Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [32]
Even though households throughout the country were presented with so many extra tenants, there were some who were able, by dint of special pleading, to keep their houses and bungalows free of interlopers throughout the war. In general terms, the system involved inspectors first visiting likely properties, and asking the occupants what room they could provide, if any. The more quick-witted, privacy-loving homeowners became adept at spinning yarns concerning elderly relatives and available living space. There does not seem to have been any such reluctance at Bletchley.
As staffing levels at the Park ballooned, living arrangements were provided at the stately home of Woburn Abbey, among other locations. Woburn was quite a different proposition from that of the Bletchley billet. But one of the most evocative – and pivotal – of all billets was that occupied by mathematician John Herivel. In his memoir, he wrote:
I returned each evening to my billet close by in one of a long line of terraced houses in the road sloping down from the level of the Park towards the railway bridge. I had been given a sitting room in the front part of the house, and when the landlady – alias the lady of the house who had been required by an all-powerful wartime government to give ME board and lodging in HER house – had cleared away the supper dishes, said Good Night – I hope I stood up as she did so – and closed the door, I was then totally cut off from the outside world except for the occasional faint Proustian sound, through the tightly drawn curtains, of the shuffling feet of some lost soul toiling up or down the hill in the deep snow outside – for the winter of 1940 was an exceptionally severe one.
As for me, each evening I was soon installed in a very comfortable late Victorian or early Edwardian armchair before the fire, always hissing and spitting as it really got under way, backed up by a full scuttle of coal, enough to see me halfway through the night.5
It was in this exact room that John Herivel was to make the psychological leap that helped to break the Enigma codes.
8 1940: The First Glimmers of Light
So, with practically nothing in the way of ceremony – or indeed, in some cases, of more than rudimentary training – the young recruits squared up to their extraordinarily complex, gruelling, grinding tasks. As Keith Batey has recalled, the nature of the work often had very little to do with mathematics and everything to do with patience and concentration.
The working day would be split into three shifts: 4 p.m. to midnight, midnight to 8 a.m., 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. It was the Air Section, under Josh Cooper in Hut 10, that started the 24-hour watch system quite early on, and the routine was quickly replicated across the establishment. Among codebreakers – and later, the Wren bombe operators – the shift most disliked, quite understandably, was midnight to 8 a.m..
But the intention was to speed up the decoding and translating work. With the enemy’s code settings being changed on a daily basis, the amount of signals traffic to be worked through could not be delayed in any way.
Keith Batey remembers that the nature of the work was not almighty intellectual effort: ‘I wouldn’t describe the work as hard slog. More tedious,’ he says. ‘In fact, the work I was doing to begin with in Hut 6 didn’t even require a mathematician. I told Gordon Welchman that any of the girls could do it.’
Sheila Lawn equally recalls the unromantic and often unexciting nature of the tasks before her. ‘I just did what I had to do. It wasn’t exciting. I got these messages, I translated them, I decoded them, and simply got through them. They got a lot in. From the radio stations and gun emplacements along the Dutch, Belgian and French coasts. And some in the Mediterranean, but I never distinguished that, and didn’t ask too many questions. It was sightings, weather reports, sightings of ships, sightings of aircraft, anything peculiar.’
For the Hon. Sarah Baring, the notion of a work ethic was already firmly in place