GCHQ: Why Cheltenham?

Over on Twitter, Chris Greenway asked why GCHQ came to Cheltenham, and whether anywhere else was considered. What follows is based on a booklet written by Peter Freeman, my predecessor-but-one as GCHQ Historian. That booklet is out of print, and my successor is in the process of producing a new edition. Peter covered a lot of ground about what happened in Cheltenham after the move was decided which I won't cover here.

On 1 April 1946 GCHQ began the move away from Bletchley Park. It took four days and saw a much smaller organisation than had been in existence a year earlier move to Eastcote, a former Bombe station in the London suburbs. At that time it felt logical that GCHQ should return to London: called GC&CS, it had left Broadway Buildings by St James's Park (which it shared with SIS) in August 1939. The drivers for the move were that the office space at Bletchley was too large for the much reduced (though still enormously bigger than 1939) size of the organisation, that as a national headquarters GCHQ 'should' be London-based, close to its customers, that the separation of cryptanalysis and cryptography – codebreaking and code making – had not been a success and that the pre-war staff who had patriotically endured six years in rural Buckinghamshire could reasonably expect that their posts would be returned to London.

Several problems became immediately apparent. Eastcote was scarcely St James's Park, and customers felt just as far away as they had when GCHQ was at Bletchley Park; pre-war staff who didn't have houses in West London faced conditions analogous to wartime getting to and from work. Most importantly, the world of 1946 was far from that of 1939: GCHQ wanted a headquarters – at one location and not dispersed – that could work in wartime as successfully as in peacetime. It had to have a mobilisation plan that recognised that its primary function was the production of military intelligence on the Soviet target and that would allow it to maintain the control of military Sigint it had acquired during the war and which, by 1947, the services had grudgingly accepted would be a permanent feature of UK Sigint.

All of this (it was felt) dictated a move well away from London; there was even discussion of the argument that modern communications would make distance irrelevant, and in view of the threat of nuclear warheads on long-range rockets a move right out of the UK, perhaps to Canada, should be considered. (No Canadian was consulted during consideration of this possibility, which never gained any real traction.)

The general feeling was that about a hundred miles from London was a suitable distance, and – bearing in mind the normal requirements whether in peace or war for face-to-face contacts and close liaison with central government Ministries – good rail and road connections with London would be required. The location should provide adequate numbers for local recruitment and reasonable housing and amenities for its staff; this meant GCHQ was looking for premises in or very close to a town of reasonable size.

The enormous importance of housing in the immediate post-war period was a significant part of the jigsaw: labour and materials were in short supply throughout the country, and the whole building trade was controlled by central government.

The most demanding criterion was the requirement for good telephone and teleprinter communications. The post-war GCHQ needed hundreds of circuits, which for safety should be routed via two or more paths to two or more main switching centres (GPO or military). These circuits had to be permanent and guaranteed free from requisitioning by any other department, such as the Services, in a wartime emergency.

Most importantly, GCHQ was looking for a set of vacant offices already owned by the government. There was no question of buying commercially-owned buildings, let alone of building a whole new set (though some expansion might be affordable, and the requirements of GCHQ's communications centre and specialised machinery would probably mean that modifications would have to be made).

Within these constraints the first step was to find the right part of the country on grounds of landline communications and nearby towns; the second would be to seek suitable buildings.

A number of candidate areas were considered:

a. Oxford or Cambridge were the right size, the right distance from London, and offered the possibility of recruiting staff in wartime. In particular the Cambridge area included Huntingdon, which had some advantages; Norwich was also a possibility. On the other hand there were many Service establishments, especially RAF stations, in the area and throughout East Anglia, which might pre-empt cable lines (and attract enemy attacks).

b. The Bedford-Leighton Buzzard area (which included Bletchley Park itself) had adequate communications and some amenities, but the competition from other government departments for space and communications would be severe.

c. The Liverpool-Manchester area had accommodation possibilities and the cable routes were being improved, but industrial development would absorb any capacity currently planned.

d. Shrewsbury, Exeter-Bridgwater and Taunton were also attractive (although all but Exeter were rather small towns), but communications serving the area were inadequate, a situation that was unlikely to improve.

e. The Bristol-Bath-Gloucester-Cheltenham area looked very attractive. The RAF had a major switching centre near Chippenham, the Army had one near Cheltenham, and the United States Army was said to have built up a network of cables in the area during the war. There were several large centres of population, all with good connections to London.

This last was the most promising, hut for many months all were possibilities. Then suddenly both steps in the decision were taken at once: in October 1947 a member of GCHQ on a private visit to Cheltenham heard that there was a large set of government buildings at nearby Benhall Farm (Oakley seems not to have been mentioned to him), currently occupied by the Ministry of Pensions but likely to be vacated within a year or two. He arranged to look over the buildings, representing himself as an Admiralty official interested in pensions procedures.

His report was most encouraging. There was adequate capacity for staff; a canteen, support buildings and a Ministry of Works depot adjacent. There were buses to and from Cheltenham every 10 minutes: the local corporation and people were well-disposed towards Civil Servants: and local recreational and social facilities were excellent. The other candidates remained on the list for many months, but from this moment onwards Cheltenham was the only one seriously considered by GCHQ.

Gwen's Finest Hour?

 

[TC Comment: this is the last instalment of Gwen Tovey's memoirs. I hope you've enjoyed them. This story hasn't been published before. I'll explain at the end why I think it is important as well as entertaining.]

One morning early in 1969, when I came into the office, I found some rather startling signals from RAF stations in Germany (Butzweilerhof and Teufelsberg). They were reporting that they could hear none of the usual air-to-ground voice traffic from the fighters of the Tactical Air Forces (TAF) in Germany, which should have been in full swing by that time. Now, a stand-down of all aircraft at least 24 hours before an attack was one of the indicators in a report which I had compiled some 10 years earlier, about likely Sigint indicators of Soviet intentions to attack.

So I had to do something about this at once. I summoned all eight Soviet Intelligence coordinators and asked them to go and find out what was happening on their targets, with particular reference to anything that had been mentioned in the Indicator paper. Some 10 minutes later they reported back and it seemed that all aircraft — the fighters, the light bombers, the bombers of the Long Range Air Force (LRAF) and the Transport Commands were silent and there were no tracking reports on the air defence nets.

We put together a report, which specified all this, but with a comment which played the whole thing down by pointing out that no other indications, which would be expected if this meant an intention to attack, were discernible. Particularly, there was nothing in the communications of the LRAF (the bombers of which could carry atomic bombs), which resembled their preparations for major exercises. There was nothing on the Strategic Rocket Forces (SRF) links, there was nothing on naval links. In fact the Navy seemed to be preoccupied with an annual tin-pot little exercise in the Baltic. But nevertheless I issued an Alert [TC: a way in which all Five Eyes Sigint intercept stations could be warned that something might be happening] and hastily got someone to send a teleprint to NSA, saying what we were up to, just before issuing the FLASH report.

The next morning the front pages of newspapers were full of photographs of the usual Red Square scenes of long columns of tanks and guns, bands and missiles and hundreds of marching troops to celebrate — Oh Hell! — International Women's Day. So then, when I got into the office, I had to write the hardest signal of my life, apologising humbly and saying that all was now well and totally normal.

What was my horror then to find later that day, that in a couple of days' time the Senior Intelligence Officer from Strike Command proposed to come down and visit us. On the appointed day I sat shaking in my shoes waiting to be summoned to the Division Head's office, where the RAF officer would doubtless lambast me. However, suddenly the door of my office opened and in he strode with a great grin on his face, saying 'Let me shake you by the hand. That was the best exercise we ever had'. Now what he had done was to put the whole V Bomber force in the air and when he had done this, he was assailed by queries from station commanders saying 'What the hell is all this about?' And he said 'This just might this time be for real'.

I don't think an intelligence coordinator today would have received the totally blank silence I did, when I consulted the JIC Watch and the Foreign Office before sending off the original alarm, because the Anniversary is quite well known about today. But I think it will be a very long time before Whitehall grants us an extra day's holiday every time March 8th comes around.

[TC Comment: It's only since retiring that I realise that I would have taken some of the lessons this story contains for granted while still serving. Specifically:

a.       The GCHQ 'Soviet Intelligence Coordinators' would have been the equivalent of Senior Executive Officers: middle managers, with a wealth of knowledge and experience of their target, but six grades below the Director, and five grades higher than the most junior clerical staff. And yet they could put out a qualified Alert message to the whole of the western alliance saying that something big might be happening.

b.      In 1969 it was a woman who made the decision, and nobody questioned it, as she was intelligence coordinator for the Soviet Tactical Air Force and knew and understood her target. Of course GCHQ in 1969 wasn't an outpost of 21st century liberal values about diversity – it's only just appointed its first woman Director! – but however much harder Gwen had to fight to get on as far as the men she was working with, once there her knowledge and expertise were more important than the fact she was a woman.

c.       When GCHQ realised that it had issued a misleading report it took responsibility and explained its mistake. Getting something wrong isn't the end of the world if you can explain why you drew the conclusions that you drew and show how that is a knowledge gap that has been plugged. The best example of this I have seen is in HW 75, the intelligence reporting on the Soviet Bloc being released into The National Archives, in which a report on Soviet Field Post Numbers (FPNs) from the very early 1950s was corrected more than 20 years later because the location of one of the FPNs had finally been shown to be erroneous. What matters in intelligence reporting is accuracy so that those assessing it understand exactly how much weight can be put on it.]

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? ?***!!!

Gwen Joins GCHQ at Eastcote

[TC note: In the latter part of the 1940s, most office-based staff in GCHQ were recruited as an 'A', 'B' or 'C' grade, depending on whether (A) they were the fast stream, tipped for the very top, (B) it was thought they would develop and become senior intelligence analysts or (C) would follow a pattern similar to mainstream civil servants. Progression through these grades was denoted by a roman numeral, so an AI (A one) was at the top of this particular tree, while a CVI (C six) was at the bottom. Up to 1945 Junior Assistant (JA) was the normal entry grade but for a brief period, the JA title was used for AIVs (AIV was the lowest A grade). JAs, then AIVs were usually called 'cadets'. B grades were called Departmental Specialists (DSs).  Believe it or not, this is a great simplification of a much more complex structure which, if I remember correctly, got to a point where there were more than 160 separate grade titles by the mid-1960s.]

Before dealing with my post-war Sigint career I should like to recommend Tessa Dunlop's book "The Bletchley Girls" — 16 of them, ranging from the obligatory member of the aristocracy to a Bletchley born girl proud to have been taken on as a messenger at the age of 14. For several of them the Bletchley experience changed their life, as it did for me.

In my last term at Oxford. I wangled an interview at GCHQ through the good offices of Pat Baber. It was Joe Hooper who interviewed me and obviously he didn't think much of me, as I was offered only a middling executive grade post. Even so, it paid more and it appealed to me very much more than the alternatives suggested by the Oxford careers officer. I trusted that the BP habit of promoting on merit regardless of background or gender still obtained.

After about two months I was amongst many people who had stayed on in Eastcote to appear before the Civil Service Commissioner himself and an all-male panel, which decided not only was I acceptable as an established rather than as a temporary civil servant, but also I was appointed to be a JA (Junior Assistant) — the fast track cadet scheme. ultimately destined for the lofty heights of an A (Administrative) grade. This was largely because John Burrough representing GCHQ on the panel had asked me a splendid question: "Which would you marry, Mr Knightly or Darcy?" Anyone who knows me will know what I replied, but I must have argued the case rather well, it seems to have impressed them all. Anyway every man likes to think he is like Darcy — experientia docet.

To be awarded a JA post sounds like an upward move, but in fact it involved a considerable drop in pay and after three months I blew the whole month's salary on a silver-grey suit in Knightsbridge [i] and asked if I could stop being a JA. So they gave me a CIV (still executive grade). Then at the beginning of the new promotion board season, I was recommended for a BIII, but they said "No, you've cheated, but you can be a CIII". But the next season I did actually pass the BIII board and I went on throughout my career in the Departmental Specialist grade.

Apart from these wobbles in the promotion stakes I was rebuked from all sides at the way I had come back. After only about two weeks Joe Hooper came rushing down from the Directorate to say "Why didn't you tell me you were going to get a First?" I mumbled: "Because I didn't know" [ii]. The Principal of Lady Margaret Hall also rebuked me for entering the Civil Service by the back door and for not following her advice to stay in Oxford and take a law degree, a ludicrous suggestion. Even my Middle English tutor wrote to me several times suggesting that I return to Oxford to do a B Lit. [iii]

Enough of this vainglory – my actual job on first returning was to take charge single-handedly of the Soviet Mainline two-channel Baudot links, which Yvonne and I had left in April 1946, but they were a shadow of their former selves. 

In the days after VE Day they had passed masses of traffic, as Moscow tightened its hold on the overrun countries of Eastern Europe. Now all links, except one to the Far East, were reduced to a few schedules every day, just for practice. As a log reader I was reduced to simply identifying which frequencies and which schedules belonged to which link and to making the tremendous discovery that the Moscow control operated a three-shift system which involved four teams exactly like Knockholt, and that the charge hands were distinguishable by very slight differences in their sign-off tapes. These were all variants on the very simple theme Tamli, tamli, tamli? ("are you there?" or in other words "what is my signal strength?") and a sequence of letters AGIPCh. (If anyone knows what AGIPCh means, will they please let me know, because it niggles.)

Then something more interesting happened. A new link appeared between Moscow and somewhere in Central Asia, which was talking in plain language Russian, even though guardedly, and included a number of references to a birch tree and an oak tree. I interpreted this as meaning they were referring to different kinds of aerials — the birch being a single tall mast and the oak a spreading array such as a rhombus. But I thought I'd better get a real linguist to check that I wasn't making an enormous mistake. But it was a mistake to ask him. He said that a birch tree was a birch tree and an oak tree was an oak tree and that was that. It was no use arguing with him that it was rather peculiar that a high-ranking engineer in Moscow should be talking to a colleague in the wastes of the Steppe lands of Central Asia, a sea of grass, about arboriculture.

Much later in my career I came across another potentially more dangerous example of tunnel vision. It was in the heady days when computer capabilities were rapidly expanding and young Turks were eagerly training themselves for a magnificent future in which computers would be applied to many more things than simply assisting cryptographers, wonderful though that had always been. I was asked to provide an example to see how far they might help with the work of the division responsible for the Soviet problem and I chose a Long Range Air Force exercise. I gave them all the air defence tracking and explained what that was, and gave them all the air-to-ground communications between the planes and the various airfields and explained what that was. And then sent them away to make of it what they would. A few days later they came back and proudly informed me that they had discovered that the aircraft did not fly at night. "Ye gods and little fishes" I was muttering to myself but restrained myself and asked them why they thought Tupolev should design a bomber aircraft which couldn't fly at night and if they could explain what sort of exercise involved the following pattern:

Day 1:    40 aircraft fly from A to B

Day 2:    40 aircraft fly from C to D

Day 3:    At least 25 (though evidence was more scanty) fly from E to F

I then reminded them that what GCHQ was studying was the communications of the Soviet Union and that this involved listening to them. But the plain fact was that we simply could not hear the frequencies they used at night. I must admit that later, of course, they did give us tremendous help, but I still remember in the early days having to beat off offers of the moon in two weeks' time. when what I wanted was a small piece of cheese by tomorrow morning. The plain truth of the exercise to a traffic analyst was that 40 aircraft had set off from a base in Europe and flown, by day and night hops, to another known base in the Far East to commence a proper exercise.

To get back to my early job, the Soviet printer network began to expand enormously with the appearance of single channel teleprinter links at lower echelons in both the Army and the Air Forces. By the time I moved on, I had three people to help me. They were still not doing anything interesting, but it was a good thing we kept continuity on them, because years later, long after I had left the section and we had moved to Cheltenham, suddenly the printer links sprang into life with the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. I was the only person who understood how they worked, so I was called back to read absolute scads of logs and pass on the traffic sorted by type to the cryptographers. Then I had to devise a week's training course on how to read Soviet mainline printer traffic.

Shortly after the move to Cheltenham I made what I think was one of my greatest contributions to the future of the whole organization by promoting a certain CA (Clerical Assistant - the lowest of the low) to CO. He was an ex-Signals corporal and by getting promotion to CO he was given an armchair like the other 19 members of the section. His name was Des L and people I hope will remember him as shooting up and being a wonderful liaison officer and being awarded quite rightly a national honour, because if anyone was ever born to do Sigint, it was Des. [iv]

Mentioning that Des was once a corporal reminds me that in the days of National Service several young servicemen from the Intelligence Corps were attached to GCHQ and of two stories about them. The first is about Corporal Alex Bennett. When I came back early from lunch one day in 1950, I found Alex in floods of tears. and when I asked him what on earth was the matter, he said want to dance". I got the story from him that at the age of 16 in Edinburgh he had first seen a ballet and decided that that was what his life was going to be. and had been seeking out a ballet class wherever he went. Fortunately for all concerned, as usual in GCHQ, there was someone qualified to help. She had belonged to the Sadlers Wells Company, later the Royal Ballet, until she broke her ankle. So Jolene organized an interview for Alex with Ninette de Valois. She said that she was very sorry she couldn't take him, but that he should try Marie Rambert, and Marie Rambert took him on the spot. To my great pleasure some years later I saw him dancing the premier role of Albrecht in Giselle at the Everyman in Cheltenham. He stayed with the Marie Rambert throughout his career and finished up as a choreographer.

The second instance reminds me that, just like BP and GCHQ. National Service threw a whole lot of people together who in civilian life would have belonged to very much divided classes of society – though not so divided as would have been the case before the First World War. This concerns two corporals who were in my section just before we moved to Cheltenham. Corporal Y came to me one day and said could he have a quiet word with me. So we went out into the corridor and he said Corporal X, with whom he was billeted, was. he thought, 'on the brink of a nervous breakdown'. I could see what he was getting at, because Corporal X had just deliberately tipped a whole bottle of ink all over his work, which I had just asked him to show to me. Anyway, Corporal Y, who was a raw-boned son of a miner from Lancashire, was worried that Corporal X, who was a Winchester public school boy with a scholarship at Oxford awaiting him, was terrified that the rest of the squad might find out that he was a transvestite. I thought it was very touching that Corporal Y showed such care and loyalty to this so different a creature from quite a different world. By some means or other I wangled it that Corporal X was given early release and I hope he was happier in Oxford.

Next time I won't ramble on so much and shall summarise as succinctly as possible the great move to Cheltenham.

[i] Three men had separately offered help in paying for that suit. Rather primly but wisely I refused.

[ii] To even have hinted at such a success would have been overweeningly arrogant. Of the 400 undergraduates sitting the final honours degree exam in English more than half were ex-service, matured beyond their age by up to six years of war. And the number of Firsts awarded was eight, that is 2%.

[iii] Kate Lea told me after Dorothy Everett 's death that 'Ev' had hoped that one day I would succeed her as a Middle English don. I burst into tears at the compliment but I thought then and do so now that she was irreplaceable as a scholar and as a person.

[iv] Des discovered a hitherto totally unknown fighter formation in the Transcaucasus, and pin-pointed its location by sweet-talking the DF pundits into giving him all the details of DF bearings instead of just their best guestimates. Also in the days when totally distinct and diverse formations shared the same call-sign book, he noted that some scraps found by general search operators seemed to form a continuity. He followed this up and thereby identified a whole new ring of air defence batteries deployed around Moscow, equipped with surface-to-air missiles. Many log readers who came across such scraps would have simply marked them 'not mine' and not cared about what thew were. But Des did care and I was privileged to hear him argue the toss against the very much senior team of              people who had some other different and highfalutin' theory about what they were.

Gwen: Gone Fishing

 

(FISH is the name given to encryption systems attached to teleprinters used by the German Armed Forces during the Second World War. Writing for an audience of fellow Siginters, Gwen takes a fair bit for granted, but gives a clear picture of what the day-to-day work of an analyst could be like between 1939 and 1989.)

When a signals officer at one end of a FISH link had a message or messages to send, he would tell the other end by using the Q signal QEP followed by a number. That number must have indicated from lists how the machines at both ends were to be set. Immediately after this came a stream of encoded text. The transmitting operator usually checked that his transmission was being clearly received by the other end by putting a few words in German chat. He might use a phrase denoting some grouse he had, like being cooped up in a metal caravan. Or he might use some Nazi phrase (Heil Hitler was common), which hinted at how deeply the dreadful madness had affected Germans for more than 20 years. But thereafter he went on to send the actual messages at an automatic speed, because it came from a pre-recorded tape.

I am no cryptanalyst and what I gleaned from liaison with the Testery came from a sort of tacit osmosis, rather than from direct question and answer, and besides, it is more than 70 years since I was involved. But it is clear that any hint of what the plain text of a message might be, or of any preliminary chat come to that, could be of help to a cryptanalyst. What Yvonne had seized upon in the supposedly useless intercept logs were the receipts sent by the other end of the link at various intervals, maybe 15 minutes, in the form RR15 0801, RR16 0810, RR25 0815, RR17 0817. One could then tell in which QEP or QEPs from the other end the messages had been sent and at what intervals the cryptanalyst could expect the word 'Spruchnummer' (message number) to appear, followed by the number of words in the message and the name of the addressee. The cryptanalysts already knew the last two figures of the message number, that is 15, 16, 25 and 17. Furthermore, the fact of the out of order 25 probably meant that it had a higher priority than the others. And the introduction, or preamble as we called it, of the message would give an indication of this, with the words 'urgent' or 'very urgent' (sehr dringend). And what is more, the correct identification of each seemingly anonymous outstation could he guaranteed by Traffic Analysis (TA) methods and allowed the addressee of the message to be identified. Or occasionally the addressee might be that of a subordinate formation. If that was so, it might have been possible to trace a re-encoding in Enigma on a subordinate morse network.

It was the extension of these very simple principles (guaranteed link continuity from day to day and hence the addressees of most QEPs) which boosted the efforts of the cryptanalysts. The biggest single advance was the recognition that about the same time every day the High Command sent out on all the links to Army Groups a longish message (perhaps extending over several QEPs), which were receipted on, let us say, BREAM, JELLYFISH and GURNARD, in the form 12/24, 19/31 or 37/49: the second dinome being exactly 12 more than the first. This turned out to be a surefire identifier of the High Command daily report (Tagesmeldung), thereby giving a near identical, but not completely identical, message in different ciphers on different links, but with the vital difference that the message numbers and the addressees were different.

This constituted a vast difference from the early days after 'The Brig' (Brigadier Tiltman) broke a very long message successfully by hand after weeks of work. And a man named Tutte worked out the cog numbers on the wheel and how you might identify their settings. It was also an advance on the early stages when the Testery were guessing at a bit of chat or at the addressee of a message and dragging the German text by hand or on the punningly named machine 'The Dragon' to try to find a statistically significant piece of cipher, which they handed over to the Newmanry. The Newmanry developed machines, of which much has been written, which then ran at huge speed to give the settings of five of the 10 encipherment wheels, after which the thing went back to the Testery to be completely decrypted and turned into German.

I would also like to introduce a few more of those who worked for David Rex and Yvonne. Probably the most intellectual, with an incisive mind, was jolie-laide Sergeant Mary, already halfway through her university course which led to a first class degree in Theology. Sergeant Lesley Stuart Taylor, ex-head girl of Cheltenham Ladies' College and renowned in post-war Cheltenham in various guises, wore a uniform of beautiful khaki cloth, because she was so tall that she had to be given the uniform of the World War I ATS Commandant. Her office party piece was reciting all the JELLYFISH frequencies without hesitation, deviation etc etc. There was Jeanne Cammaerts, daughter of a Belgian professor and a French diseuse and sister of the famous Maquis hero Francis (about whom we learned after the war), and herself a very good actress who played Eliza in the BP drama group production of Pygmalion. There was also a new man, a half Rumanian Jew, who of course had to have Saturday as his day off, and then there was Staff Sergeant Pauline, who always had Monday off. In winter she hunted, in summer she crewed for her father in dinghy races at Burnham on Crouch and their names often appeared as winners in The Times. Following a failed marriage, she brought up two sons by various entrepreneurial exploits and between the ages of 50 and 78 organised and led pony trekking holidays in the Andes.

Early in 1945 we were told to expect a captain whom we immediately and lastingly named Python, after the scheme for early return to the UK of officers who had fought abroad for many years. I was deputed to train him in the arcane ways of our section. l don't think he was very interested in that, but he was quite a cheerful companion. One day he and I took a walk through some meadows and woods. We had perched on a five-bar gate, when we heard some wonderful male-voice singing approaching us. Round a bend in the lane came a whole lot of Italian prisoners of war escorted by one British corporal. Of course the minute they saw a man and a girl in shirt-sleeve order sitting on a gate, even though we were only munching bread and cheese, they started shouting out what to me were undecipherable comments, but their meaning was clear enough. They were most taken aback when Ronald let loose a stream of very colloquial Italian, which was giving much more than he got. He had spent most of his childhood in Italy. where his parents kept an hotel.

There was another visit to Knockholt somewhere along the line when V2s rather than the earlier V1s were descending around the place, but we just had to carry on in a blasé way because a V2 either hit you out of the blue or sailed on in silence.

The end of the line

As the final battles raged, there was a great deal of activity on the FISH links to Army Group HQ and the parallel links to Luftwaffe HQ, though the latter had a far lower priority rating, because of the enormous amount of information on air-force mattes available from Enigma traffic. There were also some traces of Naval Fish links in the last days of the war. but these were so brief that I don't think they even had names given to them. VE Day of course meant the end of Fish and the dispersal of our group. Most of the ATS were posted to other units, where almost all of them became officers before their demob in mid-1946. Yvonne and I remained to tidy up.

Commander Travis issued a thank you to all BP personnel, together with an exhortation to remember our oath of secrecy, especially since "it may be that at some future time we may have to use the same methods". For Yvonne and me "some future time" turned out to be next week, because we found ourselves, and Knockholt, studying 2-channel Baudot links, technically just the same as FISH, but serving another would-be world conquering power. That, in essence, was the beginning of my post-war career in GCHQ and belongs to that story.

There was one day in late 1945 when I sat the entrance exam, specially designed for service people, for Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and went up in Michaelmas term 1946 to read English Language and Literature.

At last we have some illustration and a scrap of conversation as Alice in Wonderland thought all books should have. The photograph on the left shows me as a newly commissioned Subaltern and on the right I am on the steps of University Schools in Oxford, immediately after the most gruelling interview of my life — a 40-minute viva. The worst moments were as follows:

Miss Lascelles, somewhat disdainfully: "Miss Herbert. you mentioned in your written paper the political friends of Pope. Who were they?"

Me: total silence

The Chairman (the Merton Professor of English):"Give Miss Herbert a drink of water. Professor Rice-Oxley, she can use your glass."

Thankfully I was then asked some questions about Beowulf, the long Old English poem of which I am very fond. The first word of it, which will serve as the last word of this essay, is the attention-grabbing "Hwaet".

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.

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.