Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [5]
Work began at once. Violent events in Europe were casting shadows. Admiral Sinclair was sharply aware – perhaps more so than many in the government – that the house and its grounds would be needed urgently.
In May of that year, engineers from the Post Office began laying cables from the house that would connect it up to the nerve endings of Whitehall. Over the summer of 1938 – which was dominated by the excruciating tension of the Munich summit and Chamberlain’s calculated but misguided appeasement of Hitler over mounting German aggression towards Czechoslovakia – ‘Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party’, as the codename went, came to stay at the Bletchley Park estate by way of a rehearsal.
In fact, Captain Ridley was a naval officer with MI6. His job was to organise the logistics of the move of GC&CS (known by some jokingly as the ‘Golf Club and Chess Society’) from London to Bletchley. ‘We were told that this was a “rehearsal”,’ wrote senior codebreaker Josh Cooper in a contemporary diary. ‘But we all realised that the “rehearsal” might well end in a real war.’
This 1938 rehearsal also gave an idea of the difficulties involved. The presence of so many visitors to Bletchley Park milling around the grounds was explained to the curious local people by that very ‘Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party’ catch-all phrase. The Wodehousian flavour of the term – faintly anachronistic, even back then – was to find echoes in the years to come.
There was a lot of work to be done. It was immediately clear that the house itself would not be large enough to accommodate the anticipated code-cracking activity. As such, wooden huts, insulated with asbestos, were to be built in the grounds. ‘To begin with, when there were only a handful of us, we worked in the house,’ recalled Ruth Sebag-Montefiore. ‘Subsequently we moved into one of the wooden huts that sprang up like mushrooms.’
Although records are not completely clear, it seems that the first of the huts – those brilliantly makeshift, weather-exposed synecdoches of British improvisational spirit, and the eventual beehives of the Bletchley operation – was built not too long after the time of the Munich crisis. Hut 1 was originally intended to house the Park’s wireless station. The huts that were built soon afterwards – some of which still survive today – strike the modern eye as puzzlingly temporary structures; they put one in mind of prefab houses.
Bletchley was both far enough away yet convenient enough to reach to make it an ideal location. And the town and surrounding villages were reckoned to have sufficient space for billeting all the codebreakers and translators. Bletchley Park itself was (and is) next to what is now referred to as the West Coast railway line. And in the days before Dr Beeching axed so much of the network, Bletchley station teemed with activity. To the west, the railways reached Oxford; to the east Cambridge. Meanwhile, anyone travelling from London, Birmingham, Lancashire or Glasgow could get to the town with ease. ‘Or relative ease,’ says Sheila Lawn, who became used to these long-distance hauls. ‘The trains were always absolutely packed with soldiers.’ Nevertheless, the location was a great boon to the many young people scattered across the country who would find themselves receiving the summons.
Throughout 1938, work on further customising the estate progressed at speed. One wing of the house was demolished; the outbuildings were converted into office space.
At the very top of the house, in a small, dingy attic room near a large water tank, lay ‘Station X’. In essence, it was an SIS radio listening post. Outside the tiny little window was a huge Wellingtonia tree, around which was arranged the necessary rhombic array aerial. ‘Station X’, a wonderfully Ian Fleming-esque