Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [4]
Yet this ‘hothouse’ also imposed an extraordinary burden. The oaths of secrecy that the recruits were made to swear lasted for many decades beyond the end of the war. Husbands and wives were forbidden to discuss the work they had done there; they could not tell their parents what they had achieved, even if their parents were dying. They were not allowed to tell their children.
Which is why, since the silence lifted in the late 1970s, the recollections of Bletchley Park veterans seem to have a special vividness and clarity; they have not been smoothed out or transformed or muddled by endless retelling. Added to this, there was a focus and intensity about life at the Park that would burn itself on to the memory.
Architectural historian Jane Fawcett MBE, who was recruited to the Park as a young woman in 1940, recalls the almost unfathomable sense of pressure that they were under. ‘We knew that what we were doing was making all the difference,’ she says. ‘We knew that it really did depend on us.’
‘It would get too much for some,’ says one veteran. ‘The strain really did tell.’ Another veteran, S. Gorley Putt, commented: ‘One after another – in one way or another – we would all go off our rockers.’2
Gorley Putt was exaggerating a little. Not everyone went off their rockers. Indeed, many Bletchley Park veterans now look back at their experiences – the frustrations, the exhausting night shifts, the flashing moments of insight and genius, even the outbreaks of youthful, high-spirited laughter – as a formative experience that they were uniquely privileged to enjoy.
2 1938–39: The School of Codes
Until the outbreak of war (and indeed for many years afterwards), the town of Bletchley – in the north of Buckinghamshire, and sited roughly halfway between London and Birmingham – was notable chiefly for being completely unworthy of note.
Even the well-respected architectural chronicler Nikolaus Pevsner counselled his readers against visiting the place. He felt it had nothing to offer either in terms of interesting buildings or beguiling landscape. It was a railway town, sitting on a busy junction. Bletchley’s other chief industry was the manufacture of bricks. The smell of the works had a distinct tang that hung over the town on warm summer days.
And the idiosyncratic nineteenth-century house, with its fifty-five acres of grounds, located on the other side of the railway tracks from the main streets of Bletchley, was selected as the wartime base for the Government Code and Cypher School largely for reasons of security, as opposed to aesthetic considerations.
Ever since 1919, all foreign encrypted messages – largely those from the fledgling Soviet Union – had been dealt with by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), a small, esoteric government department which was in essence the codebreaking arm of the Foreign Office. Since the 1930s, the department had been based just around the corner from Whitehall, in Broadway Buildings, St James’s Park; a smart London address that it shared with MI6.
It was actually a good eighteen months before 1939 that the decision was made to move GC&CS out to the countryside. The reason was that its central London location would put it at very high risk from potential German bomber raids. The horrifying Blitzkrieg campaign in Spain had demonstrated just how lethally effective such attacks could be.
Previously, the Bletchley Park estate had belonged to the wealthy Leon family. But in 1937, the heir, Sir George, lost interest in maintaining the trappings of country life. And thus the place went on the market. A relative of the family, Ruth Sebag-Montefiore – who quite by chance was recruited to become a codebreaker at Bletchley Park herself – said of the house: ‘Only by stretching my imagination to the utmost could I picture the place … in its heyday, when there were hunters in the stables, house-parties most weekends and children in the top floor nurseries.’1
By 1937, the grand house-parties were over. In 1938, a small team of property developers, led by a Captain Faulkner, made