Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [13]
Several days later, Herivel was on the train from Cambridge to Bletchley, speculating madly about what he was getting into. ‘The very first thing I had to do on arrival there,’ he recalls, ‘was swear an oath. About not revealing a single detail to anyone. I remember there was a fearsome looking naval officer there – presumably to instil a measure of fear!’
Some veterans recalled their utter dismay upon arriving at Bletchley; the railway station itself was frowsy, and the small town that it served did not look much more promising. Architectural historian Jane Fawcett MBE recalls simply that Bletchley was ‘a dump’. Even the first prospect of the Park itself – which from 1939 was surrounded with wire fencing, ‘like Whipsnade Zoo’, as veteran Diana Plowman put it – might not have seemed especially enticing. One or two of these young people, when being sized up for their new duties, had imagined that their top secret missions would involve them being parachuted in behind enemy lines. Drab, dreary, provincial Bletchley seemed a long way from such excitement.
Indeed, for a few, such as Scot Irene Young, the initial impressions of their new surroundings were downright depressing. Directly upon arriving, she recalled,
I fell on the gravel, severely grazing my knee and what was worse, ruining one of my two pairs of stockings … The matron of Sick Bay, a formidable lady by the name of Mrs de Courcey-Meade, painted my wound (unwashed) with gentian violet, and I had to suffer the embarrassment of meeting my colleagues with a tattered and fluorescent leg. It duly went septic.
I found no great welcome. People seemed quite oblivious of my arrival, and no doubt it was unconscious arrogance to expect it to be otherwise.3
Not everyone recruited was an expert. The place, after all, needed a certain amount of mundane work doing, such as the role of messenger. And it was to 14-year-old Mimi Gallilee that one such role fell. Indeed, the very nature of the job that she did then – and the duties to which she was later promoted – gave her an almost uniquely broad view of the people, and of the Park. For everyone else, there was strict compartmentalisation; but a girl like Mimi could roam everywhere, and saw more than most.
As a schoolgirl, she had been evacuated from Islington, north London, the year before, and had eventually been joined by her mother and sister. School, for all these extra children imported into the Buckinghamshire countryside, consisted of cobbled-together lessons and improvised schoolrooms. Young Mimi couldn’t stand it.
Her mother, a bookkeeper by profession, had been desperate for work of any sort and had been taken on as a canteen waitress at the Park. As such, she had a quiet word with one of the Park’s directorate concerning her daughter.
‘My mother knew Commander Bradshaw,’ says Mrs Gallilee. ‘She must have been talking to him about me and saying, “Mimi’s fourteen now, she’s learning nothing, she doesn’t seem interested in what’s going on” …
‘Commander Bradshaw said to my mother, “Bring her up to see me.” He talked to me and the result was that I was offered a job at Bletchley Park as a messenger. You could hardly call it an interview. He just talked to me. I started work there the following day.
‘All of the messengers were girls and I was the youngest at the time. We had to deliver anything and everything to the Huts. In those days, there were only – I think – Huts 1 to 11a, no blocks yet. And that was my job, going around and delivering the mail, messages – everything of course was in big envelopes and we weren’t even interested in knowing what was inside them.’
Gordon Welchman himself reflected a little on the need to enlist as many good women as men. ‘Recruitment of young women went on even more rapidly than that of men,’ he wrote. ‘We needed more of them to staff the Registration Room, the Sheet-Stacking Room, and the Decoding Room. As with the men, I believe that the early recruiting