The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories Read Free

Denniston to cut back their hours. They didn’t have to start work until ten o’clock in the morning, had
ninetyminutes for lunch, and finished on the dot at five o’clock. Despite her low pay, Barbara thought it was wonderful.
    ‘Life was very civilised in those days. We stopped for tea and it was brought in by messengers. I was very impressed by this, first job I’d ever had and it seemed paradise to me.
Nice people and very interesting work. I thought, well, this is the life, isn’t it. Thank God I’m not back in the Foreign Office.’
    Many of the young women working for the Code and Cypher School were, like Barbara and Joan, from relatively well-to-do families, recruited because they knew someone who worked there, and were
therefore deemed to be trustworthy. Diana Russell-Clarke’s father Edward had worked with the codebreakers during the Great War; at the beginning of 1939, with war with Hitler on the horizon,
she decided she needed to do something to defend Britain. Naturally, the first person she turned to for help in finding the right job was her mother. It was simply the normal thing for a young
woman of Diana’s class to do.
    ‘My mother simply rang up Commander Denniston, whom we called Liza because we’d known him all our lives, and asked him: “Have you got a job for Diana?” He said,
“Yes. Send her along.” So that’s where I started. We were decoding. But it was very, very boring, just subtracting one row of figures from another. We were on the third floor.
There were MI6 people upstairs. They were always known as “the other side”. We didn’t have any truck with them.’
    Concerned that his staff would be at risk if the Germans bombed London, the admiral had bought a country estate and mansion at Bletchley Park, far enough away fromLondon
to be safe but linked to Whitehall via the main telephone communications cables that connected the capital with the far north. This was to be the ‘War Station’ for Britain’s spies
and codebreakers.
    Phoebe, Joan, Barbara and Diana were among just over a hundred codebreakers who travelled to Bletchley Park in August 1939. Many went by train, instructed to make sure that they only bought a
ticket that was ‘of the appropriate class’ for their status within the Code and Cypher School, which for Phoebe and Barbara was very definitely third class. A few, like Diana, were
lucky enough to have cars and were encouraged to take them so they could help ferry people into work each day.
    ‘A great friend lent me his Bentley for the duration of the war because he decided it was better for it to be driven than be put up on blocks. So I had this beautiful grey Bentley and of
course the private cars were useful because we used to collect people to come into work and then drop them home afterwards.’
    Initially they were all put up in pubs or hotels, where the mix of secretive elderly men and very young women, most of them much younger than Phoebe, scandalised the hotel staff, who assumed
they must be up to no good. They weren’t alone. The codebreakers weren’t allowed to tell even their own family where they were, leading Barbara’s mother to worry what her
eighteen-year-old daughter might be doing.
    ‘My mother didn’t know where I was and I was reasonably young. She had to sort of trust. I told her these people were very respectable.’
    The codebreakers were instructed to inform any locals inquisitive enough to ask that they were working on plans for the air defence of London. The servicemen attached to
the Code and Cypher School’s naval, military and air sections were ordered to wear civilian clothes. Bletchley Park was now to be known simply as ‘Station X’, not as a sign of
mystery but simply the tenth of a number of stations owned by MI6 and identified by Roman numerals. All mail was to be sent to an anonymous Post Office box number in Westminster from where it would
be collected and delivered to Bletchley by MI6 courier.
    It