Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [75]
Churchill continued to hold the work of Bletchley Park in the very highest regard as the war progressed; later, though, we shall find how some of his decisions concerning its post-war status are held by some to have held Britain back in fighting for its place in the new world order.
17 Military or Civilian?
‘There was an awful lot of nonsense involving codebreakers having to join the Home Guard,’ says one veteran, recalling that it was the only time in the war that he was required to put on a military uniform. For some of the more cerebral, bespectacled young men, the very notion of taking part in all-night exercises – with cork-blackened faces, or hooting like owls, or shimmying over security fences, or simply running around with rifles and attempting to hit targets – was a cause for irritation, especially when such exercises got in the way of valuable thinking time.
Others, however – including Alan Turing – found such duties and manoeuvres amusing and diverting. But the notion that it was compulsory goes to the heart of one of Bletchley Park’s most beguiling, ambiguous and disorientating qualities.
As we have seen, the establishment was neither wholly military nor wholly civilian. Although in its earliest days, the directorate included a couple of senior military figures, such as John Tiltman, Bletchley Park was under the ultimate control of Sir Stewart Menzies, head of MI6, which itself answered to the Foreign Office and directly to the Prime Minister. The recruitment drive, moreover, was angled almost completely towards civilians. And unlike any military establishment, there were no drills, no parades, no training sessions – and crucially, no orders.
When one thinks now of the war, one’s natural assumption is that practically the whole of society was in some sense militarised. Certainly, if individuals received orders from the government that they were to join up, or join another service, there was rarely any question of disobedience. How was it then that a set-up of the nature of Bletchley Park – handling crucial, top secret information – lacked what one might think would be essential military discipline? From the very beginning, who would these young code-breakers and linguists answer to? And what of the army of Wrens who were to descend on the place? Were they to answer to civilian or military orders?
‘This place was very strange,’ says former Wren Jean Valentine. ‘There were the men’s services, the women’s adjoining services, and civilians. How could you impose any kind of discipline? It wouldn’t have been fair, whatever you had done. If you had set the civilians above or below the rest of us, it wouldn’t have been right. So I think the only way was just to run it … everyone was equal.’
Fellow Wren Ruth Bourne also recalls the seemingly casual air, in contrast to her later work at Eastcote, the Bletchley Park outstation in Middlesex: ‘In BP there was everybody: civilians, ATS, Wrens, WAAFs walking around. No saluting. Everybody was the same. There was no hierarchy. Eastcote was much more structured to the naval module. You saluted your officers. Whereas at Bletchley Park it was all mixed.’
Oliver Lawn found from the start that he had an extraordinary amount of freedom: ‘As far as I was concerned [the job] was absolutely self-regulating.’ Indeed, adds Mr Lawn, the work of code-breaking could not have been further from the military ethos if it had tried. He recalls: ‘Our chain of command was just the head of Hut 6. First of all, that was Gordon Welchman. Then he moved – went partly transatlantic and took a rather wider remit so we saw rather less of him.
‘Stuart Milner-Barry succeeded Welchman as the head of Hut 6. And a very good head he was. He wasn’t really a cryptographer, but he had a very good brain and a very good management and manner to look after us. And then at around the same time,’ Mr Lawn adds, ‘they had a chap called Fletcher