Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [63]
Perhaps appropriately, given the centrality of the conflict at sea, there was now a distinctly naval flavour to the personnel at Bletchley Park. This chiefly took the form of the Women’s Royal Navy volunteers, the first of whom were just starting to arrive. Ruth Bourne was such a young woman, although pleasingly, she was a little less impressed with the central notion of Bletchley than her commanding officers seemed to be.
‘When we were called up, we had to go to training camp,’ she says. ‘And even though I lived and volunteered in Birmingham, we were sent all the way up to a castle called Balloch, outside of Glasgow. And there was what had been a farm called Tallyhewen and this farm was turned into a Wrens’ training camp.
‘And that’s where we spent the first three weeks doing naval training – salutes, square bashing, cleaning out the ablutions. Organising concert parties, whatever you wanted to do in your leisure. Then at the end of that period, there was a mustering process and people were told what they were going to do.
‘A group of us were told we were going to do SDX – and that was connected to joining a ‘ship’ called HMS Pembroke 5, which was later on shortened to P5. Anyone who was P5 was doing bombe operating and codebreaking and so on. But we didn’t know that then.
‘Eventually when we were brought in to see the Petty Officer, we were told that this was highly secret work – if we entered into it, we would not be able to leave it.’
There was that one tiny opportunity to back out if the idea seemed utterly uncongenial. ‘At that stage, we could have opted out, but no one ever did,’ says Ruth. ‘And then when we’d been told that, we were taken somewhere else and asked to sign the Official Secrets Act and then we were taken into what was known as B-Block, which was a huge block eventually where we finished up. My strongest memory is of the Chief Petty Officer saying “We are breaking German codes” with a kind of triumphant smile.’
As Diane Payne recalled in an essay, it was often difficult to explain to loved ones exactly why one wasn’t on board a ship, as one had signed up to be:
My pay amounted to thirty shillings a week as an ordinary Wren, rising to £4 10s when I later became a Petty Officer. We had no category badges, and were supposed to say, if asked, that we were just ‘writers’. Sometimes it was very difficult having so little to say about one’s life, and this explanation did not always satisfy relatives and friends, so my wartime activities were considered unimportant and something of a failure.
By now, the numbers working at the Park were expanding as the decrypting grew steadily more successful and reliable. As historian and codebreaker Asa Briggs succinctly put it: ‘I’d never seen so many women in my life!’4 Often, when looking out from her office on the first floor of the house, over the lawn and the lake, recalls Mimi Gallilee, one could see, at shift changeover time, ‘a great sea of bodies. All these people going to and from the coaches that would ferry them to their billets in the outlying villages. Countless people, all milling about – it was a magnificent sight.’
Around this time, Bletchley was using so-called ‘Hollerith Machines’, mighty efforts that processed punch-cards, another logic-based means into some of the codes. And it was obvious that it would be better to have these machines operated by people who knew how they worked. One such group were very loosely termed ‘The Lewis Ladies’.
The Park authorities had, in their search for Hollerith personnel, turned to the retail firm John Lewis; it used similar punch-card machines, and had women specially trained to use them. Making a plea via the Ministry for Labour and National Service, the Park interviewed fifty of these young women, and selected ten. To the fury of the Park authorities, the Ministry suddenly