Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [66]
And yet it wasn’t all cheese dishes and cardboard tarts. Bletchley Park did have more access to meat – local, it has been suggested – than many other establishments. The same was true of vegetables – even though, as one memo from Alistair Denniston pointed out plaintively, ‘competition from the railways and the factories has increased our difficulties’ in terms of getting fresh produce. Jean Valentine recalls: ‘The food was great at BP. I am open to correction. But I think there was a vegetable garden just over the stone wall. Whether they still grew vegetables there I don’t know, but that is certainly what happened when the Leons owned the house.’
And Sheila Lawn found herself comparing it favourably with the competition on offer in the town: ‘One day, I went to see a film, and then, I was hungry, so I went into what was called the British Restaurant. And I thought: “This isn’t half as good as our canteen.” I thought it was a terribly dull meal.’ But one might also see that a week of working night shifts would turn tastes, as well as sleep patterns, upside down.
The canteen itself is remembered by many for its egalitarian atmosphere. Diana Plowman observed: ‘There was a huge cafeteria where one could eat breakfast (exhausted) with an Admiral on one side and an American Colonel on the other.’
There was a lounge area within the house in which anyone could take a quick break of tea or coffee. Happily there were fewer complaints about authenticity on this front. One veteran said: ‘We got real coffee – it came in those sealed tins. Lyons, I think.’ Yet the subject of tea, and tea breaks – those perennial marker buoys of all things British – proved a reliable source of controversy at the Park. Quite early on, a peevish memo was sent out to all personnel: ‘It is regretted that owing to losses, it is no longer possible to provide service crockery for morning and afternoon teas … those wanting tea must provide their own gear … all service cups, saucers and spoons are to be returned to the kitchen by Tuesday 13th Feb.’3
Among his many eccentricities, Alan Turing was known to chain his tea mug firmly to a radiator. According to Andrew Hodges, people would then pick the lock and steal the mug to tease him. Hodges claims that Turing’s logic was impeccable; such mugs during the war were in short supply. So why not take good care of your only good one? This memo places Turing’s mug in its proper context. Clearly he was anxious that it would otherwise be removed by officialdom.
But crockery friction did not end there. Captain Ridley sent out another memo in which he practically levitated with indignation. ‘The breakage and loss of tea-cups, tumblers, knives and forks is taking place on a fantastic scale. The rate of loss is no less than five times that normally experienced in a man-of-war. Tumblers, cups and plates,’ he added crossly, ‘have been found pushed away into the shrubberies and left about in offices, many of them broken.’ Only the most extreme measures would do. ‘The watchmen have orders to stop anyone carrying government crockery away from the dining room.’4 Despite this, Mimi Gallilee remembered of Josh Cooper: ‘When he had his coffee, he used to amble along, in old grey suits, all loose, his hands going in his hair. He would go round the lake, finish his coffee there – and then throw the cup into the lake.’
The wastage of crockery was not the only problem. Tea breaks also raised a matter so serious that a memo came from Alistair Denniston. ‘A considerable time is wasted every forenoon and afternoon by persons congregating in the dining hall for the purpose of taking tea,’ he wrote. ‘Heads of section should arrange that one junior member of their sections is sent to collect jugs of tea, milk etc.’5
His strictures may have caught attention for a while but a year later, the Park’s senior men were forced to return to the subject.