Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [91]
One Anglo-American pairing came with officer Robert M. Slusser and WAAF lieutenant Elizabeth Burberry. She was attached to Hut 3 and, just prior to Slusser’s arrival, had applied for a transfer. They met, romance blossomed, and the application was withdrawn. Nor did the happy Bletchley couple waste much time. They were married on 27 June 1944, just a few days after D-Day. On 10 April 1945, their daughter Elizabeth was born – a child of Bletchley Park.
On the artier side of things, codebreaker and poet F.T. Prince met his wife-to-be Elizabeth Bush at the Park; and poet Henry Reed met Michael Ramsbotham. Meanwhile, historian Roland Oliver fell headlong for Caroline Linehan.
But perhaps the most poignant relationship at Bletchley Park – not to say the most unexpected – involved Alan Turing. In the summer of 1940, a mathematician called Joan Clarke (later Murray), who had been studying at Cambridge, was recruited to Hut 8. By the spring of 1941, the system of Turing’s bombes, and the punch cards, and the mechanical regularity of the shifts needed to operate the whole procedure, was at the centre of Bletchley Park’s work. It was also in the spring of 1941 that Turing and his Hut 8 colleagues made the vital break into naval Enigma. And against this extraordinarily intense backdrop, Turing and Joan Clarke’s friendship started to develop.
They went to the cinema. They spent days on leave together. During that period, such behaviour could only lead to one conclusion. And despite his sexual orientation, Turing clearly felt that he had to fit in with this overwhelming social norm. With surprising swiftness, he proposed marriage to Joan – although with characteristic honesty, he was careful to tell her that it might not be an ideal marriage because he had what he termed ‘homosexual tendencies’.
Perhaps such things were not understood quite as they are now, for Joan was apparently not deterred by this confession, and the engagement went ahead. He met her parents, she met his. There was an engagement ring. Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing’s use of the word ‘tendency’ masked the altogether more sexually active truth, and that if Joan had known this, she would have been shocked.
But again, this was an age in which such things were never discussed, certainly not in public, or in novels, films and stage plays. The terms ‘nancy’ and ‘pansy’ were well known, but such stereotypes as could be found within public discourse were feline mincing characters, extravagantly effeminate and knowingly, insidiously deviant. Clearly Turing did not fit in with these depictions.
The other essential point about their relationship was that, unlike many of the other non-mathematician girls who came to work at Bletchley, Turing never had to talk down to Joan; her mathematical training was sharp and their exchanges were relaxed. They played chess, they played tennis, they had lengthy discussions concerning the Fibonacci series of numbers and their recurrence in nature, such as in the folds of pine cones.
But deep down, he knew that it was not going to be. In the summer (since everyone at Bletchley was allowed four weeks’ leave a year), Turing and Joan went off for a holiday in Wales, with bicycles and ration cards. When they came back, Turing told Joan that the engagement was off.
They did, however, contrive to remain friends, and later, when Turing had returned from a spell in the US in 1942–3, he brought her back a present of an expensive fountain pen, and dropped vague hints that perhaps they should try the relationship again. Joan, wisely, gave no response to his suggestion.
*
Elsewhere – and talking of the many other romances to be found within the ‘Whipsnade Zoo wire fences’ as one lady put it – many Park veterans point out that in terms of matters like premarital sex, this was a different era, as innocent