I
have said that I was rather overawed by the Oxonians in our small ATS group, so
it might have been expected that I would be overwhelmed by the brilliance and
eccentricity of the denizens of Bletchley Park itself. But not so: we were very
much the newest intake and a pretty lowly rank, so we only came into touch with
the next echelon above us individually and about twice a day. They would
descend on us from what we called the Fuzz Room (Fusion) and we would tell them
what we had found out. One of our number, Anne, did come into contact with
quite a lot of people in the ad hoc games of mixed hockey played on an empty
bit of the Park, but as an Oxford Blue she terrified both teams by her speed
and ferocity. However, culturally speaking, my horizons were very much
extended. There were musical concerts in the Assembly Hall by professionals
from both outside and inside the Park, and I would go up to London with an
increasing number of friends, sometimes taking in a matinee or a concert and
staying overnight with their families. Their lifestyle was different from what
mine had been. It was no surprise to me that they ate dinner at night, preceded
by drinks, but it was extraordinary to find that the hyper-intellectual parents
of some girls lived in large but very dusty houses with dangerously toppling
piles of books even on the staircase.
Professionally
my first job was to deal with the networks serving the northernmost Army Group
on the German eastern front. For the first few days I gave complicated reasons
for everything I found out. But after this, Wallace Farmery, on his visitations
from above, would say 'Just give me the results'. So I did. I was never any
good at understanding the order of battle of our own organization and I
certainly didn't understand that at Bletchley at the time, but I suppose that
the Fusion Room was acting as a channel between the Log Readers and the
Decrypting Sections and the Intercept Station Controllers and the Indexers and
whomever else needed to know what we might have found out.
After
this I was moved to deal with the communications of the German Police. These
were unusual nets, three in number, two controlled from Berlin with a number of
outstations, but they all used fixed call-signs and they were all working on
long range frequencies. It was quite easy to sort out the two top level
networks, but which of them was ordinary police, military police or Gestapo, I
don't know to this day and I wouldn't have asked, and if I had, I would have
been told there was no need to know. This was an absolutely rock solid
principle, until I got into the Fish Section late in 1943. The two major police
networks were separated in frequencies by about 5kc/s, but the third network,
which produced three times as many logs in a day, was on 410kc/s and consisted
of all the outstations on the two upper nets and all their out-stations, all
transmitting on the same frequency. This sounds impossible, but it's due to the
vagaries of the atmosphere that fairly high-powered transmissions on long wave
will reach a certain radius via the ground wave. So the controls of each subnet
could get in touch with all their outstations but not interfere with those in
geographically adjacent areas. But the atmospheric wave bounced back in such a
way that all the stations on the net were heard all at once from the distance
of the UK, so the intercept stations had great difficulty in sorting out which
control, which subnet on this 'everything together' net was contacting which
outstation. So you had to resolve a number of Morse corruptions in order to get
them fitted in properly. This I managed to do, apparently to the satisfaction
of the visitor from the Fuzz Room, who in this case was a wonderfully turned
out young captain by the name of Raymond Lisser. Raymond had, in Joyce
Grenfell's phrase, 'a lovely polish on his shoes and his hair'.
Then
I moved in the summer of '43 to my first command. By this time I was a
sergeant, having taken Senior Commander Pat Baber's hint that I must get my
hair cut, because I would never be made a sergeant, unless I did. The army in
the West Section consisted of me in control, a couple of WAAF corporals, an ATS
subaltern, a British Army regimental sergeant major, who was by far the most
intelligent of the lot, and an American captain, of whom I can only say that he
was a very good tennis player. That was quite interesting. I don't quite know
how much I contributed, but Senior Commander Haber would come round and collect
things every day and seemed quite impressed. I was giving what I knew (well -
suspected) to be re-encodings and corrections to messages where they were
indicated by the chatter and so forth.
Then
in late summer 1943 Yvonne Buckoke, who became my friend for life, had just
been moved to her single command (having already been commissioned) which was
to try to do traffic analysis on the High Command printer links known as Fish.
These were quite difficult and the army corporal who had been in charge before
had stated that you could not possibly discover anything from their radio
links, because, to start with, they worked without call-signs and each end
worked on a different frequency. So you had the difficulty of fitting two ends
together before you started to log it in any sense. But Yvonne saw a chink of
light and hauled me in to help, and within no time at all we had about 14 ATS
and a gentle, charming but slightly dazed man called David Rex Uzielli, who was
in nominal charge. Here we really came into contact with both the intercept
station, which was Knockholt in Kent, and with the cryptography people divided
into two sections called the Newmanry and the Testery, each breaking one half
of the cipher, or trying to, one under Max Newman and the other under Ralph
Tester. Now, we only saw Max Newman once in our office, as far as my memory
goes. He usually sent a captain, Peter Marshall, to speak to us. The people in
the Testery we knew very well and they used to come and have coffee with us in
the mornings and eat the Naafi cake, which was bright yellow from the dried egg
and was reputed to be mixed with castor oil. We also went to visit them in
their room in the next corridor in F Block (which is now razed to the ground)
and there we found people like, or not like, because they were so individual, a
very smart captain called Roy Jenkins, whom everyone will have heard of, Peter
Hilton, who became a distinguished maths professor in the USA after the war,
and possibly the richest soldier in the British Army, Peter Solomon Benenson. He
had refused a commission and was drawing the much greater pay, in effect, of a
regimental sergeant major, but was once put on a charge for failing to turn up
at a pay parade. He later became the founder of Amnesty International. There were also a couple of people from
the British Museum, one of whom, when on holiday, sent us postcards in the most
beautiful italic handwriting in a style which resembled that of 'Finnigan's
Wake'. The other, who was just a corporal, whom we called by some fish name or
other, Chad I think, turned out, I found out by an obituary years later, to
have been a very important member of the British Museum staff. There was also a
very bright army captain who had been a journalist on the Daily Mail and the Times.
There was also Angus Mackintosh, a tall major with black hair and green eyes
who in Oxford later lectured in Old English and held a room full of students
enthralled by delivering Wulfstan's Address to the English given at the
beginning of 1000 AD, lambasting them for evil behaviour and saying they would
be deprived of beautiful things: 'mondes-licht ond regen-scur'-
moonlight and showers of rain.
The
Fish nets added to the difficulties of traffic analysis by using a Q-code all
of their own, except for some very well known Q signals referring to whether
the interference they were finding was natural or man-made. And one of my first
jobs was to sort it out. Late in the war we captured a whole lot of documents
related to Fish. In fact Yvonne and I went to a prisoner of war camp somewhere,
where a whole caravan with its mobile crew of two Germans was there with all
its machinery and codebooks. So that was extremely interesting. Yvonne did
speak German, being half Swiss, but we had with us I think Captain Fletcher,
who was a very good German speaker, so Yvonne and I kept quiet, while he tried
to get some information out of these two chaps. By this time it was obvious to
us that they were reading the ciphers on various of these links, indeed on most
of them, but it was never directly acknowledged, although it was clear that we
could (from those supposedly unrevealing logs) get information, which could
help them in various ways. We were also able to help the intercept station, and
in the early summer of 1944 1 was sent to Knockholt, the intercept station,
nominally to reorganize the traffic analysis section there, but actually to try
to pick out from my knowledge of how things happened, the messages which should
most urgently be teleprintered to Bletchley, which would lead them into the
day's keys. I didn't know that — it was obviously a decision made high up by
those who knew that D-Day was fast approaching.
Before
I went to Knockholt, I was told that I was to wear civilian clothes, since it
was a civilian station, but I said that the only civilian clothes that I had
which I could get into was my school uniform. As a special concession I was
allowed to go in uniform as a staff sergeant. I was driven down by a Colonel
Sayer, actually in a Jaguar! Then I met the traffic analysis section, about six
or seven young local housewives or schoolgirls under a rather grande dame, who
had been in Room 40 during the First World War and had no idea how to deal with
these youngsters. Also neither she nor the girls ever really ventured into the
set room. The set room was manned by people invalided out of the Merchant Navy
and the only woman who was in there quite often was a Scots girl called Netta
Eddington, who was a very good technician, called in when anything went wrong
with the machinery. I knew her later and that, not only was she a very good
technician, but she was also a very good cook. I
remember her giving a splendid Burns Night dinner with haggis and all the
trimmings, washed down with some very good whisky. I came to know what were
called the Charge Hands, who were in charge of each shift, of whom there were
four. One I can't remember much about at all, one was called Alan Clark and
used to play tennis with the girls in the traffic analysis section, but he died
young. The other two were Stan Silsby, who ended up in charge of Gilnahirk
intercept station, and Jock Harkins, who moved to Somerset when Knockholt was
moved entirely, and finished up his career as commander of the big station in
Scarborough, where I met him years later and we had dinner together.
After
I had been at Knockholt for about a fortnight, I was woken in my billet by a
blaze of light in a room which had no lighting and no black-out curtains. The
light was from searchlights endlessly criss-crossing the sky and was
accompanied by the noise of all the ack-ack guns in Kent. I only found out the
next day at Knockholt that this was the beginning of the doodle-bug (V1)
attack. We soon learned to take no notice, because either the thing was going
to cut out and drop on you or continue droning on its horrid way.
So
much for my professional career, as it were, up to the time when I went back to
Bletchley park and was made a company sergeant-major. The insignia for a CSM
was a sort of squashed circle attached to your tunic on the forearm, instead of
stripes on your upper arm, which led to a misunderstanding on a night train to
Scotland, where I was going for a 48 hour leave on a farm which belonged to
some family friends. I had been chatting with quite a few soldiers in the train—everyone
in trains talked to each other as they do in Italy today. Anyway, when we had
to change trains at Carlisle and left the dim blue light of the carriages for
the stronger lights of the station, a corporal I had been talking to said 'Blimey,
I thought you was a cook'. Cooks wore an unsquashed circle in the same place as
my insignia.
So
far I haven't said much about life outside Bletchley Park. For the first few
months the ATS were billeted in a dusty old house in Fenny Stratford and had to
walk about half a mile or more at the beginning and end of each shift. I can't
remember much about it, except that we had orderlies who swept and dusted and
cooked for us, and so on. In our spare time we would go out and have a drink in
a pub or go to the splendid Salvation Army canteen, where occasionally you
could get chocolate off ration. I also got chocolate off ration, because I
didn't smoke at the time, so I would swap my cigarette
allowance with those who didn't want their chocolate, which worked very well. One
night a gang of us went to the local cinema which was showing a film called
'Blood and Sand' – a kind of modernised Beau Geste. We were convulsed with laughter
and were making what we thought were witty comments. The manager asked us to
leave.
After
a few months we moved into the newly built Shenley Road military camp, where
all the army and ATS employed at the Park were billeted, and it was back to
huts, but thank goodness no bunks and no earwigs. They were, however, rather Jerry-built
and in the sergeants' hut where I was sleeping, one night the whole roof blew off
and after a few moments a sleepy and grumpy Elizabeth asked "Who opened
that window?'' We had to walk through the muddy roads to get to the ablutions
block, to wash ourselves and our clothes, though mostly I took them home and
let my mother do them on my day off once a week or once a fortnight. And I would hitch up there with my friend Angie
who lived close to Coventry. We would share the ride, mostly in lorry cabs, as
far as her dropping off point and then I would get dropped off on the A5, which
ran through Fenny Stratford and right up to within a mile of my own home. I
went back to Bletchley by a train, which left Nuneaton at 8.22 pm and was
supposed to get to Bletchley in about a couple of hours. But quite often in
father and I waited for ages, drinking Horlicks in the station canteen, waiting
and waiting because, before the passenger train could come through, the fish
train from Stranraer to London had to go first. It was often very late,
midnight maybe, before I was walking from Bletchley station up to the Shenley Road
Camp.
The
Shenley Road camp was commanded by Colonel Fillingham from the Durham Light Infantry
and there were various stories about his exploits. He was extremely interested
in education and indeed made a very good OC of the Formation college, where
Yvonne and I went for the last month of our service, in early 1946. He
persuaded one of his DLI sergeant majors to come to Shenley Road to what he
described to him as a Special Unit. So the sergeant major thought he was coming
to a commando unit or something of the sort and arrived full of hope, only to
find that, when he organised an early morning run for the soldiers (not for us
thank goodness) it resulted in the countryside being littered with gasping
Intelligence Corps chaps with their hands on their knees and all muddy, which
was a great disappointment of course.
The
Colonel also had a habit of stopping people as they were going around the camp
and asking them questions. He once asked Angie and me "Are you frightened
at this camp?" We said "No, we aren't frightened at all". He was
reputed to have asked one of the Pioneer Corps, who were doing the sort of slave
jobs around the camp. "My man, where are the Aleutians?" The man had
never heard of the Aleutians and said "Hut H4 Sir", which was their
ablutions. The Colonel also gave a performance in front of the men's daily
parade at about 8.30 am by making great digging motions and asked them what he
was doing. Nobody piped up with the right answer. He yelled at them that it was
obvious: he was burying Sir John Moore at Corunna.
Colonel
Fillingham had organised the planting of a huge number of shrubs and small
trees around the military camp, even though all the roads were just beaten
earth and very muddy at that. But about a week after he had done all this, a
great flock of sheep got in and ate most of the vegetation, so it was all a bit
barren after that. But at least we were able to walk across the fields to a
nearby pub, where we played darts and so forth or went for general country
walks.
The
women were under the administrative control of another senior commander, who
was a great rival with Pat Haber in the Park. Pat would quite often get us out
of what was called 'a barrack night', where we had to stand to our beds with
all our kit laid out in a specified order and be inspected by this aristocratic
senior commander But Pat would sign a little note to say we were operationally
required to be on duty in the Park.
There
was a little more military discipline, which we had rather got out of the way
of. We had to do occasional route marches or had to march around the barracks
square, but for us it was nothing like as difficult as it was for the men. The Senior
Commander in the camp rebuked me on barrack night, because I had a corner bed
and had put my barrack box, which contained all my belongings, across the
corner of the hut, whereas it should, according to regulations, have been quite
solidly fixed at the bottom of my bed. Senior Commander reminded me rather
sharply that this was an Attery, not an artery. But a few weeks later she sent
a message to say that she understood I was rather good at painting and drawing,
so would I do some murals in the hut. So I was able to say No, I was much too
busy with my work in the Park and I could not possibly be painting there, when
I was working shifts at night, evening or day – a petty revenge.
I
also quite deliberately risked being put on a charge when we were being marched
around the camp, because I was in a blank file, which meant there were two
blank spaces in the row of three I was marching in. I deliberately marched
round a puddle and then I was able to say, 'Well, we are attached to the
Intelligence Corps'. So that was that.
I
should also say that, apart from showing confidence in that way, I had gained
an enormous amount of confidence in the office. One night when I was on night duty
all alone, I had just collected all the logs from the dispatch rider from Knockholt
and was flicking through, when I suddenly saw something which interested me.
Without a second's hesitation I lifted the phone and called the War Office and
told the duty officer that Rommel was moving his HQ in France. They probably
knew this already but they thanked me very kindly. That was something I would never
have dared to do even a year before.
The
next thing that happened to me professionally was that I was recommended for a
commission and went off to a War Office Selection Board. But that was so
extraordinary in itself, as was the rest of my service career, that I shall
leave it for next time.
