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Denniston concluded pointedly:

I think perhaps you might ask the Deputy Director to impress upon the selectors the importance of the work on which these Wrens are employed and not to send us too many of the Cook and Messenger type.1

Of course, the Wrens were not the only women drafted in. Also present were six WAAFs whose task it was, from the beginning, to man the telephone exchange. Then there were thirty-six WAAFs who were there to run the teleprinters, with their communications chattering in and out of the Park.

For a lot of the girls who signed up, this life threw up a number of surprises. Felicity Ashbee, of the WAAF, kept sporadic diaries. She recalled signing up and being sent to the nearby town of Leighton Buzzard where she and other WAAF girls were put through parade paces by a male sergeant, who was mortally embarrassed by the whole thing.

They were told that maths and science were not essential subjects for the girls to know about. Miss Ashbee was then posted to Stanmore, where she recalls meeting a lesbian ballet photographer. She did not seem tremendously shocked.

She also recalls the routines that so many hundreds of young women had to get into; in terms of leisure, this meant a sparse diet of books, knitting and chess. The egalitarian spirit of the post-war world was still some way off; even in the WAAF, ranks were discouraged from fraternising with one another. Miss Ashbee recalls having debates in the early 1940s about whether the ‘Commies’ were actually worse than the Nazis.

She was then sent to Bletchley for a while, and had sketchy memories of Josh Cooper, and the disorientating mix of uniforms and civilian dress that mingled around the place. Miss Ashbee recalled just ‘one café’ and (perhaps because she was not tremendously popular) ‘no social life’. She recalled a show being staged there, called Blue and Khaki, part of which involved a Cossack song.2

A number of Wrens were housed in Woburn Abbey, once a splendid private house and after the war to become one of the country’s premier visitor attractions. For those who now watch the Channel 4 reality show Big Brother and marvel at how complete strangers can live in such close proximity for so long, it’s worth having a look at the life that was led at the Abbey. Given the gruelling nature of the work and the slog of the hours, this rhyme from one dormitory – entitled ‘Martha’s Prayer’ – rings an amusing chord:

God bless Marie and grant that she

May not drop things and wake me

And grant that Marjorie’s heavy feet

May not disturb my slumbers sweet

And when they go to bed at four

Oh God, don’t let them slam the door.3

There might also have been an element of Malory Towers about the set-up. Some of the women recalled listening stations high up in the Abbey’s tower room, and a continual problem with bats, which would cause a great deal of high-pitched panic.

Woburn Abbey was also reputedly haunted. According to Jack Lightfoot of the RAF, the young women were talking about the ghost of the ‘Flying Duchess’ – Mary, Duchess of Bedford, who was born in the Victorian age but conceived a fancy for the new pursuit of aviation at the age of sixty-one. But the house also reputedly was haunted by a monk, and there were stories of doors that would not stay shut at night.

There would not have been a lot of time for nocturnal spectral activity though – Bletchley Park, of course, was a 24-hour operation, and workers were transported to and from their shifts by special buses after midnight and before 8 a.m.

There were also Wrens posted a few miles away in a small village called Gayhurst. There, writes Diane Payne,

… another 150 Wrens lived and worked on the premises … cold rooms, no transport and, I am told, swallows nesting in the house and flying in and out of the broken windows. There too, mice abounded, and one lunchtime a dead one turned up in the gravy boat.

It was a beautiful place dating back to 1086, and Sir Francis Drake owned it in 1581. The Wrens used the old church in the grounds every