Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [57]
She remembers the outburst of excitement that rippled outwards when her title was discovered: ‘In terms of class tension, there was absolutely no trouble about that whatsoever. I’d been there about a year and a half at least when it got out that I was an Honourable. And I was frightfully embarrassed about this. Somebody came up to me and said: “Sarah! You’re an Honourable!” I said, “No, I’m not really, I’m very dishonourable.”
In what might be a reference to the Mitford girls, Sarah Baring recalls thinking about the way that she was vetted for working at the Park: ‘I presume that they must have done a little bit of work on one’s background. Make sure that you weren’t a … Because there were a lot of young girls at that time who were mad about going to Germany and thought that Hitler was really rather wonderful. Silly girls. I think they probably wanted to know that we weren’t like that.’
If the community of Bletchley Park was ever taken as a cross-section of young British society of the day, then it does offer up some fascinating insights into the class structure of the time. These days, it is widely assumed that the end of deference, and the declining power of the old school tie, only began to manifest itself in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Yet there was clearly a humorous scepticism directed towards the ruling classes long before that. In the 1930s, P.G. Wodehouse’s aristocratic dilettante Bertie Wooster was hugely popular among a wide readership, not because his readers wanted to doff their caps to him, but because he fitted precisely the popular perception of the upper-class idiot. The 1930s had given rise to an expanding middle class, and their intelligent children were now at Bletchley Park, exploring the shifting contours of this new class landscape. The posher ladies tended to end up doing some of the most fundamentally unglamorous and unstimulating work.
But, says middle-class Oliver Lawn, social status was not a subject that impinged greatly: ‘I was not aware of it at all. I think a number of people – girls in Hut 6 – whom I got to know were probably of fairly high-class social standing. One or two of the people I worked with were probably towards the debs’ class. But I wouldn’t have known except that it is likely that they would have come in through that sort of influence or channel.’
Yet the opulent lives of the upper classes continued to exert – possibly against their will – a certain glamorous fascination, even if it was not consciously acknowledged. ‘I was with a girl whose father was a lord or something but she was just one of us,’ says Jean Valentine. ‘Yet you did meet people from both above and below you, as it were, and it was OK. One girl had been evacuated to America at the start of the war, but when she reached eighteen, she came back in order to join up.
‘There were others who were clearly a little more working-class. On the whole, it was a pretty middle-class society.’
That was not always the case. There was the extremely rare instance of social mobility, and at breakneck pace: this applies especially to MI6 agent Hugh Trevor-Roper, who often had dealings with Bletchley Park. A few years ago, in an interview, Trevor-Roper conjured an amusingly irritating image with his account of his visits to the Park: ‘I went on hunting right through the early years of the war. Occasionally, when I had a staff car, I found it compatible with my conscience to make my visits to the Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park coincide with my hunting days with the Whaddon.’3
In Bletchley, class tension did occasionally make itself evident. As Marion Hill records, one deb was particularly bemused by the class of girls who were sent to her for secretarial duties. ‘I was given four or five girls as copy typists. One said when I was interviewing her, “Well, me name’s Maudie, but I like being called Queenie. I did used to work at Fletton’s but then I thought I’d better meself so I threw up the brickworks and went into the Co-op.