Gwen: A Stressed Spinster

In September 1949, when I arrived back in Eastcote, rumours were circulating about a move away from the London area, possibly to Blackpool or to Cheltenham. At the time the government was keen on dispersing departments, what with the Russians having the atom bomb and thousands of foreign (ie American) troops on British soil. It was never quite clear, however, to whom we might be sending reports, apart from the War Cabinet in their bunker, because the main departments — Home Office, FCO, and the three Service Ministries remained in Whitehall. Perhaps that led to a further story: that aircraft were standing by to take key GCHQ personnel to Canada.

The Gloucestershire Echo recently published a summary of the arrangements — the start of building at Oakley, the takeover of wartime huts at Benhall, and some information on how it all progressed. But the articles did not give any idea of what it felt like to be in the middle of it all, so what follows is the emotional stuff.

Removal day at the office

At Eastcote I was one of the heads of three sections, all in one huge office under the nominal control of a timorous person who was neither coming to Cheltenham nor was capable of saying boo to the removal men who were employed to take everything away in their huge pantechnicons. So the three section heads had to get together and work out how things which were going to different rooms in Cheltenham were to be loaded — first in last off — and to label absolutely everything, tables, chairs, wastepaper bin, steel cupboards with coded entry, and steel filing cabinets with keys. They all had to be labelled with their precise destinations, and obviously the codes of the cupboards and the keys of the filing cabinets had to be recorded and tagged, and carried down by official transport. All this took quite some time. And then we had to pack away absolutely every scrap of paper into the cupboards and filing cabinets and then supervise the chaps who were moving it. Any slippage might cause a great deal of trouble at the other end. Then we had to search the office when all the furniture had gone to make sure there weren't any bits of paper behind radiators etc. After that the security people would come round and do another one. I don't know whether they found anything after we had left; I didn't hear of anything. Then we set off — I don't remember how — in order to meet the stuff coming in at the other end. The additional complication was that many of us who were really destined to go to Oakley had to move into the Benhall huts (presumably because of some glitch in the building programme at Oakley) in what was rightly called The Crush Move. So that was all quite stressful but nothing compared to what was to come in attempting to move ourselves and our personal luggage.

Accommodation

A number of the higher grade people came down to Cheltenham to buy houses in the vicinity, many of which were genuine old Cotswold houses or farms, all needing some renovation and modernisation, though not all got it! Others chose to build new houses within Cheltenham or to buy them, including one or two in Battledown. The less well-off or more urban-minded of the senior staff were accommodated in specially-built houses known as Managerial Houses, in two areas — one set back from the A40 on the road between Benhall and the town, and the other to the east on the edge of Charlton Kings, the Ledmore Road Estate.

Cheltenham welcomed the lower fry. Obviously we constituted hundreds of new ratepayers, and for us they built Princess Elizabeth Way to link the A40 with the Tewkesbury Road, and built the complex of low-rise buildings at the A40 end as flats for single people. Between there and the Tewkesbury Road there were only two buildings on Princess Elizabeth Was. Scott House and Edward Wilson House. Behind these single-occupancy flats there was a gaggle of streets of rather poky houses for families. Imagine it. We all had to walk from there to Benhall to start work at 0800 over what we called The Blasted Heath. and it really was. There were no trees, no Hester's Way development, no shops, no cafes, no church, no post office, no bank, no library, no telephones (and of course no IT or mobiles).

The stress which I refer to in the title felt by spinsters (and by bachelors, of course) having to settle in a barren environment was increased for many, including me, by the fact that we had lived for years in barracks or furnished rented accommodation. and lacked some of the basic equipment and the experience necessary for coping with everyday living. To compound it all, GCHQ in its wisdom decided to give married people two extra days leave to visit Cheltenham and work out, order and have installed anything extra that they needed in the way of equipment or furniture. But spinsters were given only one day for an advance visit. I thought I was being clever by adding two days annual leave to the single day I was granted, and to go down by train, arriving with a folding camp bed to stay in the sitting-room of someone who had already moved. However, I was carrying so much heavy luggage that I ricked my back on Ealing Broadway station and arrived at my destination, 50 Scott House, by taxi via a visit to a doctor, who of course recommended rest. Some hope! Next morning I struggled to my feet and to the bus stop, heading to the town centre where I arranged for the delivery of a gas cooker and a divan bed (which I purchased from the extremely helpful Peter Paynter of Shirer's, who really knew about furniture, though he looked rather like "greenery yallery young man"). I also had to organise a supply of coal, because the only heating in the flat was an open fire in the sitting room. I had to arrange for all utility services to be switched on, and to buy some food and a whole lot of cleaning equipment, so that on the bus back I was loaded with a mop, a broom, a galvanised bucket (no plastics), and in the bucket with the food, a scrubbing brush, a coal shovel, dusters and polish for the ubiquitous black Marley tile floors which remained shiny for about the first 24 hours after you had been down on your knees polishing them.

I was luckier than many because, after the actual move with my gas cooker and the divan and a cabin trunk as a table, and a half-pegged bedside rug in blue and white, at the weekend my father came down in his Wolseley bringing furniture from my childhood bedroom, a proper bed and mattress, chest of drawers, some bookshelves and, strapped to the roof my bright blue drop-handlebarred bicycle. Somehow we all managed it, more or less. I remember a couple of us going to tea with some fellow in Edward Wilson House where we had to sit on the floor in the sitting room because the only furniture he had in it was a piano stool and a grand piano.

Perhaps I should say a little more about exactly what the accommodation in Scott House consisted of, because I expect most of the readers will have only passed by occasionally and just vaguely noticed among the crowded buildings on both sides of Princess Elizabeth Way these two great blocks of red brick buildings. There were three floors with five or six flats on each floor and three spurs with similar arrangements. The flats were approached by concrete stairs and concrete walkways passing straight in front of everybody's front door and kitchen window. This proved a bit of a trial for certain officers visiting their mistresses. (As has been noted of Bletchley Park, the fact that officers could not speak to their wives about anything they had been doing in the office meant that they couldn't really go home and immediately become family men because their heads were still full of worries or dramas or triumphs in the office that day. This meant that a sympathetic, professional ear, and the sheer propinquity of workers, especially, if I may say so, in the Crush Move just led to various affairs, obviously.)

In the dim and dank undercroft of the staircases were some bicycle sheds and rows of galvanised dustbins to which one had to carry down ashes from the fire and any other rubbish. These sort-of concrete dungeons and stairways could resemble the settings in lowlife police procedural books today.

After we had moved in our troubles were by no means over because, of course, we had slowly to build up more furniture and get accustomed to the ways of Cheltenham. We worked five days a week from 0800 to, I think, 1630, and we worked every other Saturday morning. The shops in Cheltenham at that time usually had Wednesday afternoon off, and many of them closed on Saturday afternoon instead or in addition, which made it pretty difficult to do one's shopping. But a grocers called Silks from along the High Street just beyond the Bath Road scooped the market by coming round and saying that they would take orders on a Monday evening and deliver the week's groceries on a Friday. And of course at that time milk was delivered very early in the morning in bottles left outside the front doors along the walkway. Coal was delivered through a hatch in the walkway and then you had to open a door inside, which meant that a whole lot of coal dust flooded out onto your (carefully polished?) Marley tiles.

Cheltenham Town

Cheltenham itself would be scarcely recognisable today. There were to my knowledge only four shops which belonged to a national chain. They were MacFisheries, the Cadena café, one branch of the Maypole Dairy and Woolworth's. There were innumerable pubs, but the idea of a gastro-pub had not been invented. There were several cafes beside the Cadena, some of them very good, but no coffee bars as such. There were, however, numerous branches of the Gloucestershire Dairy, one of which in the Promenade had a cafe above it. There were also a number of extremely good greengrocers, one near to the old Plough Hotel (which is now the Regent Arcade) and another on the corner of Clarence Street and Post Office Lane. And there was absolutely no reason for any eating-house or any greengrocer to boast that they had locally-sourced produce because local-sourced stuff was the only stuff available (apart from oranges and the occasionally available banana). There was a coal-merchant's office in the middle of the Promenade! There were no supermarkets — the present Tesco site was occupied by the gas works. There was a large number of independent stores beside these food-supply ones, many of which had been there a hundred years before, as I discovered from a facsimile edition of a guide to Cheltenham published in 1851.

And perhaps I'll end with an anecdote which involves one of those independent stores, and a colleague, the extremely well turned out Captain Raymond Lisser. Fast forward to 1960 to a corridor in GCHQ Cheltenham. I am walking along, wearing a stark white dress which shows off my just-acquired Sicilian-holiday tan, and meet Ray. Conversation follows:-

RL (after some complimentary remark): Where do you get your clothes?

Me: I think this came from Peter Robinson

RL (rather blankly): Oh. Most of my girlfriends go to Madame Wright.

Me: I'm afraid that's a bit above my pay-scale, Ray.

RL: You don't mean to say that you actually live on your pay?

Me: What on earth do you think I live on, Ray? ?***!!!