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A.O.S.A. 2009 ANNUAL REPORT |
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One year after leaving Ayton I was in a train on a hot July day, heading for Bletchley, now part of Milton Keynes. I had joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) as a writer, which is what the Navy calls secretaries and clerks. I had completed my month-long initial training in London and was travelling with three other newly-fledged Wrens, all equally bewildered as to why we should have been sent about as far from the sea as it’s possible to get in this country. When we arrived at Bletchley station we were met by a Leading Wren and marched up to a perimeter fence with sentries standing guard. We were then taken to an office in a grand Victorian mansion. This was Bletchley Park, headquarters of Government Intelligence. We were told that the work we were going to be doing was of the utmost secrecy and vital to the war effort, and we were required to sign the Official Secrets’ Act. One was left with the distinct impression that contravening it would mean a spell in the Tower at the very least. Next we were escorted across the large grounds to a concrete hut, and had to press a bell and wait to be admitted. When we went inside I was immediately aware of large black machines making a terrible din and smelling of hot oil. These were the bombes, in effect a primitive type of computer, which were essential to the breaking of the German Enigma codes. The Enigma machine, which looked like a large typewriter, had three wheels on the side, each with a notch for every letter of the alphabet, a keyboard, a panel on the front with plugs and the letters of the alphabet, and a panel of 26 lights. The German operator set up the three wheels in the order, and at the letters, he had been given, connected the letters on the panel with plugs, again according to the code for the day, and proceeded to encode the message by pressing the keyboard letters. For each one a letter on the panel of lights would be illuminated and transmitted as part of the message. In order for the message to be read the recipient had to know: the order in which the three wheels (from a possible five) were set up, the start position of each wheel and the details of the connections on the plug panel. Additionally, the first wheel rotated one notch each time a letter on the keyboard was pressed and when it had rotated 26 times, the second wheel moved on one notch and so on. This meant that, although A might come up as D at the start of the message, the next time it was pressed it could come up as K. The chances of decoding a message was 15 million, million, million to one! But that first day I knew none of this and after a brief introduction to the work we would be doing we were appointed to a watch (Navy-speak for a shift) and sent off to our billets. In those early days there were no Wren quarters and we were billeted with local people - not all that local in my case as I was billeted with Mr. and Mrs. Bunce who lived about 8 miles away. Mr. Bunce was a retired railway worker and his wife was a very kind, homely little lady. It must have been an upheaval for them to have me and another Wren, also called Anne, invading their home and having to produce meals for us at strange times. I particularly remember breakfast when Mrs. Bunce would give us huge doorsteps of fried bread like nothing I’d ever had before. They were delicious. At Christmas, the first one I’d ever spent away from my family, the other Anne must have had leave, and I must have been on evening or night watch, because I remember that while Mrs Bunce cooked the Christmas lunch, Mr Bunce took me to the pub - another first, for me. When he asked me what I would drink I hadn’t a clue what to ask for, so ordered something I knew my mother sometimes drank, gin and orange. After several of these I don’t think I remembered much about Christmas lunch. Work in the bombe hut went on 24 hours a day and we worked 8 hour watches. The first week was from 8 am to 4 pm, the second 4 pm to midnight and the third midnight to 8 am, with one day off each week. On the fourth week we worked the other watches’ days off and then had four days leave. It was a long way to travel back to Yorkshire for four days and expensive too, when my pay was 14 shillings (70p) a week. So I mostly came home only when I had a week’s leave, tacked on to the four days, when I used one of my annual rail passes and travelled free. Rail travel in wartime was no picnic. Trains were always crowded with service personnel and one often had to sit in the corridor on one’s luggage. After dark the internal lights were dimmed and there were blackout blinds on the windows. If the train was close to a large town when there was an air raid warning, it would stop outside the town and you might be there for hours, hearing the crunch of bombs and the booming of anti-aircraft guns. Not that you usually knew where you were as the names of all the stations had been taken down in 1940 when a German invasion was expected. My mother must have spent many long hours on Middlesbrough station waiting for my train to arrive. Often I spent my four days leave going home with other Wrens or with relatives or family friends whose homes were not too far away. Once I stayed with a cousin in Sussex who said on my arrival that I looked tired and perhaps I’d like to have a rest before supper. I went to bed and the next thing I knew it was 11 pm and there was a plate of sandwiches and a thermos of Ovaltine by my bed. Having polished those off I went to sleep again till 7.30 next morning. Often when I went on leave with my friends we would hitch-hike to save money. There wasn’t a huge amount of traffic during the war because of petrol rationing, and we usually ended up in the cab of a lorry. It probably sounds to modern ears a reckless thing to do, but we thought nothing of it and never had any unpleasantness but only kindness from the lorry drivers. Sometimes we spent our four days, or part of it, in London which was only about 50 miles away. There were various hostels for service women where we used to stay. There was also a kiosk in Trafalgar Square where there were free theatre tickets available for members of the armed forces, for that evening’s performance, and we often took advantage of those. The number of machines we operated expanded quickly and those of us who were at Bletchley in the early days won quick promotion, so that I was a Leading Wren within 6 months and a Petty Officer (at the age of 19) not long after that. There wasn’t room at Bletchley Park to allow for more huts to be built, as there were many other, different, kinds of intelligence work going on. So outstations were formed, usually in large country houses in the area, with special huts built for the bombes, and there were also two big purpose-built outstations at Eastcote and Stanmore, near London. The first outstation I went to wasn’t far from Bletchley, at a village called Wavendon. It was now time to leave my billet with the Bunces as all of us Wrens were installed in proper quarters and the first one I was in was at Walton Hall, now the headquarters of the Open University. After a few months we were transferred to Wavendon House so we were able live and work in the same place.
The work was fairly monotonous and although we knew when a possible solution to a code had been found by the bombe, we seldom knew the contents of the message. There might be several machines working on the same coded message for many hours, particularly in the case of the naval codes, which used three of a possible eight wheels instead of five and were therefore much more difficult to break. The codebreakers were able to use some shortcuts for the German Army and Air Force codes, for instance, there was a daily weather report and it was possible to take an educated guess at what that might contain. Or a reconnaissance plane would be sent to fly along the coast of occupied France, or the Low Countries, knowing that there would be a report of it and roughly what it would contain. In this way the Enigma setting for the day for that particular code could be found with relative ease. The mechanics who kept the bombes in working order were ex-Post Office engineers and after some time it was decided that Wrens could do some of the more routine maintenance work if we were trained. I volunteered for this work and was transferred back to Bletchley Park and put on permanent day watch, which was a welcome change. Later I volunteered to go to Colombo in what was then called Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and in April 1944 I left Bletchley Park and went on embarkation leave, celebrating my 21st birthday at home before the long wartime sea voyage to my new duties. Anne Chetwynd Stapylton |
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A.O.S.A. 2009 ANNUAL REPORT |
