Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [131]
His belief – one that flew in the face of established civil service practice – was that talented cryptologists should be able to reach the highest salary rung without also having to undertake administrative work. This was based on his experience in Hut 6, when he saw at first hand the benefits of mutual co-operation, freeing up time for thinking.
However, he found himself up against more stubborn attitudes. On top of this, Welchman believed that the British computer industry was fatally held up by the government’s reluctance to fund research – the attitude seemed to be that the government would wait until such technology was developed commercially, and then find a use for it.
He recalled that by then, he was a changed person who had been ‘thoroughly shaken out of my old academic way of life by my challenging experiences at Bletchley Park and in the United States, and it seemed impossible to return to what I had been doing before the war’. With appropriately golden references from Hugh Alexander, Welchman took up his colleague’s old post as Director of Research at the John Lewis Partnership. While being a very fine position, this does leave one wondering whether the years that immediately followed the war seemed a little anti-climactic. In 1948, Welchman discarded the department stores and set sail with his family to America, to work in the burgeoning field of computer technology. Later he joined the organisation MITRE, looking into such matters as battlefield communications systems.
For in one sense, the war hadn’t ended at all. The conflict had simply become frozen. Britain, America, and western Europe were facing an opponent every bit as implacable as Nazism. Welchman had joined the strategic struggle against the forces of the Warsaw Pact, and of Soviet military might.
Indeed, Welchman’s preference for the American way of doing things led him, eventually, to take on American citizenship. One now senses that his view of the British authorities was a little stronger than that of simple distaste. ‘People have a tendency to filter out what they do not want to hear,’ he wrote of the pre-Second World War government. ‘An appeasement-minded government in England filtered out the information on Hitler’s Germany that they were receiving from their Secret Service.’
But for other key players from Bletchley Park, life in the immediate post-war years lost that lustre of intensity. John Herivel – whose flash of inspiration one night in 1940 had had an incalculable effect upon the war effort – first went into teaching. He returned to his native Belfast, joined a school there and pretty soon found the rowdy boys absolutely intolerable. So he returned to academia and found, despite his mathematical background, that history was his real passion. He was to go on to write a history of Newton’s Principia, among many other subjects. ‘And I found that I just didn’t think about Bletchley Park,’ he says.
Messenger and typist Mimi Gallilee, who of course was so very young when she started work at Bletchley, found the immediate aftermath to be rather unsatisfactory by comparison. She says: ‘I think there were about 1,700 people left, and we went off to Eastcote, in Middlesex. We went into the quarters where the bombes were, and I think there was only one bombe left. I didn’t know anything about the bombes. None of us knew. Those of us who had nothing to do with it wouldn’t know. So we just moved in to where the Wrens had worked. I of course stayed within the directorate …
‘Commander Loehnis was the head by then. That was in 1946. And a lot of Forces people were still at Bletchley Park. I don’t think any Forces people went down to Eastcote.’
The move to London provided Mrs Gallilee with the first dusty taste of post-war austerity; even the matter of a daily Tube fare could put a serious dent in one’s weekly living wage. Life was a constant effort to scrimp.
‘I was living in Bayswater and I would have to pay the full fares all the way to Eastcote,’ she says. ‘On such a low salary. I don’t think I stayed there for longer