Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [58]
Balancing that was the occasional outbreak of what can only be described as jolly-hockey-sticks behaviour. One incident still makes the Hon. Sarah Baring laugh.
‘At that young age, you do get very mischievous, I’m afraid,’ she says. ‘Specially when you’re doing something which you think is a bit dreary at the time. We had a great friend called Jean Campbell Harris, who is now Lady Trumpington, she’s in the House of Lords. She was always up for some merry larks and one night shift, we didn’t have very much to do.
‘The signals used to arrive in enormous laundry baskets. And we’d taken them all out and got them pretty well finished, but the Watch wasn’t quite over yet. So we said: “Jean, get in the laundry basket now it’s empty and we’ll give you a ride down to the loos.” They were at the end of this terrible passage.
‘And so she got in,’ she continues, ‘and of course, we lost her because she was quite heavy, darling Jean, and she went straight down this long corridor, straight into the gents’ loo. The embarrassment! Though I think it must have been much more embarrassing for the gentlemen.’
Having said that, she emphasises that high jinks went hand in hand with a deep seriousness of purpose: ‘We really were conscious of what we were doing, we knew how important it was. We were pretty good actually. I’m making out that we were silly little girls. But actually we weren’t. We did work incredibly hard.’
Elsewhere, for some at the Park, outward appearances were important, although not to the same degree as they are today. ‘We were never scruffy, we kept up appearances, and that was true of everyone during the war,’ says Mavis Batey. (Not quite: the men, such as Turing and Cooper and Knox, were allowed all sorts of sartorial transgressions, from intense scruffiness to the wearing of pyjamas in the office. One Bletchley contemporary recalls Turing looking ‘like a tramp’, with trousers held up not with a belt but a striped necktie. His grooming too was on the neglectful side: he had a permanent five o’clock shadow caused by his reluctance to shave with anything other than an old electric razor; his fingernails were chewed to a point where small scars would be left on the very tips of his fingers; and even though he did not smoke, he none the less contrived to have yellow teeth. Angus Wilson in contrast had his blue shirts and apricot bow-ties, as well as artistically long hair; quite the thing in raffish Hampstead, where he had lived for a while, but the cause of a little local consternation in this small country town.)
But how exactly did Mrs Batey and all those other women keep themselves looking presentable and respectable? Bletchley was a small town – frock shops and hairdressers were extremely thin on the ground.
When it came to matters of hair, a salon called E. & G. Wesley, of High Street, Woburn Sands (several miles away), was rather cunning about cornering the Park market. After a period of correspondence with the Bletchley authorities, they set up a new branch of the salon in Hut 23.
It was open ‘weekdays 10 a.m. – 5.45 p.m. (not Wednesdays)’. Men could have a simple haircut, or a shampoo too, for one shilling. For women, there was the choice of a simple trim, a “shampoo and set”, or a “Trim, shampoo and set”, which would have cost four shillings and sixpence for civilians, and three shillings and ninepence for those in uniform.
Customers, however, had to provide their own towels. ‘The position regarding towels is very serious,’ wrote Mr Wesley to Commander Bradshaw. ‘The shortage being very acute.’5
Hairdresser Mr Wesley presumably had to undergo security vetting as thorough as everyone else. But the idea of bringing such a service into the Park was ingenious; even the nearest salons were scattered around the countryside, and in towns such as Bedford which were a step or two too far away.
Everything, of course, was in short supply, especially clothes. Mimi Gallilee recalls with horrified vividness the occasion on which she borrowed her older sister’s smart frock, hoping to be able to put it back afterwards