Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [78]
Those men in civvies at Bletchley Park had their chance to fulfil a certain kind of service obligation, chiefly in the form of the Home Guard. For some, this proved to be an onerous distraction. Keith Batey recalls: ‘I’d be engaged on breaking a cipher or something, and then had to put it down and pretend to go and be a … it was bloody silly, especially in 1944 when there was no danger of invasion. It was organised, we all had to do it, and we all had these stupid uniforms too. It really was fatuous.’
Conversely, Oliver Lawn found this dash of military experience provided some welcome light relief away from the serious businessof cracking ciphers. ‘We all joined the Home Guard, where we had fun and games. And we went out on to the fields beyond Bletchley and watched to see if any German parachutes came in overnight.
‘Academics in the Home Guard were great fun,’ he adds. ‘You can imagine, Dad’s Army, some of them, the most brilliant, were the most extreme … Though one or two had army backgrounds. There was one chap called Michael Bannister, whose father was in the army. Bannister was very much the army type, and he tried to bring in all the army stuff, but without success. So he was the exception. We were very lame.’
Alan Turing was initially rather taken with the idea of Home Guard duty, as it was an opportunity to learn how to shoot; and his shot, as it turned out, was much more accurate than a lot of people’s. However, Turing’s interest in this activity waned sharply once his shot had been perfected, and around 1942, when after several years of anxiety, the prospect of a Nazi invasion of Britain had receded, he began to absent himself from parades.
The authorities were irritated by Turing’s apparently casual approach, insisting that since he had signed up for Home Guard duties, he was under military law. Turing calmly pointed out to the furious officers in question that he was no such thing, and that he had stated as much on the form that he had signed. One of the questions on the form was: ‘Do you understand that by enrolling in the Home Guard, you place yourself liable to military law?’ Turing had written his answer: ‘No’. Naturally, no one had noticed.
Despite the fact that the women, including the Wrens, at the Park greatly outnumbered the men, there was still the fact that the men were of course very firmly in charge. In the case of the Wrens, there would always be a male officer somewhere. For the civilian women, it was a matter of answering to the heads of huts, be they Gordon Welchman or blond, blue-eyed ‘knockout’ Hugh Alexander.
In matters of uniform too, there were the views of the ladies to consider. The Hon. Sarah Baring says that the presence of a military man always perked things up a little in the section in which she worked: ‘There were very few service people, mostly civilian. But there were a few uniforms, which we thought was terribly exciting. If you saw a naval uniform, or an air force uniform, it was lovely. For instance, word would get round that someone from the navy had dropped in. And that was very exciting because it was quite rare.’
In terms of hierarchy, Sarah Baring gives a vivid account of that very lack of structure – a tale that contrives to combine military, civilian and class sensibilities into one imbroglio. ‘One morning, I was working as usual in the Index Room when I heard many footsteps outside. The door opened and in walked my godfather. At that time, he was Vice Admiral, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations and naturally privy to Ultra. He was accompanied by a lot of top brass and harassed looking Bletchley staff.