Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [79]
‘I managed to splutter in my astonishment: “Uncle Dickie, what are you doing here?” “Oh,” he said, “I knew you were here and thought I would see how you’re getting on; show me the system of your cross reference index.” Pink with embarrassment, I showed him, conscious of the waves of anger behind from the learned code-breakers …
‘I was awfully pleased to see Uncle Dickie and, as the Index was considered fairly lowly work, all of us on watch were thrilled,’ she adds. ‘Doom descended the next morning with a peremptory demand to see Commander Travis forthwith. He asked me how I had dared to ask the Chief of Combined Ops to visit the Index. I assured him, eyes full of tears, that I knew nothing about the visit and that he was my godfather. He believed that I spoke the truth and, bless him, lent me a hankie to blow my nose.’
For Mimi Gallilee, promoted from messenger girl to clerical duties within the house itself, it was immediately clear that it was the figures in the house who held sway. Her sixteen-year-old self was a little in awe of these men, with their smart secretaries: ‘I went to work directly under Nigel de Grey’s secretary,’ she says. ‘And she taught me all sorts of little things. Everything from that point of view was more interesting, because it was in codes, or about things that I didn’t understand.’
Mrs Gallilee also recalls that for all the apparent lack of military structure, this was still an age in which one did not speak out of turn. Especially not if one was very young: ‘Sometimes I used to do Mr de Grey’s bits of typing, and anything that he wanted. Take tea and coffee into him. He was a very silent man. Grim. Forbidding. I was afraid of him. I wouldn’t have dared to put a foot wrong. One was terribly respectful of him.
‘Others, like Harry Hinsley – well, he was one of us. He was lovely and we called him Harry and I believe he was the only boss there that we called by his Christian name. Certainly not Commander Travis or Captain Hastings or the rest of them. Colonel Tiltman was always Colonel Tiltman. We would never have thought to call them by their first names.’
Mimi Gallilee had authority issues of her own, and they concerned her own immediate boss, Miss Reed. For the senior women in administration had a reputation for ferocity very much more intimidating than the men. Mimi recalls: ‘Miss Reed used to train me and coach me in the right way to present myself to the world. She said to me once: “I must have a talk with your mother some day, she really ought to know about some of these things that you’ve been doing.” What she meant was the way that I was behaving in the office.
‘And at the end of the day, I’d get home and I’d say to my mother: “Please let me leave. I hate her, I hate her!” Poor Miss Reed. It was only after the war that I realised what a gem she was.’
18 1942: Grave Setbacks and Internal Strife
‘You mustn’t think that it was all harmony at BP,’ says one veteran. ‘There were some pretty ferocious internal squabbles too.’ As 1942 dawned, some of these internal pressures were finally to erupt.
While it enjoyed the untrammelled and deep admiration of Churchill, the quasi-academic atmosphere of Bletchley Park was not otherwise viewed outside with universal approbation. Particularly, it appears, within certain corners of Whitehall, there was disquiet concerning the way that information was parcelled out. And after the difficulties and frustrations of the previous year, with the immensely long struggle to finally break the naval Enigma, the Park was coming under fresh pressure from various directions.
Thanks to Dilly Knox, Bletchley Park had at the end of 1941 scored another tremendous, almost priceless success in the cracking of the Abwehr code – that is, the codes used by the German military intelligence service. The Abwehr used a subtly different Enigma machine, and the breaking of the Abwehr code was something of a personal triumph for Knox – now so ill with cancer that he was working from home.
Back at Bletchley, Oliver Strachey was specifically assigned to monitor messages