Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [138]
Like a surprising number of young people of the time, Mavis Batey had, just before the war, spent a little time on the continent for the purposes of study. ‘I was much better acquainted than anyone else with Freud because I went to Zurich University,’ Mrs Batey says. If one was a linguist, one normally had to go for a term in a German university. But since this was 1938, and the Germans had already moved into Czechoslovakia, she instead had to go to one that was German-speaking. ‘And I actually heard Freud’s disciple Carl Jung.’
One always imagines that the work of Bletchley Park would be enough of an intellectual demand on the young people who were working there. Yet as we have seen, aside from the odd lightning flash of genius, the business of decoding communications was more a question of patience, trial and error. Also, this particular generation of young people had hinterlands. Just because they had particular abilities in their own fields – mathematics, linguistics, the classics – didn’t mean that their interests were circumscribed in any way.
‘This is another thing you hear: that we were more or less incarcerated in Bletchley,’ continues Mavis Batey. ‘That isn’t true at all, we could do anything in the town, and I enrolled for the Cambridge extra-mural course on psychology and used to go there with the townsfolk.’
She also recalls: ‘Lord Briggs always said to me, as he did to a few other people: “It was our university, Mavis.” Those five years are tremendously important at that age … what it did for me, that I was very grateful for, we were all thrown in at the deep end.’
Mrs Batey credits Bletchley Park with giving her a certain measure of confidence. ‘I always wanted to be a historian – so I am a historian now – and I got into a particular field of landscape history as pioneered by W.G. Hoskins,’ she says. ‘He was my great guru.
‘As time went on, I found myself on heritage committees, landscape heritage, National Trust. And because it was a new subject, I didn’t have to know what Professor X or Professor Y had said – I was quite happy to have a bash at it, and then read what the others said after I had got some ideas myself. And that was what I realised was a gift, a legacy of Bletchley. You either do it or you don’t, but no one else is going to do it if you don’t.’
Similarly, Sheila Lawn was summoned to Bletchley before she had the chance to finish her degree. But the atmosphere of the Park suited her extremely well, as she recalls: ‘It was stimulating to meet people, and to talk to them. I had friends, about my age group. I think I was the only half-baked MA, they all seemed to have completed theirs. They came from different universities, different parts of the country, different experiences, different subjects. Yes, that was the collegiate feel, all the different disciplines.’
The Hon. Sarah Baring had been educated only by governesses. Nevertheless, Bletchley Park seemed to her at times to have a distinctly campus feel: ‘Of course the cryptographers were all brilliant mathematicians. And they were a class apart. Quite mad, some of them, quite potty, but very very sweet.
‘I never went to university but here, I was lucky to be right at the centre of things and the people I worked with were so wonderful. And to have met Turing and all those sorts of people was just great.’
Another veteran, Gwen Watkins, recalled wanting to immerse herself totally in this strange intellectual whirlpool. And afterwards, when Bletchley Park was packed up and she