Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [85]
For some, like Hugh Denham and Wren Jean Valentine, the Japanese work would take them all the way out to Colombo, in what was then Ceylon, an extraordinarily exotic contrast to Bletchley, with its ‘woven palm-leaf cabins’, the ‘phosphorescent sea’ and the ‘snakes in the filing cabinet’, as Denham recalled. The work of this small, concentrated team would mostly track Japanese activity in the Indian Ocean.
‘One thing to record,’ Denham wrote, ‘is the priceless sense of community that formed. We were in our teens or twenties, thrown together, Wrens, civilians and officers, working to a common purpose, sharing unusual experiences.’14
Jean Valentine’s spell as a Wren based at Adstock and working at Bletchley came to a startling end in 1944. One day, as she says: ‘A notice went up on the wall saying, “The following are required to go overseas.”’ Her name was among the ‘following’. For a nineteen-year-old girl who had never before left Britain, the notion of travelling right the way across the world – U-boats or no U-boats – was extraordinarily daunting.
‘We went out into the Atlantic, down, and then through the Straits of Gibraltar, and eventually dashed across the Red Sea, and then across to Bombay,’ says Jean. ‘We were in Bombay for a week, then got a dirty old tramp steamer – which had been condemned before the war – and that took us from Bombay to Colombo.’
Upon arrival in her little concrete hut in Colombo, Jean found that the work was rather more congenial than simply tweezering the inner workings of a giant bombe. ‘We were breaking the Japanese meteorological code,’ she says. ‘So I didn’t need to speak Japanese. It was all figures.’ After the privations of Britain – the constant shortages, the rationing – this exotic new billet proved surprisingly pleasant. The ease with which this girl from Perthshire adapted to her new life tells us something about the last years of the British Empire, when even the remotest corners of the world had a sort of instant familiarity and comfort – as long as one made the correct introductions and got to know the right sort of people.
‘I was there fifteen months,’ says Jean. ‘I left Britain in the middle of the blackout, with all that severe rationing. I got to Colombo and there was no blackout.’ And, by pleasing coincidence, a family connection enabled Jean to settle in a little further. Her cousin’s fiancée, who had visited Ceylon as a member of a ladies’ golfing team, had told her, ‘If you should find yourself anywhere near Ceylon, I’ve got a business card for this tea-planter, do use it …’
Jean contacted the man, ‘And subsequently he invited us up to his beautiful tea-planter’s house, four thousand feet up. It was a different life. Here was a man sitting in his beautiful bungalow with bluegrass that he’d imported from Kentucky before the war. A bell at the end of the table. When anybody laid down their knife, he quietly rang and servants would come.’
Back in Britain, despite the dreadful setback of the even more complex naval Enigma, the Battle of the Atlantic was by no means over. However intractable the new ‘Shark’ U-boat key, Hut 8 began after a while to make headway with ‘Dolphin’, the codes that related to German ships. This was illustrated vividly in March 1942, when the formidable German battleship Tirpitz was stalking an Arctic convoy bound for Russia. ‘Tirpitz was the big bad wolf of the war in home waters,’ wrote naval historian John Winton. ‘All by herself she constituted a “fleet in being” and, while she still floated, she remained a potential threat … the mere knowledge of her presence lying up in some northern fastness cast a long shadow over the convoys.’15 Thanks to the almost instantaneous decrypts that Bletchley provided – the translated messages instantly being transmitted to the Admiralty – the convoy was