The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (28 page)

‘Three of us sorted mail for incoming ex-PoWs and helped any who wanted to send a message home. It was hard to remain dry-eyed when a lad would open and read the first letter he had had
from home for several years, from a mother, wife or sweetheart. One chap read out to
me: “She says, I am still waiting,” as he broke down and wept.’

They weren’t all members of the forces. Expatriate Britons, many of them women, had been swept up by the Japanese and subjected to appalling brutality in the camps. The women were taken to
a ‘beauty parlour’ set up by the Wrens, where they could take a shower, have their hair cut and styled, and make-up put on their faces for the first time in four or five years.

‘It was good for their morale but to see their worn and gaunt skin underneath was sad. We were all very moved and felt immensely humble in the presence of the PoWs who had suffered so much
and for so long.’

Finally Dorothy was sent home on a troopship, much more crowded and far less exciting than the one she’d gone out on. Britain was effectively bankrupt, beholden to the United States for
the cash needed to keep the country going, with every penny having to be watched.

‘Life afterwards in post-war Britain was really grey and cheerless. There were innumerable shortages, and ration cards and clothing coupons were to continue for some time yet. People had
gone through a ghastly time, but the knowledge that we – incredibly – had won this six-year war, when at times it seemed impossible, was everything.’

The Government Code and Cypher School moved to the Eastcote site under its new name of the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. Most of the temporary Foreign Office staff recruited
during the war were being laid off. Pre-war staff like Barbara Abernethy and Phoebe Senyard were told they could keep their jobs,
but others were being made redundant with
just one week’s wages. Barbara was left to close up the Park.

‘The General Post Office was going to take the place over. So we just left everything as it was. We closed down the huts, put all the files away and sent them down to Eastcote. I was the
last person left at Bletchley Park. I locked the gates and then took the key down to Eastcote. That was it.’

It was an emotional departure for Barbara. That midnight meeting between Commander Denniston and the Americans had changed her life. Barbara fell in love with one of the US naval officers sent
to Bletchley as a liaison officer. Joe Eachus already had a wife back in America, but he was soon to be divorced and, in 1947, Barbara was transferred to the GCHQ liaison office in the United
States, where she and Joe were married. After leaving GCHQ in 1956, she worked at the British Consulate in Boston and became a vice-consul in charge of media liaison. Barbara was appointed MBE as a
result of her work in the consulate rather than for her work at Bletchley, and retired from the Consular Service in 1986. Joe had two sons from his previous marriage but Barbara and Joe never had
any children of their own. Joe died in 2003 and Barbara in 2012.

Betty Vine-Stevens and Julie Lydekker flew to America at the end of the European war and spent the next few months working with the Americans on Japanese codes, enjoying the
complete contrast to the depressing austerity of wartime Britain. They had every weekend off
and enjoyed a variety of foods they’d never seen before, including
inch-thick fillet steaks and real ice cream.

At the end of the war against Japan, they returned to Britain and were demobbed. Betty took a secretarial course ‘for young gentlewomen’ in London and then went home to
Richard’s Castle near Ludlow, but found it very difficult to get a job.

‘I tried, of course, but you’d go to a prospective employer and they’d ask what you were doing during the war and you’d say you couldn’t tell them. I just said I
was not at liberty to say. Faces went blank. They didn’t understand and they were quite shirty.’

Then she applied for a job as secretary to the headmaster at Ludlow Grammar School. When he interviewed her they both realised that they had seen each other at Bletchley, so she didn’t
have to explain, and she got the job, although neither of them ever said anything about their work in the war.

‘That was before the veil of secrecy was lifted. We didn’t say anything about it. We just knew that we’d both been there. But we didn’t ever talk about it.’

Betty later joined the Territorial Army and worked as an administrative officer for a number of years before getting married in 1970 at the age of forty-seven; sadly, her husband Alfred died
seven years later. Bletchley remains very close to her heart and she now gives talks about the work there.

‘It has not always been easy to talk about it but once you are able to talk about something like that it all comes gushing out. It was a very important thing. I feel very much that
I’ve been privileged to be involved in it.’

As one of the pre-war staff of the Government Code and Cypher School, Phoebe Senyard moved to Eastcote with Barbara Abernethy, travelling into work from
Peckham each day on the Tube. Both Phoebe’s mother and her brother Henry survived the war. Phoebe retired in August 1951, with GCHQ then in the process of transferring to Cheltenham. She, her
mother and Henry moved to Croydon, where she settled down in retirement with many happy memories of her time at Bletchley Park.

‘They were happy days. The people that I knew in the German Naval Section were a very kind, cooperative crowd; nothing was too much trouble for them to do and I could never wish to work
with finer people. They were a grand crowd.’

Phoebe’s mother died a year after they moved to Croydon. Phoebe herself died in 1983, aged ninety-one. She never married.

Mavis Batey (née Lever), Joan Clarke and Margaret Rock all went to Eastcote with GCHQ to work on Russian codes. Margaret was appointed MBE at the end of the war and
continued working at GCHQ until her retirement in 1963. She never married and died in 1983 at the age of eighty, having never spoken about anything she did either at Bletchley or for GCHQ. Joan
Clarke was appointed MBE in 1947 and continued to work for GCHQ until 1952 when she married Jock Murray, one of her colleagues at Cheltenham. She rejoined GCHQ in 1962 and retired in 1977. She had
no children and died in 1996, aged seventy-nine.

Mavis left GCHQ in 1947 to start a family and when Keith was appointed to a post at the High Commission in Ottawa she went with him. They had two daughters and a son, and
Mavis stayed at home to bring them up. Then in the 1960s, Keith became ‘Secretary of the Chest’ at Oxford University, the chief financial officer of the university. The Bateys lived in
a house in the grounds of the university-owned Nuneham Courtenay estate and Mavis began work on the restoration of the eighteenth-century gardens. It led to a pioneering role in garden history that
she said was heavily influenced by her former boss Dilly Knox.

‘Working for an eccentric genius, whose motto was “Nothing is impossible”, during the most formative years of my life made a lasting impression.’

The post-war period of the 1950s and 1960s were times of great change in Britain, much of it positive but a lot of it detrimental. The slogan ‘new lives, new landscapes’ was current
and historic parks and estates were being destroyed by the construction of new roads. Mavis always insisted that it was Dilly’s insistence that ‘nothing is impossible’ and the way
that women were treated equally at Bletchley – in all aspects apart from pay – which gave her the confidence she needed for the fight to protect historic gardens and parks.

‘Women who worked at Bletchley Park have much to be grateful for. It was a remarkable community where neither rank nor status counted and a girl of nineteen with a bright idea would be
encouraged to take it forward, long before any official equality for women. Throughout Bletchley Park and its outstations all that mattered was getting the job done.’

Mavis was appointed MBE for her work on protecting historic gardens, having received no honours for her many achievements at Bletchley. She wrote many books on garden
history including
Jane Austen and the English Landscape
and
Alexander Pope: The Poet and the Landscape
, and also an affectionate and much-needed biography of her old boss,
Dilly: The Man Who Broke Enigmas
. Keith died in 2010 and Mavis in 2013.

When Jane Hughes left Bletchley she took up a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music and trained as a professional singer, marrying her Royal Navy officer fiancé Ted
Fawcett and having her two children while she was studying.

‘I went to my final exam with one of my children inside me and the other one asleep in a carrycot and the examiners kept asking me if I wanted to sit down because I was seven months
pregnant.’

Jane spent fifteen years as a professional singer, performing a lot of opera and recital work of which the most prominent roles were Scylla in
Scylla et Glaucus
, as the Sorceress in
Dido and Aeneas
and singing ‘
Seit ich ihn gesehen
’ (‘Since I Saw Him’) from Schumann’s song cycle
Frauenliebe und -leben
Opus 42 (
A
Woman’s Love and Life
).

It was ‘a very exciting time’ in her life but it meant touring and too much time spent away from her children, so in 1963 she gave up professional singing and took a job as the
secretary of the Victorian Society, set up five years earlier to prevent the demolition of old Victorian buildings and their replacement with the characterless concrete and glass popular in the
1950s, 60s and 70s.
Despite Jane becoming what was effectively the chief administrator, it was not a lucrative position as the society had little money. When Sir Nikolaus
Pevsner, the society’s director, wrote offering her the post, he said he was glad to tell her that ‘the ill-paid job for the
enthusiast
has gone to you’.

Working from home on her own portable typewriter, Jane joined Pevsner in a whirlwind campaign to prevent the destruction of the country’s great Victorian buildings. It was a remarkable
pairing. The biggest battle was with British Rail, whose executives had just sparked a public outcry by knocking down the main arch in front of Euston Station when Jane appeared on the scene. They
now found themselves frustrated at every turn by the woman they took to calling ‘The Furious Mrs Fawcett’.

The most dramatic victory came in 1967, when with the assistance of Prince Philip and John Betjeman the society succeeded in ensuring the listing of the St Pancras locomotive shed and the
station’s Midland Grand Hotel, both of which British Rail had been determined to knock down. It was a campaign of which Jane was very proud.

‘The fact that St Pancras is intact is one of my special achievements. Not only the train shed but the hotel. I never thought it would be a hotel again. But it is. It’s quite
remarkable and it retains so many original features. It is a magnificent building by any standards.’

Jane stepped down in 1976 and was appointed MBE for her services to conservation as well as being elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. As with Mavis Batey, a
close friend of both Jane and her
husband, the refusal to give up engrained at Bletchley had served her well in her post-war careers.

‘It was a very exciting period. They were exhausting days because we always seemed to be in a minority. It was a big undertaking to turn over a whole nation from one attitude towards
architecture to another.’

Marigold Philips stayed in the Wrens for a while after leaving Bletchley. She was sent to a base in Cornwall to teach sailors about Shakespeare, which was supposed to help them
adapt back to civilian life.

‘It was tremendous fun but totally pointless. All they did was look at my black-stocking-clad legs as I stood on the platform.’

The majority of young Wrens simply wanted to get back to their ordinary lives, and for most that meant finding a husband and settling down with a young family. Despite her previous determination
to get herself a university education, Marigold was no different.

‘All we wanted was “normality”; to have, in this order, a husband, a baby, a house and a car. I had no ambitions and I think that was very common. It had seemed so unnatural,
the life we had led, that we swung too far the other way and of course a great many people bitterly regretted it.’

The marriages that took place during the war or in its immediate aftermath frequently fell apart. Marigold was lucky. She married David, an army officer, and because he was posted to a
succession of overseas bases, she had the opportunity to work as a teacher in schools for
servicemen’s children, so she had a rewarding job. Most were not so
fortunate.

‘We all heard stories of the young mothers with good brains who suddenly found they had a husband at work all day and two small children at home and went nearly batty with frustration. It
was a quite severe social problem after the war.’

Marigold and David had two sons and a daughter but eventually the marriage crumbled and she married another army officer, Harold Freeman-Attwood. She didn’t tell either of her husbands
what she’d done in the war and when the news emerged in 1974, when the former head of the MI6 Air Section Frederick Winterbotham published
The Ultra Secret
, she was shocked. Neither
she nor any of her friends who had worked with her were happy that the story they were told must never be revealed was now the subject of a bestselling book by one of the senior officers in charge
of keeping it secret.

‘It was horrible. We hated it. We didn’t like the secret coming out. It was like having a bit of skin that had grown over something peeled off. The secrecy was so engrained that even
now talking about it still feels like you’re gossiping to someone. I still hate talking about it.’

But like the vast majority of the thousands of women who worked at Bletchley, Marigold regards her small part with great pride. At its peak some 12,000 people worked at Bletchley and the Bombe
outstations, more than 8,000 of them women.

It was hugely important for me, and I think it must have been for everybody who was there. Whether you liked it
or not you were one of the geese who laid the golden eggs
and in your lowest moment, when you’re feeling like shit, at least you can say: “I played my part. I did my bit to help win the war.”’