The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (16 page)

Now they had a real chance of breaking the Dolphin Enigma, Messrs Turing and Twinn were given their own offices in Hut 8. They’d been part of the pioneering three-man team helping Dilly
Knox to break Enigma, brilliant minds but not very good at organising themselves. They were untidy and kept losing things. It worried Frank Birch, head of the German Naval Section.

Alan Turing was widely regarded as eccentric, largely because he just thought at a different level to most people. He had difficulty dealing with most women and often spoke very fast, more out
of enthusiasm than anything else, giving people the false idea that he had a stutter. He
cycled into work wearing a gas mask to stop the pollen sparking off his hay fever,
chained his coffee mug to a radiator and converted his life savings into silver bars as insurance against a collapse of the pound caused by the costs of the war. Having persuaded his bank, with a
great deal of difficulty, to get him the silver bars, he buried them, working out an elaborate set of instructions so he could find them once the war was over and the danger to the currency had
passed. But he never did find them again.

Frank Birch knew that Alan Turing was the right person to lead the attempts to break the Dolphin Enigma but he also knew he was the wrong person to run the actual hut. He and Peter Twinn had
been given another codebreaker, Tony Kendrick, the other member of Dilly’s original team, so he was someone they were very comfortable working with. Mr Kendrick, who was badly crippled as a
result of having polio as a child, had been head boy at Eton and was a brilliant codebreaker in his own right. Another codebreaker was due to arrive shortly. What they really needed now they had
their own offices were their own equivalents of Phoebe to make sure everything was organised properly.

Pat Wright came from a working-class family in Woolwich, on the border between southeast London and Kent. Pat, the daughter of a machine-fitter, was seventeen and had just left school. She was
on a secretarial course when she received a letter out of the blue telling her to report to the Foreign Office in London.

‘I was just approaching my eighteenth birthday. I had a letter asking if I would go for an interview at the Foreign
Office. There were several other girls there.
They told us they wanted us to do something but they couldn’t tell us what it was and that we’d be hearing from them. So I went home and my mother said: “What did they want you
for?” and I replied: “I haven’t the faintest idea.”’

Eventually another letter arrived, this time with a train pass to go to Bletchley. Other girls from the secretarial college were going too. They took the train from Euston to Bletchley and were
picked up at the station and taken up to the mansion, where they were lectured by ‘a very ferocious-looking security officer’ and made to sign the Official Secrets Act.

‘It was then read out to us in no uncertain terms that on no account were we to tell anybody what we were doing. Nor were we to say we were on secret work. It wasn’t secret. We were
the evacuated office of the Foreign Office and we were copy typists.’

They were then told what they would actually be doing. It was very secret. They would be decoding messages.

‘Well everybody knows the Foreign Office has codes. It didn’t seem very secret. We trailed over to Hut 8 where they said: “Well, the thing is, it’s German naval codes,
we’ve broken the codes and we want you to do the decoding” – collapse of several young ladies in a heap. None of us were fluent German speakers.’

Once in Hut 8, which still looked quite bare, they were shown into a big room. It seemed the obvious description of the room, so from then on that became the name of the office in which the
girls worked – the Big Room.

‘It was explained to us that the German codes had been
broken by this super machine that had been invented. At the same time every day, the Germans transmitted this
weather message beginning exactly the same way. This was, of course, not anything that we lesser mortals had to worry about. This was the brainy boys’ department.’

The Big Room had a number of modified Typex machines in it which, like those in the Hut 6 Decoding Room, were designed to work just like the Enigma machine.

‘There were three wheels out of a box of eight which were put into the machine and then turned to the right letter of the alphabet, and then there was a plugboard with plug leads that went
everywhere. You started off typing and then with a bit of luck you suddenly saw something you could recognise as German.’

It was hard, tiring work, and surprisingly messy. The keys on the modified Typex machines were very stiff and had to be pressed down very hard and sprang back up with a loud clunk.

‘Anybody who works a computer now that has this light touch would be horrified. It was very, very noisy. We had to grease the wheels of the machine from a big tub of Vaseline and it got
all over your clothes, so by the end of the day they looked a bit tatty.’

The machines printed the text of the German messages onto a long strip of sticky tape which they cut into lengths of half a dozen words and stuck to the back of the original message. It was
passed to the Naval Section in Hut 4, carried across the Park by messengers who reported to Phoebe.

The new codebreaker was a bit of a surprise – a young woman a week off her twenty-third birthday and straight out of university. At this stage all the codebreakers
devising ways to break Enigma, both in Hut 8 and in the Hut 6 Machine Room, were men.

Joan Clarke was the daughter of a Church of England clergyman. She was born and brought up in West Norwood, south London, where she went to Dulwich High School before obtaining a place at
Newnham College, Cambridge, to study mathematics. She’d been recruited earlier that year by Gordon Welchman, who’d been one of her tutors, and had agreed to join Hut 6 once she’d
completed her degree course.

She didn’t know her results at this stage but she would take a double first, as Mr Welchman knew she would. She’d done all the work, got far better marks than many of her male
contemporaries at Cambridge, but she wouldn’t be awarded an actual degree because, while Cambridge allowed women to study at the women’s colleges of Girton and Newnham and take exactly
the same exams as the men who were reading the same subjects, it did not award degrees to women, and would not do so until 1961.

‘I arrived at Bletchley Park on 17 June and after the routine administrative matters I was collected by Alan Turing to work on naval Enigma in Hut 8, instead of with Welchman in Hut 6,
because of the documents taken from the German patrol boat.’

Messrs Turing, Twinn and Kendrick were known as ‘the Seniors’ by the rest of Hut 8 and Joan officially became the first female ‘Senior’ a few days after she arrived when
Turing had an additional table placed in ‘the Seniors’ Room’ just for her.

‘I think it was Kendrick who said, “Welcome to the Sahibs’ Room” – the only time that I met that term for it. Kendrick, exceptionally, never progressed beyond
calling me Miss Clarke, and himself was known only by his surname. Another exception to the general use of Christian names was Turing, but this was not because of any need of formality with the
head of Hut 8; he was widely known by his nickname, Prof, even during the short time when an actual university professor was working with us.’

After a ‘sketchy’ introduction from Alan Turing, who was not very good at explaining things, largely because he found it difficult to relate to people who didn’t know things
that he took for granted, Joan was set to work using the documents found on board the
Schiff 26
to find a way into the Dolphin Enigma. She was put on night shifts very quickly. Civil
Service regulations about men and women working together on nights didn’t apply to Seniors. There was only one person on a night shift in the Seniors’ Room.

The captured documents enabled them to break the Dolphin Enigma messages for six days from April but the information wasn’t enough to break them on a daily basis. It proved they could be
broken and it gave them a good idea of how to do it but it wasn’t enough.

The occupation of France had given the Germans new submarine bases on the western French coast, which made it much easier for them to attack the Allied convoys crossing the Atlantic. Meanwhile,
the Germans were doing their own codebreaking. They’d broken the British
Merchant Navy code so they could read all the convoys’ messages and knew the precise
routes they were taking. The German U-boats operated in ‘wolf packs’. They lined up from north to south across the shipping routes. Once one of the U-boats spotted an Allied convoy it
would shadow it, sending out homing signals to draw in the other members of the pack. When all the U-boats were assembled, they would pounce en masse.

The Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre needed Bletchley to tell them where the U-boats were so they could route the Atlantic convoys around the wolf packs, but Hut 8
couldn’t get anywhere near breaking the codes used on a regular basis. They desperately needed more pinches.

Ian Fleming, who after the war would go on to write the James Bond books, worked in naval intelligence, liaising with MI6 and Bletchley Park. He dreamed up what his boss Admiral John Godfrey,
the Director of Naval Intelligence, described as a ‘cunning scheme’ to try to obtain a German naval Enigma machine with all of its rotors and settings.

Ian Fleming’s elaborate plan to get the ‘pinch’ from a German ship required a captured German bomber. ‘I suggest we obtain the loot by the following means,’ he
wrote before outlining a plan that had all the feel of a first, tentative blueprint for the fictional hero who was to make him famous. Those taking part in Operation Ruthless should each be
‘tough, a bachelor, able to swim’, he wrote, pencilling in his own name in brackets alongside one of the positions. ‘Pick a tough crew of five, including a pilot, wireless
operator and word-perfect German speaker
(Fleming). Dress them in German Air Force uniform, add blood and bandages to suit.’

They would wait until the next German air raid on London and, as the bombers returned home, take off and hide among the other aircraft. On the French side of the Channel the bomber would send
out an SOS. It would then switch off one engine, lose height fast, ‘with smoke pouring from a candle in the tail’, and ditch in the sea. The team would then put off in a rubber dinghy,
having ensured that the bomber sank before the Germans could identify it, and wait to be rescued by the German Navy. Fleming’s plan continued: ‘Once aboard rescue boat, shoot German
crew, dump overboard, bring boat back to English port.’

Frank Birch thought it was a ‘very ingenious plot’ and gave it Bletchley’s backing. But Operation Ruthless was called off, causing immense disappointment at Bletchley Park.
‘Turing and Twinn came to me like undertakers cheated of a nice corpse yesterday, all in a stew about the cancellation of Ruthless,’ Birch told Fleming. ‘The burden of their song
was the importance of a pinch. Did the authorities realise that there was very little hope, if any, of their deciphering current, or even approximately current, Enigma for months and months and
months – if ever – without a pinch.’

During this period there was not much for the girls to do but sit and wait. There were very few messages being broken and none of them were broken until sometime after they had been transmitted.
Pat Wright spent a lot of time sitting by the lake thinking, but she rarely spoke to any of the people from the other huts.

‘The lake was a place you went for peace and quiet. There was a landing stage there and a boat and you didn’t think anything of it if when you were coming off
shift at midnight you saw a young man in the boat in the middle of the lake. They were just taking time to think.’

Pat was billeted in Bletchley itself, a short ten-minute walk away from the Park. Bletchley was an important railway junction and there were a lot of railway employees in the town. Len Tomlin
was an engine driver and his wife Nessa, who was in her forties, was not one to mince her words, as Pat soon found out.

‘She was a very capable woman with a range of language I had never encountered before. I had been brought up fairly strictly and she used words I hardly knew the meaning of. I remember it
was the first house I had come across that had a toilet in the garden and I spent five minutes of my first evening there with my toilet bag touring around looking for the bathroom. But Mrs Tomlin
was very good to me. She had an engine driver husband and a fireman son and she never took the tablecloth off. She always had food on the table.’

In her time off, Pat would meet up with other girls from Hut 8 and sit in the buffet at the station. If she had more than a day off at a time she would go home to Woolwich to see her parents.
They were curious as to what she did but her father clearly knew better than to ask and when her mother asked why she worked so many nights she told her it was because of the wartime shortage of
typewriters. She had to work nights to get access to a typewriter.

With the U-boats sinking several hundred Allied ships
between June and October 1940, Hut 8 came under increasing pressure to break the Dolphin Enigma. It wasn’t
until the early spring of 1941 that they began to see the light. The first of a series of pinches of Enigma key tables that would turn the tide was obtained in a commando raid on a German armed
trawler, the
Krebs
, off the Norwegian Lofoten Islands in March. This allowed Bletchley to break some old messages but nothing new that would have provided useful intelligence. Pat Wright
remembered it as a very quiet, boring time. If nothing was happening, she and the other girls in the Big Room tended to mess about a bit just to liven things up and keep themselves amused.

‘With three or four teenagers in the same room things could sometimes get a bit silly. The Seniors didn’t really know how to cope with four girls lying on their backs kicking their
arms and legs in the air like overturned beetles.’

It was during this frustrating period of occasional breaks that Alan Turing and Joan Clarke began going out together to the cinema or for the occasional drink. They enjoyed each other’s
company and Joan seems to have been the first woman outside of his immediate family with whom he was able to make a connection.