There has been a recent fascination with Bletchley Park, the centre of Britain's codebreaking efforts during the Second World War. The Imitation Game, which focuses on Alan Turing's work to break the German's Enigma coding system there, has just been nominated for eight Oscars. And this month has seen the publication of two books about the women who made up 75 per cent of Bletchley's workforce: Tessa Dunlop's The Bletchley Girls (Hodder & Stoughton) and Michael Smith's The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (Aurum Press).
There are increasingly few veterans left to tell the true story of life at Bletchley—an incredible operation that at its peak involved 10,000 people working on a 55-acre estate, in secret, to decode enemy messages. But Michael Smith, a historical advisor at Bletchley, managed to gather together six women veterans for the launch of his book on 20th January.
Watching The Imitation Game, he tells me, “you get the impression that [the team at Bletchley] was a group of brainy men with one or two women around. I thought it was interesting that Keira Knightley got nominated for best actress 'in a supporting role'.” But women made up the vast majority of workers at Bletchley and some of them, he notes, such as Mavis Batey, were top codebreakers. “The women's story doesn't get told very much, and when it is told it's like they were minor cogs, like they just did little bits and pieces. Of course, many of them did do supporting roles but... some of them were not minor cogs at all.” Even those that weren't doing senior work were “indispensable,” he says, and the operation as a whole "did tremendous things to help the war.”
Why do the women's stories tend to get overlooked? “It was an era when men dominated things," says Smith, "particularly in the area that dominated here [at Bletchley], which was mathematics. It wasn't seen as lady-like.”
I spoke to 92-year-old Betty Webb, who was recruited to Bletchley in 1941 at the age of 18, and stayed until the end of the war. She had volunteered for the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the women's branch of the British army, and immediately found herself sent to London for an interview. Afterwards she was given a train ticket to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, not knowing what it was or what work she was to do there. She assumes she was selected because of her fluency in German, “but none of us really knew,” she says, and many did not have language skills. Others were recruited from secretarial colleges, the women's branches of the navy and air force, the small selection of women who had been to university and from families who it was felt could be trusted.
Betty worked at first on registering the German police messages and later wrote intelligence reports based on Japanese army messages. Those who worked at Bletchley signed the Official Secrets Act and were not allowed to talk about their work even to colleagues in different departments. Two of the veterans at the book launch said it was sad their parents had died without ever knowing what they did during the war. Many waited decades even to tell their husbands. But in 1974, FW Winterbotham, an RAF officer, published a book called The Ultra Secret, which detailed some of the work that had taken place there: Bletchley veterans were finally allowed to talk. Still, Betty says, she didn't. “It was many years after that that I felt free to talk about it.”
She recalls her first days in the ATS and then at Bletchley; despite its glamorous image, it seemed at the time, she says, pretty boring (asked about her thoughts on The Imitation Game, one veteran described it as "overdramatised.")
“I was 18... and it was my first time away from home," says Betty, "apart from a visit to Germany in 1937 when I lived with a family for a few months. But apart from that I hadn't been away from home before. It was pretty rough, actually. The basic training in the ATS was at a regular army camp in Wrexham, where the accommodation was very very basic, the food and everything, it was all rather rough...
“To begin with [at Bletchley], because I was pretty green I suppose, pretty junior, I did all sorts of things. I taught myself to type and sometimes I did a bit of typing for people. Just helped generally, starting with registering the incoming [intercepted German] messages... The day-to-day work was pretty boring, actually, to begin with. You didn't talk about anything outside your own role, so you didn't know the whole picture, you didn't know what the chaps next door were doing; you couldn't. And [even though I can speak German] I didn't know what the messages contained because they weren't in the clear. Our signal people around England and around the world were listening in on messages that the enemy was sending out in morse code, and we were registering them in groups of five letters or five figures, so we didn't know what was going on. There was nothing in the clear at that stage, and then it was all pieced together, once the codebreaking, translation and transcribing had been done.” Some of the messages Betty was working on revealed the beginnings of the Holocaust, with the slaughter of thousands of Jews on the eastern front, but she didn't know it at the time. “This was the tightness of the security. Junior people just did not know. I found out many years later; I made it my business to find out, by meeting people at reunions where we were encouraged to tell our stories."
She speaks warmly of the social life at Bletchley, though. “We had lots of things we could do in the way of recreation... [My strongest memories] are on the social side. We were very fortunate here. We had a Bach choir which we could join in if we wanted to, we had a gramophone group that met about once a week, plenty of sport and so on, and so it was all very balanced. I think one tended to forget the boredom of the job. I enjoyed it very much because I'd grown up in the country and hadn't been around very much, and to me the cross-section of people who were Bletchley was very interesting."
Speaking to me in the former dining room in the mansion at Bletchley, she says “it's lovely to be back. I love it, I come very often. It's very different, of course it is, but the atmosphere to me is still here.”
Bletchley Park is open to visitors daily from 9.30am to 4pm
Michael Smith's book, The Debs of Bletchley Park, is out now
