Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [96]
I take pride at the ease, goodwill, and success with which the merging was accomplished by Britons and Americans alike.5
Colonel Taylor was also at the centre of something of a scandal; he embarked upon an affair with English cryptographer Christine Brooke-Rose. She later confessed to Michael Smith that her husband reacted in a way that seems inordinately of a piece with the times: ‘He was very very British and he and Telford talked together. Telford was terribly amused afterwards, because he thought my husband was so British, shaking hands and saying everything was all right – which of course it wasn’t, because our marriage broke up.6
Elsewhere, Mimi Gallilee also has a particular memory of these socially adept American newcomers: ‘I had a friend, in the Wrens, and I don’t even know which Hut she was working in, but at the end of the war, whiling away time before she was posted to the Admiralty to finish out her service, before she could be released … she was going out with an American army man there, Bob Carroll. I believe they got engaged before he went back to America. It took well over a year for her to be able to join him and marry out there.’
The notion of American soldiers coming to Britain and making free with the available women is one of those comical tropes as deeply embedded as the idea of the special relationship itself. It even featured in a recent episode of The Simpsons, where Grandpa feels impelled to revisit his English love. As we have seen, Bletchley Park lent itself to romances of all sorts.
Contemporary caricatures – good-natured ones, all the same – abounded in popular culture. One of the characters in the wildly popular BBC Radio comedy It’s That Man Again was an American sergeant called Sam Scram; elsewhere, in Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944) one of the three leads was a young American sergeant who finds his ‘pilgrimage’ to Canterbury diverted temporarily by a quirky foray into Kentish village life. Powell and Pressburger were to return to this theme of Anglo-American melding in A Matter of Life and Death (1945); here, airman David Niven falls for American wireless operator Kim Hunter.
One Bletchley Park veteran, Harry Fensom, recalled with great good humour the ‘remark of an amazed American lieutenant’ who had been visiting codebreaking sites. This American observed that ‘the buildings contained marvellous machines and many attractive ladies. The machines were made by the British Tabulating Company and the ladies by God.’7
The American contingent at Bletchley Park clearly found life in the Buckinghamshire countryside congenial and stimulating in a variety of ways. Consider this account from an American soldier, collected by Marion Hill. He spoke wistfully of the lively social life he and his compatriots enjoyed among the Wrens:
‘We were 100 American men, at least half of whom worked side by side with the natives, many of them female. In the community at large, there was a shortage of men, many of the local lads being away in the service. Consequently, Americans were always invited to dances. At least half of us were married, but there is little evidence we forgot it. A few of the single men did marry British girls.’8
Similarly, some of the women who worked at the Park had starry-eyed (and curiously innocent) recollections of these American dreamboats. One said: ‘We used to go to dances with the American airmen … because they had beautiful food and ice cream.’ Another, equally artless, had this to say: ‘Bill, a Captain in the American signals, drove a jeep. I was looking at it with great envy – I’d never ridden in a jeep.’
Obviously, there was going to be the odd moment when the two cultures gazed upon one another with mutual incomprehension. There was the matter, for instance, of culinary tastes. One American serviceman at Bletchley noted that one could always do swaps in the canteen: ‘The Britons were always hungry for protein and it was a delight to see the English