Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [142]
And even after the Bletchley secret was blown open for all to see in 1974, many of Bletchley’s operatives experienced a curious psychological side-effect. Although Winterbotham’s book set off a chain of other publications, a number of ordinary Bletchley-ites could not bring themselves to even mention the place, let alone discuss their roles there. The need for secrecy had become ingrained to the profoundest degree. There were a significant number, like Walter Eytan, who felt that Winterbotham himself was a disgrace for having gone into print. Others, even into the 1980s, would stead-fastly refuse to disclose a single thing even to their closest family.
One codebreaking veteran in Scotland, a church minister, continued to tell his children that his war had consisted of his religious ministry, although they knew well that he had been ordained after the war. He absolutely would not mention Bletchley. It was simply a case of duty; a promise had been made, and it had to be kept.
In the case of Walter Eytan, the silence remained even in the face of matrimonial pressure: ‘Security was second nature to us; my wife said she found difficulty in marrying a man who would not tell her what he did in the war. I did tell her that I had spent most of the time at a place called Bletchley, which meant nothing to her.’2 Others were more pragmatic. ‘I never told a soul,’ says Jean Valentine. ‘It didn’t come up because you didn’t discuss it. I married a man and didn’t ask him about the secret things on the plane that he flew, and he never asked me what I had been doing.’ One story concerns a husband and wife who finally, in the late 1970s, told each other what they had done at the Park while the husband was washing the car on a Sunday afternoon.
Then there was Mimi Gallilee’s extraordinary case: she, her mother and her sister all worked at Bletchley in different capacities. Mother was a waitress, and so rather less secret. But Mimi and her older sister – who worked in one of the huts – never discussed it after the war. Sadly, Mimi’s sister died in the late 1960s. To this day Mimi has no idea what her sister was doing in that Hut. There are no official records – so how on earth is she to know?
There are numerous other poignant stories too, chiefly concerning young people who – like John Herivel – yearned as the post-war years went on to tell their parents what they had done in the war, yet never could; and whose parents then died, never having known. Some found it unbearable that there was no official documentation, as though those years had simply never happened. Sheila Lawn recalls: ‘What I regretted was that my father died long before I could reveal anything. He died in 1961. My mother died a lot later but by that time she wasn’t very well. I am so sorry my father couldn’t have … he would have been so interested.’
‘My parents were the same,’ adds Oliver Lawn. ‘They both died in the 1960s. They were never curious. Many people were in the same situation. Relatives who should have known, but who couldn’t be told. And then died.’
These days, some wonder exactly why everything had to remain so hush-hush for so long afterwards. One very simple reason was that the encryption techniques that Bletchley had managed to break into, either via Enigma or ‘Tunny’, were still current in other parts of the world – far-flung corners of the fast-fading British Empire included. Indeed, in its first few years under Communist rule, East Germany was still using the same Enigma; a fact that was exploited not merely by the British, but also by the East Germans’ Russian overlords.
The second reason was the Cold War: Churchill’s chilling 1945 speech concerning the Iron Curtain falling across Europe; the understandable paranoia when, in the immediate aftermath of the