Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [87]
Meanwhile, on the eastern front, the Russians were engaged in the extraordinarily bitter and prolonged struggle of which Stalingrad became both the focus and the symbol. The turning point arrived after many gruelling months in which the Germans had been convinced that the Russians would simply collapse under the weight of the German attack. Stalin himself was receiving information from Churchill ‘based on intelligence sources’ concerning the state of the German forces and their possible next moves. As the Germans eventually began their retreat, Churchill provided more small gobbets of such information, while keeping the true source carefully concealed.
The codebreakers still had little idea of how their work was being utilised. As Oliver Lawn recalls: ‘I was concerned with the codebreaking and that was it. When the code had been broken, the decoded message was passed through to the Intelligence people who used the information – or decided whether to use it. The content of messages was of no concern to me at all. I knew enough German to get an idea of what it was all about. But I had no idea of the context. And it wasn’t my business. I could read the messages but they were so much in telegraphese, jargon, that they would mean nothing.’
Nevertheless, it was perfectly obvious that the work was important. And the success of Bletchley was also being reflected, late in 1942, to the extent that it appeared to be expanding physically. There had come a point when all those wooden huts, with their attendant discomforts, were no longer sufficient for the task. And so the Blocks – plain constructions of brick and steel, some two storeys high, and explosive-resistant – started to appear. In Block A, Josh Cooper’s Air Section got the first floor, while Frank Birch’s Naval Section was moved into the ground floor.
There were more Blocks to follow, up to D. Block A was equipped – in one of those nice little touches that always seemed to bring an element of the quotidian into the Bletchley effort – with a pneumatic tube system previously used in John Lewis stores and employed at Bletchley for zipping messages on paper between rooms. It was a step up from the hatchway/tray/pulley arrangement that had previously been a feature of inter-hut communication. The pneumatic system was brought in by Hugh Alexander, who before the war had been Chief Scientist to the John Lewis chain.
Despite such innovation, working conditions were still far from luxurious. For example, the conveniences, or lack of them, were sometimes a talking point. In February 1943, an agitated Frank Birch wrote a letter to the works manager, Mr MacGregor:
Sorry to bother you again, but I should be very grateful to know the latest developments as regards the plan for extending the congested portion of Block A, as the problem is getting more and more acute.
I went over Hut 7 this morning to see how my chaps fitted in. It all seemed very comfortable and the light was very good indeed, but they really are in a bad way about lavatories – I think there is only one for men and one for all the women, which is not enough for the 200 authorised.
Notwithstanding the delicacy of the subject, Birch continued:
Mack told me some time ago that you were going to build a lavatory between the main building and the hut. If this could be incorporated in a passage, it would remove also the remaining disadvantage, namely having to go through the open air in the hot or the cold or the dark to reach another part of the section.19
But even with these and a great many other physical discomforts, the institution was running with great efficiency. Hugh Alexander, who succeeded Alan Turing as Head of Hut 8 in 1941, was a formidable and rather frightening intellect. He was also something of a heart-throb with the ladies.