineastes, though their tastes, it seems, did not run so much to Will Hay as to more specialised productions. The Bletchley Park Cinema Club was, as one veteran recalls, more likely to show productions like Night Train and even the odd vintage German film. Bear in mind that this was a good fifteen or twenty years before cinema even began to be regarded as an art form.
There were language classes too (quite apart from the more formal lessons held in Japanese at Bedford for those working on ‘Purple’); these would include not only the usual modern languages, but also Latin.
Clubs were not just academic. There were more traditional forms of socialising too. ‘In Newport Pagnell,’ says Sheila Lawn, ‘we formed a very informal club. It was more a walking club, serving coffee and tea. Anyone could come in and we met people from the same village, we were all billetees together.
‘And then on your days off,’ she continues, ‘if one of your friends or companions had the same day off, you might agree to go away with them: be it a visit to London, if you could afford it, or into the country for a walk. When I met Oliver, I remember we went down to Stratford, by train, on one occasion and we went to a play.’
Towards the end of the war, the dancing craze was the unlikely source of a security panic at Bletchley Park. For the time and effort put by the Bletchley authorities into providing special dancing facilities had somehow reached the ears of a London journalist. He was called Harry Procter, and he worked for the Daily Mail. In fine investigative style, Procter was now hot on the trail of the story, inspiring a terse and rather desperate Bletchley memo:
a) The telephone exchanges at BP to be warned to be on a look-out for a call from Harry Procter of the Daily Mail. Procter will probably ask for ‘Bletchley’ or ‘for the country branch of the F.O.’ and will wish to speak to the Club Secretary.
b) Should such a call come through, the operator will reply after some delay that the Club Secretary is out and ask for Mr Procter’s number to ring him back.
c) The ‘magnificent dance hall’ will be laughed off and we will explain that the truth is that we have built a small temporary room in the office enclosure for recreation.5
It is nice to see, with this gambit, that the practice of ‘spin’ is a little older than many now assume.
But not all press coverage of Bletchley’s out-of-hours pursuits was deemed so hostile. Among the townsfolk of Bletchley and the surrounding districts, the dramatic theatrical productions seem to have made a considerable impact. Indeed, right at the end of the war, the Bletchley Gazette reported with some regret that the Bletchley Park Drama Group was producing its last play, and looked back fondly over the last few years of productions. The newspaper’s un-bylined reporter wrote:
The Group in the early days were in great demand in the district, and they roamed about the countryside in BP transport, giving entertainments in conjunction