Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [65]
One night I found a cooked cockroach nestling in my meat, if you can dignify it by that name, the meat not the beetle. I was about to return it to the catering manageress when my friend Osla, who had the appetite of a lioness with cubs, snatched the plate and said: ‘What a waste – I’ll eat it!’ How she managed to eat so much – minus the insect – and stay so slim I never knew, because any leftovers on any nearby plate were gobbled up by her in a flash.
Oliver Lawn recalls differently, though his endorsement does not quite add up to faint praise: ‘Andrew Hodges, in his biography of Turing, talks about the “poor food” at Bletchley Park. Which I didn’t agree with. I thought it was all right: wartime food, rationing, all the rest of it. But it wasn’t as bad as he has painted it.’ Another veteran said: ‘A lot of people complained about the meals but I thought they were wonderful.’
When the war began in 1939, meals were taken in the house itself; the then head of SIS, Admiral Hugh Sinclair, arranged stylishly for a professional chef to be brought in from the Ritz, and there was waitress service at the tables, as Mimi Gallilee remembers well, since for a short time her own mother was one such waitress.
Even then, however, there was no such thing as a free luncheon. In October 1939, the first of many nit-picking internal memos concerning catering arrangements and tea breaks was circulated to staff. ‘There is no obligation for anyone to take lunch at the war site,’ the management memo stated. ‘But those who do must understand that the rates charged apply for the whole month.’ Furthermore, ‘all GC and CS personnel are requested to pay their lunch money to Miss Reid, room 38.’
And that unusual and generous bonus of exquisitely prepared food was not sustainable. In the first place, the Ritz chef in question was a troubled soul who tried to commit suicide. He did not last long at Bletchley Park. Second, as numbers at the Park steadily grew, this method of catering was less and less practical; although another Bletchley veteran, Jean Valentine, recalls that the ground floor was used for quite a while for ‘self-service cafeteria’ purposes – quite a novelty to a young Scots girl unacquainted with such modern ways. Later there was to follow a large purpose-built canteen, the wares of which were to divide opinion sharply.
Given the shortages of meat, of butter, of sugar, of practically everything, it would have been a tall order to expect the canteen staff to produce works of culinary genius. But reactions might also have had a little to do with one’s upbringing: for instance, if one hailed from the north of Scotland, where the food tended towards the plain and hearty and filling, then there may have been some comfort to draw from the Bletchley efforts.
For instance, one wartime dish, Woolton Pie – named after its inventor, Lord Woolton, and involving substantial amounts of potatoes, turnips and other bland vegetables – was rather popular with some of the Bletchley Park veterans. It might have been plain and tending towards the tasteless, but it was also gratifyingly filling.
One Scottish lady who was not so impressed was Irene Young, who recorded these views in her memoirs: ‘The food was not particularly appetising – I remember with especial distaste the packeted pastry fruit pies which we called “cardboard tarts” – but then, few expected delectable food in wartime.’
Just because it tasted of nothing didn’t lessen demand, however, as she wrote: ‘Some people, though, were very hungry, and second helpings were not allowed. I recollect one girl putting on dark glasses as a disguise in the hope that she would be luckier than Oliver Twist. She was similarly rebuffed.’1
An admonishing official memo from the Park authorities to all personnel put the issue in sharp relief. ‘Everyone should collect their own helpings from the counter, one course at a time. No