Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [132]
So, after the relative comfort and even romanticism of Bletchley Park, this new prospect of dull work for low wages began to gnaw at her. ‘I hadn’t got enough money to live and stay in London,’ she says. ‘So I said I’d take the first job that I could get as long as it paid more money. And the first job I went after was as a copy typist for Burroughs Wellcome, the research chemist outfit. They took me on. I earned a pound a week more, straight away. That was a hell of a lot of money.
‘But after maybe just a couple of days, I thought – I can’t stand this. I felt as though I had been dropped from one world into another. It was nothing like anything. Perhaps I thought everywhere would be like Bletchley Park.
‘I used to say, “I feel as though I’m in a different world altogether.” I saw a job advertised in the Telegraph, for BOAC [the British Overseas Airways Corporation, a precursor of British Airways]. I applied there, and got that, and I stayed with them from 1947 until about 1953. I was married by then.’
For two of the codebreakers, there was a move, conscious or not, towards helping to rebuild both the nation and its remaining colonies. Keith Batey recalls: ‘I left Bletchley Park in August 1945. I decided – wrongly, I think now, though it seemed right at the time – that I wasn’t going to go on with mathematics, so I tried for the administrative Civil Service. I got in, so for some reason I opted for the Dominions Office.
‘I had six months in the Foreign Office while I was waiting for the Civil Service exam, in the South American department. I was working with Victor Perone, who had finished a very successful career as Her Majesty’s Representative in the Vatican. A typically Edwardian gentleman, very portly, with a great gold chain across his chest. The man I really did like – I being a junior dogsbody, of course – was the chairman of the Bank of London and South America. He was Samuel Hoare – and a more polite, considerate and charming chap I have never met.’
But there was an element of an upper-class world that already seemed to be vanishing fast. Hoare, it seems, was slightly bewildered by the provenance of this new Foreign Office recruit. In the years before the war, many of those who worked for the Foreign Office very often came from the grander, titled families; they tended to have substantial private incomes, upon which they were expected to live. This was not the case with Keith Batey.
‘Samuel Hoare was puzzled,’ Mr Batey continues. ‘He couldn’t understand how there could be anyone in the Foreign Office whose name he didn’t recognise. He would call me Mr Beety.’ But it was Batey who was emblematic of the future, not Sir Samuel Hoare. Mr Batey and his generation were helping to forge a new era of administration in which old school contacts were not the most important thing.
Similarly, for Oliver Lawn, the Civil Service seemed the logical career path. ‘I had a very frantic one-term lecturing in mathematics at Reading University in September 1945,’ he says. ‘By that time, I had more or less forgotten all my mathematics, in five years of doing codebreaking.
‘Then I took the Civil Service exams in the spring of 1946. I could have gone scientific or administrative civil service. I was successful in both but I decided, on the whole, to go for the administration, rather than the specialist science as a mathematician. I joined the civil service around July 1946.’
As he says, Mr Lawn was ‘directed’, as indeed was everyone else after the war. Despite the fact that almost any occupation would seem drab after the pressurised life he had been leading, this was also the correct thing for a young man of his upbringing and background. Britain was smashed to pieces, bankrupt, fading and peeling