Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [129]
But it was finally over. A copy of a rather stiff memo on the subject of ‘Re-Distribution of Surplus Staff’ survives. Intended as a generic letter to all staff members, it begins:
Owing to the cessation of hostilities, there is no further work for you to do in this organisation. In these circumstances, there is no object in continuing to report here for duty, and with effect from … [blank space left for date], you are free to absent yourself. You must, however, present yourself, with this letter, to the Staff Officer, Hut 9, before your departure, to give certain particulars for his records …
In accordance with Treasury regulations, your name has been forwarded to the Treasury for consideration for employment in other Government Departments.4
This transition was by no means instant, and nor was it painless. With personnel leaving, those left behind were juggling new and awkward shift systems to keep up with the remaining work. The Bletchley Park directorate made some proposals concerning week-end leave, which one might imagine would have been welcomed after all those years of seven-day shifts. Curiously, these met with fierce resistance: what worked in peacetime for ‘family and friends’, as one Park staffer put it, was not right for this organisation. At Bletchley, the shifts worked best when the staff could ‘choose’ which days off they wanted. And what, this staffer added, would be the benefit of having every Sunday off?
‘Shopping is impossible on Sundays anywhere,’ said the staffer in a memo of protest. ‘So no shopping would be possible one week in three (according to the BP shift system). In London, shopping is only possible in the forenoon of Saturdays. Those making appointments – hairdressing, dentistry, interviews for jobs – would be severely handicapped.’
Perhaps even more persuasively, added the staffer, ‘Entertainment facilities are rare on Sundays and overcrowded on Saturdays. Difficulties would be greatly increased if all BP personnel were free at weekends.’ And possibly the clincher? ‘Billeted personnel are in many cases obliged to be “out” for the midday meal. They are doubly unwelcome on Sundays, when the billetor is himself at home, and on Sunday, it is more difficult than on weekdays to get a meal elsewhere.’5
John Herivel took a slightly more emollient line in the debate over compulsory weekends off, though he felt that in his own department, he and his colleague Macintosh should carry on as before. ‘If we were to confine our leave to Saturdays and Sundays,’ he wrote in another memo still held in the archives, ‘there would be some days when neither of us were on. This could be very inconvenient.’6
Nevertheless, the slow, careful dismantling of the operation was under way. And the image of Bletchley Park in the later months of 1945 seems to be one of once-teeming blocks now lying empty; of sparse huts, and of many of the rooms in the house itself now starting to echo. ‘It was so strange,’ said one veteran. ‘It was already nearly empty – a ghost town with just a few removal men shifting furniture. Thousands of people just walked out of the gate never to return.’
Actually the clear-up was a shade more complex than that; given the intense secrecy and security, every square inch of the house, and all the huts, and all the blocks, had to be combed and sifted for any hint of coding material or even machine components to ensure that solutely nothing had been left behind.
The operation was largely packed up: some (though by no means all) bombes were dismantled. Some Wrens were gleeful about these acts of destruction, for they had come almost to hate the machines. Now, instead of having to treat them with the utmost care, they let parts drop and fall and roll on the floor, and they shouted with enthusiasm.
Meanwhile, bonfires of paperwork were made in the grounds of Bletchley Park. The huts, the house, all areas had to be combed for any bits of paper that might have got away. Some decrypts were found jammed into the gap of a window frame;