Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [47]
The work was very hard for the young women who were drafted in to carry it out. To operate a bombe properly took all one’s concentration and focus. Accuracy was of the highest importance. One young Wren recalled: ‘The back of the machine defies description – a mass of dangling plugs … and a multitude of wires, every one of which had to be meticulously adjusted with tweezers to make sure the electrical circuits did not short.’
According to Ruth Bourne, herself a Wren, the effect of this on individual women could sometimes be distressing. There were instances of the strain getting too much, of girls collapsing and having to go for periods of extended rest. Medical attention was sometimes needed. Bourne also recalls that bombe operating was unforgivingly harsh in less obvious, more psychological ways.
‘It was very pressurised because of the working hours. It was very intensive. You did an eight-hour shift – you only had thirty minutes off in the middle of the shift to rush across from the place where you were working to the place where you were eating, queue up for the food, eat it and go back. Then the person who was working with you, called your oppo, went and had her thirty minutes. And the reason you worked together was because you alternated.
‘One night you were standing up operating the bombe for seven and a half hours. On the next night you could sit down for most of the time operating a checking machine, which was not very hard to do. Stops didn’t need checking that often. Maybe you would get four or five stops a night, which wasn’t arduous. The only time you worked together was plugging in the back of the bombe because it was so complex. But there was the noise, and it was smelly. And many people got what they called burnout.
‘I had it for a short period of time. You’d go to the sick bay and say “I don’t feel well.” They’d say “What’s the matter?’ and you’d say “I don’t know,” and maybe you’d just cry or something.
‘And they’d put you to bed for about four and a half days – with a big jug of water. All you’d remember is wandering in and out of bed, drinking water and sleeping. After about four and a half days, you’d wake up, and that’s what happened with me.’
The other difficulty of the bombes was that they were so intricate to set up. Ruth Bourne recalls: ‘You had to be accurate as a bombe operator. You didn’t have to be a crossword puzzler or a Greek scholar, but you did have to be incredibly accurate. Because with all these little wires on a wheel – one little group of wires must not touch another. And if you were putting in twenty-six pin plugs, you mustn’t bend the pins. Anything you did wrong caused a short circuit.
‘And every fifteen minutes,’ Mrs Bourne adds, ‘the machine stopped and some of the wheel orders had to be changed. So you’d have to check those wheels with a tweezer and put them back on the rack. You’d put on the new ones, check the old ones, and if there were a lot of wheels, you might have only just enough time to check them before the run was finished. At the end of fifteen minutes, you’d start again with another lot of wheels.’
Ruth Bourne recalls in particular looking at the women who were just coming off a week of night shifts. ‘All their faces were terribly pale. I remember when I first went there, I saw all these scarecrow pallid women coming off their shift. And I thought, “My God.”’
Tellingly, about a year into the bombe operation, one Dr Gavin Dunlop, of Newcastle Street, Worksop, Notts, sent a concerned letter to the Bletchley Park authorities concerning one of his Wren patients:
Dear Sir,
Miss Adele Moloney is late on leave on account of the high temperature which is the cause of my keeping her in bed. This is not the first time that the same thing has happened when she has been on leave, and as there is no physical reason that I can find for this being thus, I wonder whether there is anything about the nature of her job to account for it.
Miss Moloney has hypertrophy of the conscience to such an extent that she will not divulge the smallest detail of what she does, even