Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [55]
In domestic terms, given the sheer number of German bombing raids above central England – and the sheer profusion of railway lines around Bletchley at the time, pointing north, south, east and west – it seems something of a miracle that the Park itself only received two German bombs throughout the war. Both came on a single night – the same night, by coincidence, that Coventry was bombed for a second time, 21 November 1940.
The adjacent site of Elmers School, which had once housed Gordon Welchman, took a direct hit on the building’s telephone exchange and typing room. Another bomb from the same drop came down between the house and Hut 4, and was said to have lifted the naval Enigma hut off its foundations. In truth, it may not have taken that much of an explosion to achieve this.
And another bomb landed in the stable yard, just yards away from the Cottage, where Dilly Knox and Mavis Lever were at work on the Italian naval Enigma. This bomb, however, failed to go off. A couple of others apparently fell and failed to go off as well. They are still somewhere in the grounds of the Park, though no one is quite sure where …
It has been noted by some that even though Bletchley was utterly secret, and therefore there was no specific reason to bomb it, the place was still incredibly lucky; for any returning bomber who still had some load to discharge might, on a cloudless night, have been drawn by the silvery lines of the rails running through the town, and used those as a target. Indeed, given Bletchley’s geographical centrality, it is astonishing that it – and its associated signals stations across the county – weren’t simply targeted randomly.
As a postscript, Sheila Lawn has a haunting memory of the nights a little later in the war when the Luftwaffe once more turned its attentions to London. It was one such night that made her realise just how blessed Bletchley was to have escaped such a furious onslaught.
‘I do remember that the bombing of London resumed in 1944. That was when I was billeted with this elderly lady in the village. Now, I had a very nice bedroom and it looked over fifty miles, to London. And when they resumed the bombing, I could watch, at night, what looked like an amazing firework display. Flames leaping up and explosions in the sky. And I thought, the people who are there, how brave they are. What are they going to find in the morning? If they are alive in the morning.’
The disconcerting truth was that by the autumn of 1940, any progress made by Bletchley Park – no matter how ingenious – was still frustratingly slow. While there had been some success with military and air force codes, a way into the naval Enigma remained agonisingly elusive, as the German U-boat wolf packs threatened the convoys in ever more serious numbers. But the part the decoders had played in the Battle of Britain was merely a taster; as the work went on, it was not too long before Bletchley’s contribution to the war effort started to have a lasting, definitive impact on the course of events.
12 Bletchley and the Class Question
‘If you had a day off, you scurried up to London by the train,’ says the Hon. Sarah Baring. ‘Boyfriends or friends would be back from the war, and we’d always manage to keep in touch. And I tell you who used to do it for us. There was the most lovely man called Gibbs, who was the head hall porter at Claridges. And he knew exactly where all our boyfriends were. He used to say: “Hullo Miss, so-and-so is back, he was in yesterday.” That’s how we kept in touch.’
It is an image that one cannot help relishing for its cheering incongruity; in the middle of the blackout, the doorman of London’s smartest hotel is still keeping the glittering gay young things informed of