Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [33]
‘It was the hours,’ she says. ‘You were translating German decrypts. And you really got to know how to do them pretty quickly. If you had the lingo, that is.’ The shift system also took a little getting used to, as she recalls: ‘If you turned up for work in the day, hopefully night shift had got through a bit of the messages. It depended on what was going on. There was always plenty to do.
‘But night-watches were hell,’ she adds. ‘You do get a bit tired, but then suddenly you’re woken up by a signal that is so important that you sort of become alive again. It’s not just routine. You suddenly get terrifically excited about where such and such a U-boat is, or where the Graf Spee is. You’ve got something really worth it.
‘And the sleep patterns! They were awful, because we changed every week, from day watch to night watch. That was hell. But everyone did it, of course. Soldiers, sailors, everyone.’
No one in the huts, according to Ruth Sebag-Montefiore, looked their best after so many nocturnal hours of ferocious concentration. ‘Individually, these backroom boys, with their original minds and brilliant brains, could be described as interesting looking,’ she recalled. ‘Seen collectively, as they poured out of their huts for a breather or en route to the dining hall, with their gesticulating arms, unkempt hair and short-sighted eyes peering through thick spectacles, they looked like beings from another planet.’1
The actor Sir Anthony Quayle – who according to some spent a little time himself at Bletchley later in the war – was deeply, and helplessly, in love with a married actress called Dorothy Hyson. At that time, Hyson was a byword for theatrical West End glamour. The night work that awaited her now was of a different order. Hyson had been summoned to work at the Park while Quayle was out in Gibraltar serving with the forces. Once, when he was on leave, Sir Anthony recalled, ‘Dot, the essential reason for my return to England, was not even in London; she had gone to work as a cryptographer at Bletchley Park. I went to see her there and found her ill and exhausted with the long night shifts.’2
Many decades on, cryptographer William Millward found himself pondering the side-effects of the punishing shift system. He wrote:
We worked in shifts on a pattern allegedly recommended by the medical authorities, its aim being to avoid painful changes in the circadian rhythm. It meant in practice destroying this rhythm … I worked these shifts for two and a half years with one week’s leave a year, and have sometimes wondered whether working thus, with all the excitement and dedication which it involved, was perhaps a cause of the bad insomnia which hit me some dozen years later.3
Some female veterans recall that occasionally, a night shift in a hut could have an uncomfortably quiet, ‘spooky’ quality. Then there was the difficulty of moving around outside in the thick darkness, with few effective torches. One recalls that she found herself subconsciously memorising where the potholes in the roads were.
‘I have a memory of looking out of the first floor window of the house,’ says another veteran, ‘just as a night shift was switching over. Some people would be coming in to start work, others going home. And I seem to have this image, of seeing, down by the lawn and the lake, all these people, milling around in the dark.’
Sheila Lawn, however, recalls the upside of the system. ‘Because we were all young, we were very adaptable. I think now the shift system would be a big shock to my system. But no, we were very adaptable, we just accepted this. And there were advantages and disadvantages. A more flexible day. Sometimes you had to work at night, of course, but you had part of the day to yourself.’
Another veteran is equally phlegmatic: ‘When you changed rota, your sleep pattern would change and that gave you an awkward day or two.