Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [69]
‘There was a bit where people could have a shower – a row of showers on a wall. I was an only child and I wasn’t used to stripping off in front of people and washing myself, but I did it. Some of them kept their swimming costumes on because they were just too embarrassed to strip down to the buff.’
But after these privations – perhaps deliberately spartan – a rather more attractive prospect for some Wrens started to loom. Jean Valentine recalls: ‘On the last day we were all called into a room – forty or fifty of us – and told to sit there, and we would be called one at a time and be told where we were going, what we’d be doing. So when I was called in, I did what I was told, sat down in a chair in front of three or four officers sitting there. “We don’t know what we’re going to be asking you to do. But we have been told to look for people like you. So tomorrow you will go to London.”’
After a short interlude of excitement in the capital, the work in hand soon beckoned. But there was still a little bewilderment to come. ‘Then I went to the Bletchley outstation site in Eastcote, Middlesex,’ says Jean. ‘And I was introduced to the bombe machine.’
However, before long Jean Valentine had more serious concerns, which were to do with the nature of the work opportunities that she could pursue during the war. For any woman who might have been even a little ambitious, working on the bombes seemed a little like factory work. ‘Only Wrens worked the bombes. I assume it was because the boss was naval and veered towards his own “gels”.
‘But we couldn’t get any promotion. I think the theory was that the humbler we looked, the less that anyone from outside would think that we were doing anything of great importance. We were told, if people asked us what we were doing, to say that we were “confidential writers” – or secretaries, in other words.’
The lack of prospects may have been put in place by the military hierarchy as opposed to the Bletchley Park authorities. Unlike the Wrens, the Hon. Sarah Baring did achieve promotion – she was sent to work at the heart of the war establishment in the Admiralty, her role to be a go-between representing Bletchley Park to the naval establishment. ‘I was seconded up to Admiralty from BP at the beginning of 1944,’ she recalls. ‘The Bletchley Park authorities opened an office there, underneath that hideous monstrous building on the Mall. The Citadel, the one that’s a mass of concrete that people used to call “Lenin’s Tomb”.
‘We got all the Park decrypts concerning the navy,’ she continues. ‘It would come up to us, and we would have to decide what to do with it. So really I was doing the same work as in BP but just in Admiralty. It was Bletchley Park all in one tiny room.’
And the story of the Wrens can also be contrasted with the experiences of female codebreakers Joan Murray and Mavis Batey, who were treated with a respect that was perhaps a little unusual for the time.
Yet not all the Wrens sent to Bletchley were deemed to come up to scratch. In a rather crisp memo to the Admiralty, concerning the quality of the personnel being sent to him, Alistair Denniston addressed the cases of several individuals who had been brought to his attention:
Wren Kenwick is inaccurate, very slow and not a bit keen on her work, not very intelligent …
Wrens Buchanan and Ford are unintelligent and slow and seem unable to learn. Wren Rogers suffers from mild claustrophobia and cannot work in a windowless room.
There seems to be some mistake in regard to Wren Dobson, we have never so far as I am aware complained of her work which is satisfactory, and now that I have informed her that she cannot have a transfer, she appears to have the intention of putting her back into the job, in which case she may well equal our best.
The remainder of the Wrens are doing most excellent work,