Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [56]
The personnel of Bletchley Park were initially drawn either from the intellectual or the social elite; young Cambridge mathematicians working alongside girls in pearls. According to Josh Cooper, some of the very first pearled girls were not at all suitable: ‘There was an elderly and very imposing typist secretary whom the Section immediately nicknamed “Queen Mary”. And a younger and rather promising recruit who made her position impossible, scandalising her Bletchley billetors by saying to all and sundry that the only friends she had ever had were Germans.’1
Of course, owing to outbreaks of Mitford foolishness in the 1930s – plus the recurring suspicion that certain members of the royal family were not quite so anti-German as they ought to be – the upper classes had more cause than most to be sensitive to other people’s feelings on that subject. Generally, though, the first wave of titled girls and debutantes, including Sarah Baring, were staunch, occasionally flinty, patriotic in every degree and determined – possibly even more determined than anyone else, with a sharpened sense of noblesse oblige – to do their very best. Sarah Baring herself has lost none of that sense of the duty she felt she owed.
They also brought some rather colourful distraction. There was the example of Maxine Birley, later to become the Comtesse de la Falaise, who according to one Park veteran held ‘unmissable parties … I remember her giving a party at which we all had to be very French.’
As numbers at the Park began to expand, a draft recruiting document (now in the archives) was drawn up for new staff. The intention was to send it out to ‘all regional controllers’ who had access to the Central Register. Not only does it give a fascinating insight into the way the Park was portrayed for security reasons, it opens an unintended window on to all sorts of thorny questions about class, and about how upper-class recruits should be treated:
We have been approached about vacancies for Temporary Assistants of the executive type in a branch of the Foreign Office in a country district of Bucks. The work is secret and particulars of its exact nature cannot be given. In the main, recruitment could in the first instance be limited to young women, but young men who are unfit for military service should not be excluded … candidates should be alert and distinctly above average in intelligence, and capacity for concentration and sustained effort is essential …
There may also be some people on the register who because of their social position would find it difficult to settle down in an ordinary office. This difficulty should not arise in the present instance and, while it may appear to be snobbish to have regard to considerations of this kind, the fact must be faced that those already in post in the establishment in question belong to a certain social grade and people who move in the same circles would more easily fit themselves into the present organisation.
Although the work is arduous, we are informed that the living conditions are comfortable and that the social amenities are pleasant.
As soon as the document crossed his desk, Alistair Denniston was swift to countermand it: ‘The question of social status can now be disregarded as we have people from every type of life.’ He added, perhaps as a slight giveaway: ‘I should not like to stress our social amenities, though great efforts are made to help people pass their spare time as pleasantly as possible in such a place as Bletchley.’2
The Hon. Sarah Baring’s own recollection is that in the Park at least, the different social classes rubbed along quite happily: ‘Perhaps before the war, debutantes were never asked to do anything serious,’ she says. ‘When you land yourself in a place like that, it’s pretty overpowering. There were people from all walks of life. There were Wrens, there were girls like me, people in uniform, army, navy, air force and later