Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [12]
‘So I didn’t know, of course, that he had gone to Bletchley. I went to his rooms, and he said: “Would you like to work with me?” Without telling me, of course, what the work was. Obviously, since I was due for call-up, I had no choice, in that sense. And a fortnight later, I turned up at Bletchley Park, and sat at Welchman’s feet, to learn about Enigma.’
For the Hon. Sarah Baring – a young debutante, goddaughter of Lord Mountbatten and a photographic model for Cecil Beaton – the route to Bletchley Park was a little less cloak-and-dagger and rather more patriotic gung-ho. As soon as the war broke out, she knew that she wanted to throw herself into the effort. The only problem was that the first job she found was less than ideal.
‘When the war started, me and a great friend of mine, Osla Henniker-Major, decided we wanted to do something really important,’ Sarah Baring says. ‘And we thought: making aeroplanes. So we trooped off to the Slough Trading Estate – ghastly place – and said to the people there: “Here we are – we want to make aeroplanes.” So we were shoved in to something like a school.
‘We had to learn how to cut Durol,’ she continues, ‘which the planes were made of. We did that for a while, and then Osla and I felt we weren’t really doing enough. Then suddenly, through the post, came a letter, God knows who from, asking us to report to the head of Bletchley – forthwith. That was all. So we thought: “Anything’s better than making aeroplanes at the moment.”
‘We had to have a language test,’ she continues. ‘And it was a funny one. I knew German, luckily, because my mother had sent me to Germany when I was sixteen – I hated it, by the way – so I had the German. And French was easy. And I suddenly realised that the lady who was talking to me and finding out about my linguistic skills didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.
‘So I lost my head completely and said: “Oh! Would you like to hear my Spanish?” I couldn’t really speak Spanish at all. She said: “Oh no, dear, I think that’ll be …’ I added: “I can do Portuguese.” The whole thing was going to my head. She said: “No, no, dear, that’s fine, you’ve passed the thing.” It was the German this lady was after, of course.’
Others too found that the language test didn’t seem to be as rigorous as one would expect. One recruit was asked if she could speak Italian. ‘Only opera Italian,’ she replied. ‘Yes, that will do,’ she was told.
One young mathematician did have an idea of what was coming, and his approach was more cloak-and-dagger than almost anyone else’s. But as the man who would provide one of the most brilliant intuitive leaps of the war, this is perhaps appropriate. John Herivel – whose ‘Herivel Tip’ was to prove vital in the struggle to crack Enigma – remembered his introduction to the institution as a young undergraduate in 1940: ‘Gordon Welchman in the early days had done most of the recruiting. A lot of them inevitably were people that he knew. The men and also, I think, some of the women.’
Welchman also happened to be Herivel’s old mathematics lecturer, so the link could not have been more direct. From the undergraduates’ point of view, he was a figure who had disappeared from the university under a cloud of mystery; now, one cold midwinter’s evening in Cambridge, 21-year-old Herivel got an unexpected visit in his rooms from the very man himself.
Welchman was brisk, though civil, wasting little time in telling Herivel that there was important war work going on at Bletchley Park and asking him if he would like to come and help.
The young man responded equally briskly; Mr Herivel recalls that at that time ‘the university was a ghostly place’, and that Part III of his Mathematics tripos could wait until after the war. And so a date was agreed. Welchman told Herivel where to