Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [27]
‘As for Dilly going around picking out girls, that is totally untrue. We were all interviewed by this dreadful Miss Moore, a fierce lady in the Foreign Office.’
There is another possibility too; that Dillwyn Knox had somehow found that women had a greater aptitude for the work required – as well as nimbleness of mind and capacity for lateral thought, they possessed a care and attention to detail that many men might not have had. This, of course, is just speculation; the other possibility, and one that seems likely considering the scratchiness of many of Knox’s personal dealings, was that he simply did not like men very much.
As the war effort intensified, new recruits would be given a statutory three-week induction period to be taught the nuances of code-breaking. Later still, recruits were sent to Bedford for a few weeks, to sit in a dusty, anonymous office where they learnt the rudiments of Japanese, in order to be able to crack the Japanese codes.
But for that first wave of recruits, Bletchley Park as an institution had what some have described as a peculiarly English air of improvisation, of simply diving in and getting on with it. Perhaps there was no other way. For in the face of a challenge like the Enigma keys and without, at least at first, the technology to be able to attack them mechanically, the Park would need as many original, quirky, lateral thinkers as it could get, and then give them as free a rein as possible. This created a unique atmosphere that was to be remembered, despite the nature of the conflict in which they were so deeply involved, with the utmost fondness by everyone who served there, even if they were not allowed – under the strictest oaths of secrecy – to discuss even the smallest detail of it for decades afterwards.
7 Freezing Billets and Outdoor Loos
‘This was Bletchley,’ says one veteran. ‘A very small railway town some fifty miles out of London. This town was expected to house all these people. And very few of these houses had baths.’
Even in the earliest days of Bletchley Park, before the crowds descended, it had not been considered practical or feasible to use the big house itself for accommodation. There had been a suggestion that the first wave of staff could somehow be housed in an underground shelter under the old headquarters of Broadway Buildings in London. The idea, as Alistair Denniston was swift to point out, was extremely unattractive; was it really sensible to cram people engaged in the most sensitive cerebral work together in this way? Though Alan Turing sometimes slept in the Cottage, Dilly Knox would make his way back to his own home in the Chilterns, while from the start senior personnel had been billeted in local hotels and inns.
As the new young recruits began making their way to the Park, it was clear that the townsfolk of Bletchley would have to put roofs over their heads. Some recruits made their way straight to rooms above inns; others to neat, terraced little houses; yet others to grander accommodation just outside the town. Perhaps this added a further dimension to the feeling that this was, in some ways, a university; all these students, classicists, mathematicians and boffins taking rooms in humble digs and doing their best to stay out of their landlady’s hair. Before long, however, billets had to be found in all the villages and hamlets within a wide radius.
Baroness Trumpington had less than fond memories of the first place that she was sent. She recalled: ‘My billet was with a chap who worked on the railways and I noticed when his wife showed me around, that there was no lock on the bathroom door. She said, “Oh you don’t have to worry about that – when you’re in the bath, my husband will be working on the railway lines.” Well, I found differently on the very first night. So I changed my billet.’1
Another billet-changer was Keith Batey. ‘My first landlady was a horror,’ he