Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [59]
There was something levelling about ‘make do and mend’, at least in theory – though the girls from more privileged backgrounds had more material to work on in the first place. Nevertheless, many of these upper-class girls were keen not to be seen as ostentatious; they wanted people to see that they could hunker down with everyone else and accept their duties – and attendant privations – without complaint. It was a fine national moment of class cohesion – or at least, as close as Britain would ever get to it. For as soon as the war ended, the change was astonishingly rapid.
One might argue that in Britain at any rate, the Second World War was the last high tide of the aristocracy. From the young Princess Elizabeth joining up with the ATS and getting under the bonnet of a truck, to the double-barrelled young ladies with pearls quietly going about their administrative duties at Bletchley and in the Admiralty, this was a time when family name and connections opened every door imaginable. That is not to say that this does not happen now; of course it does. But one would very rarely now hear such privileged people being described anywhere as ‘the quality’, and one would also rarely hear that they were noted for their abiding sense of duty and loyalty to the nation.
In questions of politics, as in many other things, Bletchley Park seemed a microcosm of the nation as a whole. Change was clearly in the air. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) was a cry of mourning for the passing of an aristocratic way of life. The opening chapter of that novel saw Charles Ryder returning to a house that he had once seen in very different, rather more gracious circumstances, and which was now requisitioned by the army. In real life, this was the case up and down the country. Yet there was still a smart set. And unless one was born into it, one on the whole never caught sight of it.
Similarly, most of the young people who worked at Bletchley would only ever have read about the aristocracy. Certainly they would have been highly unlikely in any other circumstances to meet such rarefied creatures, while the smart ‘gels’ who volunteered their services would only have had the patchiest idea about the lives of those alongside whom they were now working.
But Bletchley represented the last gasp of the notion of the smarter set and their sense of mucking in and doing what one could, just as it represented in miniature the oncoming triumph of the middle classes: the classes for whom the old snobberies were being cast aside, not merely in the interests of the nation pulling together, but because they had read Orwell and Priestley and understood the terrible privations suffered by so many in the 1930s, and were determined that a better country should come of this.
When Captain Eric Jones was put in charge of Hut 3, everyone who worked with him could not help remarking on his Cheshire vowels and indeed the source of his wealth (‘… His qualifications for the post were not immediately apparent. He was a wholesale cloth merchant from Macclesfield,’ wrote William Millward. Peter Calvocoressi thought that he had been ‘something in biscuits’) – but, crucially, these same people stressed how brilliant he was in the role. All who worked with Captain Jones (later to become Sir Eric) were full of praise for his strong principles and the strength of character that enabled him to deal smoothly with ‘tiresome intrigues and controversies’, as Millward put it.
The point they seemed to be making – only slightly patronisingly – was that Jones’s background was an indicator of quiet strength, and that he was the reverse of a chinless wonder. And in contrast to the pre-war Foreign Office days,