Gwen's Road to Bletchley Park

In December 2022 we said farewell to a 98 year old former colleague, Gwen Tovey who in 1942, while still Gwen Herbert, had begun a career in signals intelligence which lasted until she retired. Seven or eight years before she retired, she dictated her memories of her time at Bletchley and of the move of GCHQ to Cheltenham into a cassette recorder and these were transcribed by a friend. This transcription was spread across a number of separate pieces which were shared with retired and current members of GCHQ. At her funeral I asked members of her family and the friend who had transcribed them whether I could publish them here, and as everybody agreed, here is the first instalment.

Part One: "Why Me?"

The inhabitants of Bletchley Park were many and various, and so were the routes by which they got there - but I challenge any survivor to match the unlikelihood of my selection! The process which led to my first walk up the narrow. dark and sooty path from Bletchley station to the gates of the park and the suddenness of my encounter with a world which up to then had existed only in books were probably also rather unusual but utterly captivating.

In late 1941 I was in the third year Sixth Form of a small grammar school for girls in a town of some thirty thousand people, eight miles north of Coventry. My Head Mistress came home from some conference and said that the ATS proposed recruiting a dozen or so Oxford graduates for some unspecified special duties and there might conceivably be room for one or two school-leavers in the group. I had just spectacularly failed the entrance exam for Girton and had said that I was not going to try again in the middle of a war. So I said 'yes' to trying for one of these hypothetical places. I can't pretend that this was pure patriotism. It was a decision influenced by the bone-aching chill of two nights at Girton in November and by the humiliating realisation that it would be ridiculous to think that my languages were up to university standards. My German was almost entirely self-taught as the only staff member who could teach it succumbed to TB after two lessons. My written French was up to scholarship standard but speaking it was another matter. I had never even seen a foreigner until the War brought Poles to a nearby airfield (and the King's Own Scottish Borderers to the town, speaking an equally incomprehensible language). My ever resourceful Headmistress persuaded the Polish Meteorological Officer to give me practice in French conversation. I never told her, but the last thing Jerzy wanted to do was to talk French because, like many of his fellow officers, he had been badly treated in France; but he kept up the pretence because he liked using the school tennis courts and liked even more my mother's raspberry jam and sponge cakes. He wanted to talk (in English) about Shakspir and Sho (GBS of that Ilk). Jerzy went on to anglicise his name and to marry the daughter of a British Admiral and became Professor of Physics in a northern university.

So now imagine me in early 1942, possibly about to become a mole, aged 17¾, paralysingly shy, wearing a borrowed "grown up" hat, setting out for London where I had never been. I found my way to Devonshire House and was shown into a dusty room and asked to fill in forms. Under the heading "languages" I put down Modem English, Middle English on the strength of having "done" Chaucer's Prologue, French, Latin and elementary German. Then I was led into an interview room. The Chairman was a rather short and rather round Colonel. On his left was an ATS Senior Commander (Major) wearing as much make-up as a film star. The third member of the Board was a civilian from the British Museum named C. J. Gadd. (Some 55 years later when I became fascinated by ancient Sumerian history, I discovered he was famous for having recognised that a carved cylinder seal found in the city of Ur came from the Indus valley. This led to much work on the incredible amount of trade between the two civilisations between 2500 and 1900 BC.)

Most of the interview passed in a blur, but I clearly remember answering two questions in a way which could have led them to believe that I knew far too much about what I was being interviewed for and that it might be safer to have me inside, as it were. The first pivotal question was "what do you think you might do when you leave school?", and the second was "what would you call a circle turned inside out?" My totally innocent answers were, firstly, that I thought it would be interesting to be part of the BBC team which was monitoring German Public Radio broadcasts, though I feared my German was not good enough, and secondly, that if a circle were turned inside out its radii might look like a star. The answer caused a definite frisson because of course recruits would be studying German communications and the German names for military communications in the most used formats were Kreis and Stern - circle and star. I cannot think of any other reason why they should have chosen me, but after an agonising wait they said I had been accepted on condition that the ATS also considered me suitable.

That ends the first part of my saga. The next was bizarre but in a different way.

Part 2: "Basic Training" - for what?

After being accepted by the BP Selection Board I was given a date to attend an ATS recruitment centre. I cycled to Coventry, sailed through the medical but found the officers were distinctly miffed by the strict instructions they had received that on no account was I to be put through their trade aptitude tests. However, I passed muster, and two weeks after leaving school I proceeded to Talavera Barracks in Northampton, where we were doled out with approximately fitting and hideously unflattering uniform. My appearance was not improved when I washed my khaki stockings in Persil and they came out bright yellow. (I did once play Malvolio). We lived in one of the numerous wooden huts, each labelled "28 men - 8 horses". We slept on bunk beds on excruciatingly hard straw-filled palliasses. At night earwigs fell down on the unfortunate girl on the top layer and crawled down to the overheated recruit on the lower level.

The command "outside in threes" had us marching off to meals, P.T., route marches, lectures on hair nits and the Battle of Talavera, but most often to drill on the barracks square. There, in a blisteringly hot August, we marched about, exasperating the male Regimental Sergeant Major since half the company never learned which was their left leg. My worst experience was when, standing to attention, and having been told "do not blanketty blank dare to blink", I became squintingly aware that a large wasp was crawling up my plump cheek. The route marches affected many of the girls in my hut - a lot of them were conscripts from East London. After what seemed to me a gentle stroll, admittedly over some fairly hummocky fields, they returned exhausted and with badly blistered feet. Another trial was gas drill. The ATS sergeant had repeatedly instructed us what to do if there were a gas warning. She suddenly shouted "Gas" so we flung ourselves on the ground, wrenched off our caps and fumbled our gas masks out of their cardboard boxes, which we carried everywhere, and put them on. Sadly, a little white dog appeared and ran away with my cap. The squad was spluttering with laughter and so had to take off their gas masks. The sergeant, fearing she was losing control of the squad, was minded to put me on a charge until some bold soul pointed out that a prostrate girl in a gas mask could not possibly be capable of "Conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline".

We were not allowed out of camp without some very special reason so were able to save four weeks' pay which in total amounted to £2.

Thus ended my first encounter with the real ATS. Subsequently we were attached to the Intelligence Corps. The discipline they had tried to instil into us at Talavera was replaced by the discipline of the job we were doing and a determination to avoid as far as possible any interference with that job.

Part 3: Secret revealed

After our exertions in Northampton we were given a 48-hour leave before gathering at Beaumanor, the ancestral home of the Herrick family in Leicestershire. The Manor is surrounded by parkland and by 1942 this was planted with aerials and wooden huts. In the huts ATS girls laboured to transcribe the Morse code radio transmissions of German military units of all kinds. Reams of paper (which we called logs) were filled with messages and any intervening chatter. This was mainly in Q-code - for example QSA IMI means "what is my signal strength?". When we got to the park two of our group, both German linguists, were sent to join people attempting to decrypt the messages but most of us became "traffic analysts", following networks and stations as they changed frequencies and callsigns every day and trying to establish order of battle and to help cryptographers in various ways.

Many, many books, some good and some awful, have been written about techniques employed at Bletchley and at its outstations, but for any younger colleagues who want to learn about what it was like and how it fitted into the wider picture and its importance I would recommend two books by Michael Smith - "Station X", published in 1988 and "Secrets of Station X", published in 2001. The latter has more technical details but the former version has more about the atmosphere and the personalities. A remarkable evocation of Bletchley, both inside and outside the park, appears in Robert Harris's novel "Enigma" (comparable with his evocation of "Pompeii").

But before we knew anything of all this we were asked to sign the Official Secrets Act: anyone who felt they did not want to were to say so and would be released. It was now that we got to know the others in our group. I had already met, though only briefly, two other school-leavers who were friends from GPDST Sutton High School but Talavera had kept us pretty well restricted to our hut groups. There were eleven Oxford graduates and various life-long friendships began at this time. When we got into the classroom the next day we found an ATS subaltern, drafted in from who knows where (I suspect nepotism) and a whole group of soldiery who were destined for tactical units in the field.

The work was fascinating from day one to the penultimate day which we spent endeavouring to make sense of the great heaps of logs and reporting on our findings and then to the very last day when we were told that all had done well and all must have a prize of sewing a lance corporal's stripe onto our uniform because there were no Privates in the Intelligence Corps. (Some hardened battle-scarred fellows would say there were no soldiers either and that the rather attractive Tudor rose of the badge represents a pansy resting on its laurels).

We had some guest lecturers from BP but most of the instruction was done by Major Jolowicz, in civilian life the Professor of Law at Oxford. He was brilliant, not just in expounding technical matters and methods of attack, but also in somehow creating an atmosphere of hushed reverence. This was only broken once when an aircraft crashed into a hillside just beyond the manor and two Canadian soldiers were up and away out of the big bay window before Major J could thunder "Sit down".

The second of the resident lecturers (puzzlingly from a famous naval family) looked like a teddy bear in his khaki battle dress and was a man of great deliberation. He once drew a complex diagram on the blackboard in blue chalk, contemplated it in silence for a few moments, and then rubbed it out and did it all again in red.

There were snags in life, of course, not as far as the work was concerned but out of office hours. Moving from earwiggy huts to billets in substantial houses in the rural surroundings of the manor should have been pleasant, but unfortunately I didn't like either the girl I was billeted with or our landlady. Elizabeth was grumpy and sleepy, grumpy because I woke her every morning clattering about polishing my shoes and buttons while she wanted to sleep to the last minute. Our landlady was very nouvelle riche, always talking about her dead "hubby" who took her to Monte Carlo and gave her gifts of wonderful china - the hideous stuff was in glass cabinets all round the house, and I nearly crashed into one of them when I fell down the stairs one night on the way to the bathroom. The bathroom contained the only example I have seen of a shiny steel bath which acted as a distorting mirror when one sat in the regulation allowance of 2" of water. Every morning, once we were dressed, we had to slog the one and a half miles along the road and up the drive to the manor without even a cup of tea. Breakfast was taken in a beautifully panelled room and usually consisted of a sort of bright yellow pasty stuffed with some rather fusty prunes.

There was very little in the way of entertainment and at first I was rather shy of all these people who seemed so sophisticated. Their casual conversations were full of references to theatres, opera, art galleries, museums and foreign holidays. However, I soon began to enjoy trips on local buses to the only cinema in miles and an occasional fairly edible meal at a British Restaurant which cost 6 (old) pence. The chief pleasure for most of us came from walks in the countryside including field paths and going up and down the occasional craggy hill.

I quite often walked with a soldier who had been born in a high valley in Switzerland and then emigrated to some remote spot in the Canadian Rockies. Friedrich was intent on teaching me what he considered to be essential life skills. One of these, that of coming rapidly downhill without falling over, did come in useful in later Scottish holidays, though I never had occasion to test the rest of this lesson, which is that it is the only way to escape if you are being pursued by a bear. Nor did I ever find myself in the middle of nowhere in deep snow, and be thankful to know that by digging myself a deep hole I could survive the night. Friedrich also considered me dangerously innocent. One evening, having escorted me to the landlady's garden gate, he proceeded to teach me how to break the hold of a man attacking from behind. This was all in broad daylight and was witnessed by Mrs Whatever-Her-Name-Was, who wrote to my parents that she feared for my morals. This sent my mother into a fit but my father simply laughed because he had met Friedrich and Mrs X when he cycled over (petrol strictly for business) to bring me some apples from the garden. He knew perfectly well that any danger to my morals was, to say the least, unlikely. Disaster – potentially greater than that of any little white dog – was averted and I went on with full marks, unsullied name and a clear conscience to all the wonders of Bletchley Park.

I'll aim to put out the next instalment next week.