Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [15]
De Grey had previously been president of the Medici Society, Miss Reed his assistant. When he was called to Bletchley, de Grey ensured that the very strict Miss Reed came too. ‘Not that Nigel de Grey was at all unpleasant,’ Mrs Gallilee recalls. ‘But you had to know your place. You’d never have joined in with a conversation. You would never butt in. People were very respectful.’
Directly outside the front door of the house was a path that led, both left and right, to various huts. Mrs Gallilee recalls often seeing Alan Turing ‘walking along the path – intense – always looking worried. People thought he was a bit of a weirdo.’
The front lawn of the house was in the early days of 1939 used for sporting activities. The journalist and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge, who in his capacity as an intelligence operative passed through the Park a few times himself, recalled these contests in one of his volumes of memoirs:
Every day after luncheon when the weather was propitious, the cipher crackers played rounders on the manor house lawn, assuming the quasi-serious manner dons affect when engaged in activities likely to be regarded as frivolous or insignificant in comparison with their weightier studies. Thus they would dispute some point about the game with the same fervour as they might the question of free will or determinism, or whether the world began with a big bang or a process of continuing creation.1
Beyond the lawn was the lake. In the depths of winter, it would gratifyingly freeze over, allowing ice-skating; in the sultry nights of midsummer, it would occasionally play host, as one veteran recalls, to a number of young RAF men, splashing about, nude and laughing. There were some geese that apparently felt rather proprietorial about the lake; one veteran recalled how some young women – clearly townies – were intimidated by the birds ‘hissing at them’. There was also an abundance of frogs, which during the blackout were occasionally accidentally trodden upon.
The house had originally boasted a tennis court, which had to be removed to make way for the construction of a new hut. When Prime Minister Winston Churchill paid a visit a little later in the war, he was dismayed to learn that ball games were restricted to rounders alone; the PM authorised the construction of new tennis courts.
‘Churchill was very horrified to find that the staff in the early days played rounders for exercise,’ says Sheila Lawn, laughing. ‘Churchill said: “This isn’t good enough.” And he is reputed to have ordered the tennis courts.’ Indeed, in the years to come, the Bletchley Park Tennis Club was very popular. A surviving memo in the archives shows that its members were even permitted to use the Summer House as a temporary changing room.
By the side of the main house lay the ice house; beyond that, the stables and the cottages. In the earliest days of Captain Ridley and his Shooting Party, there was also a fine yew maze and a couple of rose gardens. But when the time came to start building the huts, these were sacrificed.
Reactions to the estate tended largely to depend on where each recruit had come from. For some young people, this was their first close-up view of a large, well-appointed property, and it thus acquired a sort of sub-Brideshead glamour; for other, posher recruits, it was nothing more than a nondescript provincial pile set just outside the most provincial of English towns.
According to Irene Young, the house was ‘irretrievably ugly’ and its style was a form of ‘lavatory-Gothic’. In the view of codebreaker and, in later years, historian Peter Calvocoressi, it had ‘a lot of heavy wooden panelling enlivened here and there by Alhambresque (Leicester Square, not Andalusia) decorative fancies’.
Later, an American recruit, soon-to-be-prominent architect Landis Gores, almost fainted with distaste. ‘A maudlin, monstrous pile probably unsurpassed,’ he said, ‘though not for lack of competition in the architectural gaucherie of the mid-Victorian era