The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (3 page)

The machine didn’t print anything out and it didn’t send the message itself. The operator simply noted down the encoded letter from the lampboard and typed in each of the other
letters until he had a completely encoded message which he sent via wireless, normally using Morse code.

As a letter was typed in the first rotor moved forward one position. After that rotor had moved a certain number of times, the second rotor moved forward once, and after the second rotor had
moved a number of times, the third rotor moved once. As a result, the code was constantly changing with every letter. The Germans added a plugboard providing an additional level of security which
they believed made Enigma unbreakable.

But they were wrong. The Poles, who shared a border with the Germans and had never stopped seeing them as a threat, had begun trying to break Enigma shortly after the Germans first started using
it. The Polish codebreaking
organisation, the
Bureau Szyfrow,
employed a group of mathematicians led by a young man called Marian Rejewski, who used mathematics to
work out the internal wiring and mechanism of the German Army Enigma machine. He was helped by a spy inside the German War Ministry, an army colonel who provided the French with the Enigma settings
and operations manual in return for money and sex; the French shared this intelligence windfall with the Poles. It certainly gave the Polish mathematicians the start they needed, but reconstructing
the machine mathematically remained an amazing achievement.

For several years, the Poles managed to keep breaking Enigma, but as war approached and the German security systems improved it became increasingly difficult to decode and they approached the
British, hoping they might be able to help. It took a while before the two sides trusted each other enough to share what they knew, but once Marian Rejewski and Dilly Knox were left alone to
discuss their different methods of breaking codes, cooperation began in earnest.

Dilly Knox had in fact got very close to breaking the German Enigma messages himself. The main thing stopping him, the one thing he’d been unable to work out, was the way in which the
letters of the keyboard were connected to the internal rotors. If he could only work that out, he would be able to read the German Enigma codes. One female codebreaker, a ‘Mrs B’,
suggested that the simplest way to do it would be A to A, B to B, C to C, and so on. But that was a ridiculous idea. Scrambling the connections would make the code far more secure.
Any sensible person would want the links between the keyboard and the rotors to be completely random, making it far more difficult for people like Dilly to break. The Poles, however,
had one of the German Army machines and Marian Rejewski was able to tell Dilly that it was in fact A to A, B to B, C to C . . . Mrs B had been right all along. The Germans had decided that since
the electrical wiring was soldered into the machine by hand it would be too much of a risk to make the connections random. It would be too easy to make a mistake in the wiring. If it was as
straightforward as A to A, B to B, there would be no doubt as to how the machine should be wired up. Given the extra security the Germans had put in place, knowing this still wasn’t enough to
get Dilly into the Enigma codes, but he knew now that he was very close.

Commander Denniston, who had travelled to Poland with Dilly to meet the Polish mathematicians, was understandably impressed by the Polish mathematicians’ success in breaking Enigma. Dilly
was a brilliant codebreaker, who had unravelled the mysteries of the bawdy comedies of the Greek poet and playwright Herodas from fragments of papyrus scrolls found in an Egyptian cave. He had
shown himself adept at breaking every kind of code, including the Spanish and Italian Enigma codes, but when it came to the German Enigma he had not been as adept as the Poles.

In the months leading up to the war, Commander Denniston had toured Britain’s universities, looking for professors and lecturers who might make good codebreakers.
Initially, he targeted linguists and classicists, but after meeting the
Poles he began to interview mathematicians. One of the first he recruited was a young Cambridge
academic called Alan Turing who was making a name for himself with his ideas for ‘a universal computing machine’. Admiral Sinclair authorised Commander Denniston to recruit fifty senior
academics, both men and women, and thirty female language graduates. Although the tilt towards more women might seem a positive move, it was actually done on purely practical grounds. Young men
were likely to be needed by the armed forces and women were far cheaper to employ.

All the academics were given some training in codebreaking and made to sign the Official Secrets Act. They were told to keep a ten-shilling note in their pockets at all times for a railway
ticket and to wait for a telegram saying simply that ‘Auntie Flo is unwell’. On receipt of the message, they were to make their way to Station X.

In the days following Chamberlain’s declaration of war, the messages went out and the dons began arriving at Bletchley. The original codebreakers moved out of the hotels and into
‘billets’. Local people with spare bedrooms were required to let them stay there in return for a guinea (£1.05) a week. Barbara Abernethy was put into a house belonging to the
owner of a large chain of car dealerships.

‘I was in a very nice billet to start with in a place called Great Brickhill and the dons were all in one pub up there called The Duncombe Arms. Since I lived in Great Brickhill, I was
exposed to them more than most people early on. There were a lot of dons staying at the pub, about six or eight of them, all of them having such a jolly time that they called it the Drunken
Arms.’

The first few months after September 1939 were known as the Phoney War. Nothing seemed to be happening. British troops were sent to France but they weren’t involved
in any fighting. The Royal Navy did have a number of clashes at sea with German ships but at Bletchley only those people working on German material like Phoebe were busy.

‘We were deluged with intercepted German messages which we still continued to register, although we really could not cope with it and were days behind. However, we struggled valiantly with
it, each of us taking it in turns.’

Things began to turn around for Phoebe when Frank Birch, an actor and comic who had been in Room 40 during the First World War, arrived to take charge of the German Naval Section and had the
rest of the section sent up from London.

‘From then onwards everything began to be properly organised and to take shape. In no time, we were filing, sorting, making and receiving reports. We had been joined by Miss Bostock, who
later became Mrs Kerslake. More staff were needed for the work we were doing and we could only obtain them in ones. None of us specialised. We all had to help one another and all who came to the
section did a bit of everything.’

Dilly Knox and the new young mathematicians working with him in a cottage – which became known as ‘the Cottage’ – behind the mansion were also very busy, trying to break
into Enigma. But other sections had far less to do. The Italians and the Japanese hadn’t entered the war yet.

Barbara helped organise games of rounders after lunch to wear off the effects of the food and keep people amused.

‘We had a tennis ball and somebody managed to commandeer an old broom handle, drilled a hole in it and put a leather strap in it. It was all we had, things were
getting a bit tough to get. If it was a fine day, we’d all say rounders at one o’clock, we’d all go out and play, just to sort of let off steam. Everybody argued about the rules
and the dons just laid them down, in Latin sometimes. We used trees as bases. “He got past the deciduous,” one would say. “No he didn’t,” another would argue.
“He was still between the conifer and the deciduous.” That was the way they were.’

As more people arrived to deal with the German codes, Commander Denniston realised he had a problem. There was nowhere to put them all. MI6 was occupying the entire top floor of the mansion. The
Naval Section was still crammed into the loggia and the library. The Air Section was in the large panelled room to the right as you went in through the door. The Military Section was also on the
ground floor, and the Diplomatic Section, the other main department of the Code and Cypher School, had been moved into Elmer’s School, an old private school just outside the grounds.

The admiral decided that wooden huts should be put up around the mansion to house the naval, air and military sections. There were already three huts which had been built for some of the MI6
sections before the codebreakers arrived. Hut 4 was constructed just outside the library, replacing the beautiful rose garden that had so entranced Barbara Abernethy. The new hut was designed to
house the Air Section, but when they’d moved in and there were still a few empty rooms at one end, the German
Naval Section was moved in there too, much to
Phoebe’s relief, initially at least.

‘We had become very cramped in our quarters; files were increasing and the numbers of our personnel were slowly mounting so that the amount of space at our disposal had dwindled to such a
degree that Jocelyn Bostock and I were working together on a small kitchen table and getting very much in one another’s way, as one can imagine. Even the floor was used to sort signals and it
must have been amusing to see us on all fours doing this job. It needs no great effort of the imagination to realise how very delighted we were to hear that we were to move into Hut 4.’

There might have been more space to work in the huts but, with their thin wooden walls and floors, they were far from comfortable and very cold. The glass of the windows was taped up to protect
against bomb blasts and covered in blackout curtains. They were lit by bare light bulbs and kept warm at best by paraffin heaters, at worst by cast-iron coke stoves which Phoebe found impossible to
light or control.

‘They were awful. When the wind was high, long flames would be blown out into the room, frightening anyone nearby. Alternatively, the fire would go out and smoke would come billowing
forth, filling the room with a thick fog and, with all the windows open to let out the smoke, the shivering occupant would be dressed in a thick overcoat, scarf and gloves, endeavouring to cope
with his work.’

Across Britain there was very much a patriotic spirit, inspired by the Prime Minister’s address to the nation. There was a genuine feeling that Britain was doing the
right thing, taking on the evil of Hitler and the Nazi regime. Women inevitably had much more of a role in society than they had become used to between the wars. Even for those whose
fathers, husbands or sweethearts were not already serving in the forces, there was a realisation that it would be inevitable and, as had been the case during the First World War, women would have
to keep the country running while the men went abroad to fight. The Women’s Voluntary Services for Air Raid Precautions was set up in early 1938, working in close association with the
Women’s Institute. Amid fears of German bombing raids on the major cities, young mothers often experienced the effects of war before their husbands, suffering the emotional turmoil of having
their children evacuated to the countryside. When their husbands were called up they found themselves looking for some way of ‘doing their bit’.

Most women felt very patriotic and proud of their male relatives who were joining the forces. Young women in particular really wanted to be part of the war effort, often seeing it not just as a
patriotic duty but as an opportunity to escape from the confines of the family home. The combination of romance and usefulness of being a nurse in wartime meant no shortage of volunteers for the
Voluntary Aid Detachments, set up across Britain to care for people injured in the bombing, or the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), which despite its name carried out a number of other roles
apart from nursing, including providing drivers for Bletchley Park. Women also became ambulance drivers, worked in factories, on farms, or joined the fire service or the police. Female equivalents
of the Royal Navy, the Army
and the Royal Air Force had all been set up during the First World War but then disbanded in the early 1920s. In the run-up to war, they were
re-formed. The Women’s Royal Naval Service, commonly known as the Wrens, the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force or WAAF, and the female equivalent of the Army, the Auxiliary Territorial
Service or ATS, became the most common organisations in which young women sought to serve their country, along with the weapons factories and ‘the Land Army’ of female farm workers.

Despite all this patriotic enthusiasm, recruitment of extra staff for Bletchley was initially slow. There was very little money available, and that was likely to remain the case unless the
codebreakers could find a way into the German Enigma codes and begin to prove their worth, but morale remained remarkably high. As Christmas approached, Phoebe naturally wanted to spend it at home
with her mother, but someone had to stay behind and keep track of the German messages.

‘It was impossible for us all to be away together so we arranged among ourselves who should stay. Jocelyn and I drew lots and I lost and resigned myself to a miserable Christmas, the first
one for some years that I had spent away from home. When the day arrived I found there were more people at BP than I had thought there would be.’

There was a ban on travel over the Christmas period so even some of those who had got time off couldn’t get home. Frank Birch invited Phoebe and the other members of the German Naval
Section who were on duty for drinks in the office.

‘I arrived afterwards in the dining room for lunch
feeling quite happy and, being rather late, to find the hall decorated magnificently with everyone sitting down
wearing the peculiar paper hats one gets from Christmas crackers and blowing whistles which shot out a terrific length of paper. Every seat was occupied with the exception of one seat round the
corner but there I sat quite happily with a wonderful lunch in front of me. All the Christmases which I spent in Bletchley were extremely good, everyone going all out to make everyone else enjoy
themselves.’