Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [14]
Life was to acquire a terrific intensity, not all of it generated by the sometimes nightmarish pressure of breaking codes or the sheer feats of hard work required. There was a great deal more to life at Bletchley Park than that.
4 The House and the Surrounding Country
When talking to veterans of Bletchley Park now, one looming background visual feature of their lives seems to polarise opinion rather sharply, and that is the house itself.
A grand structure had stood on the site for a long time; there is apparently mention of some kind of property there in the Domesday Book. The Victorian house was acquired in 1883 by Sir Herbert Leon and his wife Fanny. With them came an extravagant building programme that saw the house expand, and also embrace a bewildering array of architectural styles.
The Leons were enthusiastic travellers and their journeys throughout Europe seemed to guide their aesthetic whims. As well as mock-Gothic twirls, there were Italian pillars by the entrance, rococo detailing on the ceiling of the ballroom, and a copper dome, inspired again by Italy, and jammed rather awkwardly on to the roof on the left of the house.
The building itself – all dark panelling, faux stained glass, little passageways and oaken stairs – stands as an interesting example of the general architectural confusion of the period, when heavy Victorian Gothic was starting to give way to the more natural contours that would be found in the Edwardian age. Some of the older landowners in the area, with their charmingly decayed honey-stone properties, might also have regarded Bletchley Park as having a nouveau feel to it – the modern house, with all the modern comforts, of a man who had finally arrived into wealth, and was keen for the world to know.
‘It’s a nightmare. It’s hideous,’ says Sarah Baring with some feeling. ‘We called the house The Victorian Monstrosity.’ The detailing of the house’s interior was, she felt, equally off-putting. The ornate plasterwork on the ballroom ceiling, she says, ‘looked like a cascade of drooping bosoms’. Others look more kindly upon the property as a form of brave architectural experiment. And for some, it was the sort of stately home that they never imagined that they would be working around.
Although from the beginning it had been clear that the house was not remotely big enough for the recruits either to live or work in it (though during the 1938 ‘rehearsal’, those few who covered night shifts were permitted to sleep there), it would be a place in which, in the years to come, leisure hours could be spent, either in the library or at musical events held in the ballroom.
A suite of rooms on the first floor, initially the domain of the Secret Intelligence Service, were eventually used by Alistair Denniston, Edward Travis and Nigel de Grey for administrative purposes. Colonel John Tiltman, the veteran cryptographer and head of the military section, had an office right upstairs which had not long ago been the nursery to one of the Leon children. The walls of Tiltman’s office were still decorated with Peter Rabbit wallpaper.
Having started working at Bletchley Park as a young messenger, Mimi Gallilee was within a couple of years promoted to secretarial work within the house itself. Mrs Gallilee recalls the high, decorative ceilings and the big, light windows which looked out over the lawn, and beyond that on to the pretty lake, fringed with trees. As the war went on, and as the activities of Bletchley multiplied, there was soon much more to the Park than that. ‘I never realised the grounds were so extensive,’ says Mrs Gallilee. ‘Or that they had all those RAF camps there. It was all shaded off.’
For a very young person such as Mimi, the house had a somewhat overbearing air, which would be reflected in the personalities of those that she worked for – not merely the austere ways of her immediate superior Miss Reed, secretary to Nigel