Gwen: from Lance Corporal to Warrant Officer at Bletchley Park

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.