Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [140]
Actress Dorothy Hyson not only returned to the West End; in 1945, she joined John Gielgud’s Haymarket Company, newly formed and immediately set to become highly prestigious. In 1947, she went on to marry her second husband and sometime Bletchley colleague Anthony Quayle (her first husband, Robert Douglas, had died not long before). Not long afterwards, she retired from the stage in order to concentrate on bringing up their two children, while he became one of the most recognised faces on the cinema screen, going on to be knighted.
Writer Angus Wilson, who had found Bletchley so psychologically stressful, had his first volume of short stories, The Wrong Set, published in 1949. These were chilly portraits of contemporary upper-middle-class life. He was to achieve real fame with his first novel Hemlock and After, published in 1952. Wilson’s colleague and friend Bentley Bridgewater subsequently became Secretary of the British Museum.
Meanwhile, reluctant ‘Tunny’ codebreaker Roy Jenkins was, after an unsuccessful attempt in Solihull, to win his first seat in Parliament – Southwark Central, in 1948. The seat soon disappeared in boundary changes, but Jenkins won another, Birmingham Stechford, in 1950. He went on to become one of the most influential politicians of his generation, rising in the 1960s to become Home Secretary and in 1967 Chancellor of the Exchequer. Like a great many politicians of that era who fought in the war – Edward Heath was another – Jenkins was very much in favour of the then Common Market. For greater economic union between member European states would help to ensure that no conflict like it could ever happen again.
Keith Batey’s fellow billetee Howard Smith was later to become Ambassador to Moscow and head of MI5. David Rees went on to become a tremendously eminent Professor of Mathematics at Exeter University.
Elsewhere, the extraordinary musical traditions of Bletchley Park were upheld proudly in codebreaker Douglas Craig’s subsequent career as an opera baritone, a creative executive at Glyndebourne and later Director of Sadler’s Wells theatre. Colin Thompson, one of the men who later helped to crack the Italians’ alternative cipher machine, the C 38M, went on to become curator of the Scottish National Gallery. Meanwhile, naval Ultra veteran James Hogarth eventually became a high-ranking official in the Foreign Office, while his colleague J.H. Plumb became a professor of history.
This brief run-down demonstrates that even though the central work of the Park may not have been directly stimulating, those young men and women who had applied themselves to the most intractable and daunting of problems had finally emerged from the institution ready to take their rightful places in government, the civil service, the arts, as though they had just matriculated from Oxford or Cambridge. Compared to their military equivalents, the young people of the Park had scarcely paused at all in their pursuits.
Unlike their military equivalents, however, they were not permitted the luxury of relating what they had achieved in the war. Exactly the reverse: with family, with spouses, with offspring – no Bletchley Park operative was allowed to say a single word about those extraordinary years.
28 After Bletchley:The Silence Descends
‘My father died in 1951,’ says John Herivel. ‘And of course, he never heard anything about my war career. Although he knew I had been at Bletchley Park, he had no idea about what I had been doing. And there was a point, shortly before he died, when he experienced this tremendous frustration.
‘I was a son who had promised great things after his school career, and who then seemed, to him, to be doing nothing during the war. And this frustration spilled out. My father said: “You’ve never done anything!”’
The Official Secrets Act, says Herivel, was so deeply impressed upon everyone who signed it that even under this terrible weight of provocation, he could