Contents

Introduction

In April 2003 I made my first visit to Bletchley Park, the home of the codebreakers. Like many people, I knew very little about what had happened there. I certainly didn’t know that more than 10,000 people had worked there during WWII, or that more than half of them were women, and young women at that; many of them were away from home for the first time. I also didn’t know that the secret code breaking work carried out there had shortened the war by approximately two years, and at that time 11 million people per year were dying. This means there were potentially 22 million lives saved as a result of activities conducted at Bletchley Park.

22 million. Lives. Saved. Why did I, and so many others, know nothing about these amazing achievements?

Over the next ten years I learned much more about what had happened at Bletchley Park, and, amazingly, got to meet many of the people who made it happen. I went away after my first trip wanting to raise awareness of the achievements of the women who had worked at Bletchley Park – the “Women of Station X”. (Bletchley was the tenth listening station, hence the X.)

Bletchley Park had got under my skin. But my interest in what had happened there, and the amazing contributions made by the thousands of people who worked there, contrasted starkly with the state of the site as it was at the time.

In 2008 I found out that Bletchley Park was, according to CEO Simon Greenish, “teetering on a financial knife edge”. I thought, frankly, that this was a disgrace, and set out to do something about it. Campaigning to save Bletchley Park took over my life for the next three years. There was hardly a waking moment when I wasn’t either taking action to raise awareness or thinking about how to get more people on board with the campaign. Looking back now, it seems like an obsession. At the time it just felt like an amazing whirlwind of energy and excitement; I was on a roller coaster ride. I’m very lucky that my family and friends supported me during that ride and even came along with me for parts of it.

I’m often asked what the major turning points were in the campaign. It’s hard to pick just one, but if I had to I would say that for me the biggest turning point was working out how to use Twitter, and then using it to help build a massive community of love, support and goodwill towards Bletchley Park. Without it, I don’t think we would have been nearly as successful as we were.

For years, whenever I mentioned Twitter and how it was a real catalyst for the campaign, I would get the same response: “I don’t care what you had for breakfast!” For some reason, rather than embrace this new exciting medium, most people seemed to have decided that it was all about being vain and telling everyone the most mundane details of your life.

Not many people in the UK were using Twitter in 2008, but those who did were part of an exciting crowd of early adopters who I now feel very privileged to call friends. Many of these people became key influencers in the campaign. They are the ones that made all the difference with their enthusiasm, expertise, energy and, crucially, their response to a rallying call: we must save Bletchley Park.

Thankfully, Bletchley Park is now safe. I visited again in June 2014 to see the opening of the new visitor centre by the Duchess of Cambridge, whose grandmother and great aunt had worked there during the war. It was truly wonderful to see the newly restored huts and visitor centre, and to see the press there, jostling for position from behind cordons. At that time, Bletchley Park was on the front pages of national and international papers; just a few years earlier I had struggled to get any journalists interested enough to write a story about it at all.

This book is a personal story of how I started a campaign to save Bletchley Park, and of how hundreds, if not thousands, of people joined me to help save a site of fundamental international importance. This was a place where thousands of people worked around the clock for years on end, with no thanks at all, in the strictest secrecy. Many of the veterans of Bletchley Park never told anyone at all what they had done and most of them received no reward. But what they did, and how they did it, ensured that we can enjoy the freedom we have today. We cannot thank them all now – most of them unfortunately are no longer with us. But we can preserve and cherish the place where they carried out their amazing work and ensure that our children, grandchildren and all future generations have the opportunity to get a glimpse of history, see what it was like, and hear the stories: of decoding messages straight from Hitler, of schoolgirls, away from home for the first time, arriving to work at Bletchley; of now famous codebreakers and inventors like Alan Turing, Bill Tutte and Tommy Flowers; of nicking the vicar’s bicycle to go to a dance or sunbathing topless on the roof at Woburn Abbey. There are so many stories, so many of which were erased.

So let’s treasure Bletchley Park and the people who worked there, and let’s put those stories back into our history. Let’s celebrate what we do have. Those stories are part of our heritage and should be taught to children in the UK and across the world.

We owe it to the people whose work saved 22 million lives.

Sue Black

London, September 2015

When the last members of staff left the Bletchley Park estate in 1945, they probably didn’t give much thought as to what would happen to it. The war was over and the work that they had been doing was so secret that they undoubtedly believed that no one would ever know what had gone on behind those gates. Seven decades later, we now know a great deal about the extraordinary code breaking work that was done at Bletchley Park. However, what isn’t so well known is what happened after those gates shut – both immediately after the war and in the 70 years since. This book tells the story of Bletchley Park’s wartime activities plus, for the first time, the lesser known but equally fascinating story of how BP, as it was known to those who worked there, was saved for the nation. But before we begin, let’s look briefly at what happened between 1945 and 1991, when one story ends and the other begins.

After the war ended, BP was effectively shut down. The specialist equipment that had been designed to assist the codebreakers was either destroyed or removed, staff were reassigned and, in order to protect secrecy, almost all paperwork and records of BP activity were destroyed. Once that was done, Bletchley Park settled into a long period of disuse and neglect of which very little has been written.

We do know that, for a short while after the fall of Berlin, BP was used by the Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories (AMGOT), which means that Germany was, at one time, “ruled” from Bletchley Park. Meanwhile, GCHQ, the government’s intelligence service, continued to occupy part of the site until 1946 when they moved to Eastcote in Middlesex. During their short post-war tenure, the site was patrolled by security guards, but things had become very lax; local people frequently cut through the estate as a shortcut to Bletchley Park train station rather than walk the extra mile around the outside. When GCHQ left, they knocked down radar installations and all of the radio towers.

In the years that followed, several organisations moved onto the site and used some of the many buildings. In 1948, a teacher training college, run by a fearsome woman called Dora Cohen (who, if the tales told are true, ran the place with an iron fist) was set up in the Mansion House, and the General Post Office (what became British Telecom) set up a training school also in the Mansion and in G and H Blocks. The Civil Aviation Technical College was based on the site too until 1993, teaching future air traffic controllers, as were several radio clubs and amateur radio stations. But by 1996, all that remained on the estate was the Diplomatic Wireless Service Social Club which was based in Hut 4.

Between 1957 and 1958, some of the iconic huts were demolished and local people used the remains, stacked behind the Mansion, as firewood. Then, in 1965, vandals got onto the estate and smashed many windows which encouraged further degradation of the buildings, especially of the remaining wooden huts once the damp got inside. No one fought to save them because no one knew of their historical importance. BP trustee Sam Crooks first moved to the Milton Keynes area in 1970 and, in 1973, had occasion to speak to the College of Education based on the estate. He recalls that there was no reference to the history of the site then; in fact he wouldn’t discover that anything interesting or unusual had happened there until the publication of Squadron Leader F W Winterbotham’s book, The Ultra Secret, in 1974.

The Winterbotham book caused a sensation. Although some of the content subsequently turned out to be inaccurate, based, as it was, on a little knowledge supported by second-hand anecdotes, it nevertheless put the long-held secrets of Bletchley Park into the public domain for the first time. Local people began to talk about their wartime reminiscences of what went on in the Park, as did many of the people who had worked there. However, many veterans remained reluctant to break their vow of silence. Meanwhile, Dora Cohen’s teacher training college moved off the estate in 1975 and a new college was installed, run by less formidable staff. Its open door policy soon led to it becoming the local centre of intellectual activity and it was here, among a group of amateur historians and archaeology enthusiasts, that many discussions took place regarding Winterbotham’s revelations. It was from these humble beginnings that the campaign to save the Park would emerge.

At this time, the estate was roughly half-owned by PACE (Property Advisors to the Civil Estate) – the government’s land agency – and by British Telecom. Neither agency did anything with it until there was a fire in 1983. Permission was then given for a property developer to demolish the damaged buildings, including the old Elmers School that had been subsumed into BP’s wartime work (as a Japanese code breaking school), and to build a small housing estate – the first part of the BP estate to go. It was when the developers suggested plans for a large housing estate utilising the remainder of the site that people started to realise that Bletchley Park – and all of its history – was in genuine danger of being lost. It was one of several such development plans put forward during the coming years; on more than one occasion BP came very close to being reduced to nothing more than a commemorative plaque marking the spot where it had once stood.

In 1987, the aforementioned Sam Crooks became council leader for the Milton Keynes area, of which Bletchley is a part, and he began asking questions about how BP might be saved from the developers; since the publication of Winterbotham’s book, a great deal more had been learned about the site’s wartime role and he became convinced that Bletchley Park was simply too important to be bulldozed. What was needed was some kind of conservation order. However, obtaining anything like that was going to be an uphill struggle. In those days the Milton Keynes Development Corporation – now defunct – was very keen to capitalise on such a valuable piece of real estate. As Peter Wescombe, one of BP’s foremost historians, explains: “You’ve got ٥٥ acres of ground here, right by the railway station. People could get out of bed, brush their teeth and be straight on a train to London, without any need for parking. They would have their own supermarket and petrol station. It was a very valuable site indeed. With planning permission, it was worth an estimated £٣m at the time.” To make matters worse, Crooks had the site independently assayed by a heritage expert who expressed the view that it wasn’t worth developing the site. By the late 1980s, the Park was being used less and less by its owners and, in 1987, it was finally decommissioned as a military establishment. With no one taking an active interest in preserving the estate, it was, quite literally, falling to pieces. Whoever did take on the task would face huge bills. Selling to a rich property developer was by far the easiest option for the owners.

In 1991, when BP was yet again under real threat of being demolished and turned over to housing, the Bletchley Archaeological and Historical Society – one of the intellectual groups that had been meeting on the site since the mid 1970s – formed a small committee with the aim of organising a farewell party to mark what appeared to be the inevitable demise of the site. The idea had come from Peter Wescombe who was friends with Peter Jarvis, a local GP and a member of the society. Wescombe recalls: “We invited ourselves to tea at the Jarvises. I said, ‘Look Peter, what are we going to do about the Park? The council’s decided it’s a dead duck, how are we going to stop it happening?’ I then suggested a big farewell party with all the WWII codebreakers at the Park. I could get their names. We requested a meeting with the Bletchley Archaeological and Historical Society because if we personally invited the wartime BP staff they’d say, ‘Who on earth are Peter Wescombe and Peter Jarvis?’ But if you say the chairman of the Archaeological Society invites you, that has some clout.” The committee agreed to write the invitation letters on the Peters’ behalf. However, getting permission to hold such a party on the estate proved to be more problematic. On his first attempt, Wescombe didn’t bother to make an appointment and walked, unchallenged, straight through the front gate and into the estate administrator’s office.* He was then told, in no uncertain terms, that he was on private property and was escorted off the grounds. Undaunted, however, he found a hole in the fence and snuck back to the administrator’s office to carry on the conversation. It wasn’t difficult; at this time the estate boasted a tiny skeleton staff of only nine people. His cheeky perseverance paid off and it was agreed that that the party could be held in Block E on the 21st of October – 50 years to the day from when Sir Winston Churchill had made a historic and very secret wartime visit to BP to congratulate the staff.

The Society put out feelers to locate and invite as many living veterans and their families to come along and say goodbye to BP. Over 250 people turned up on the day, most of whom had had no contact with each other since the end of hostilities. Chatting amongst themselves and with the party’s organisers, many were finally able to talk about their top secret work for the first time in five decades. So powerful and extraordinary were those stories that the committee decided, there and then, that the story of Bletchley Park couldn’t just end with demolition. They asked the veterans for a show of hands of all those who would support an attempt to save BP. The vote was pretty much unanimous.† At that moment, the party organisers decided that they would do all that they could to save BP for the nation. The Bletchley Park Trust was born.

One of the Trust’s earliest prime movers was the late engineer Tony Sale who pushed, and pushed hard, for the site to become a national museum. He also began the seemingly impossible task of rebuilding some of the extraordinary machines that had been developed at the Park during the war. He had no plans, some boxes of parts – many more were missing – and no budget, but he soldiered on. Meanwhile Peter Jarvis and Peter Wescombe persuaded British telecom (BT) to allow the Trust to use part of the site. They even managed to persuade them to pay for some maintenance and utility bills. Two other big players at this time were local councillor and one-time mayor of Milton Keynes, Roger Bristow, and local MP Brian White. Remembering Sam Crooks’ talk of preservation orders, they identified a number of important trees on the site – sequoias, maples and oaks among them – that dated from the 1880s and obtained a tree preservation order for them all. “At the time, the trees at Bletchley Park accounted for 2 per cent of all the mature trees in the city,” explain Bristow. “We knew there would be some important specimens among them, and there were. For instance, we had a cherry tree that a Japanese expert got very excited about. He was even more excited when I told him we had two of them.” The preservation orders made the site a very difficult prospect for developers; the roots of the various trees were all interlocking which made any attempt to install roads or other infrastructure – such as electricity, water and gas mains, etc. – almost impossible without killing some of them. It was a notable victory for the campaign.

Money was still a problem however. Or, more accurately, a complete lack of money. But the campaigners refused to give up. Roger Bristow even put his own money – including a substantial injury award he’d received – into saving Bletchley Park. He did so knowing that he’d never see a return on it, but, had he not done so, it’s doubtful the site would have avoided development. By this time, BT owned the site in its entirety. When the Trust approached them about a sale price, Wescombe recalls that, “BT said we could have the site for about three million quid. Between us we had about £3.50.”

The Bletchley Park site opened to visitors in 1993. To begin with, it was a very humble affair and it was open for just one weekend every fortnight. At this time, the Trust was operating from a single office with a single primitive computer and around ten people vying for space to work. There was no electricity across most of the estate and so old hand-cranked field telephones were used for communication. GCHQ kindly loaned the fledgling museum some exhibits, including Enigma machines, and the London Science Museum donated its old display cases when they installed new ones. One of the BP volunteers, a man called Clive Wallace, was part of a group that had amassed a collection of old military vehicles which they left on the BP site to help attract visitors, and it was one of these vehicles – a 1941 articulated lorry – that was used to collect the display cases. A few years later the Tower of London made a similar offer, and these too were collected in the vintage lorry. The Motor Vehicle Group was responsible for leading many expeditions to collect such things for the new museum. A small army of volunteers and passionate supporters of the estate gave freely of their time and energy in all weathers. Some even stood at the gate offering £2 raffle tickets to anyone they met; anything to raise much-needed cash.

1994 was a landmark year. Firstly, the museum was formally inaugurated by HRH The Duke of Kent, as Chief Patron. Then Chris Smith, the finance director for Milton Keynes council, was asked to bring his expertise to the Trust. Despite royal patronage and a now steady stream of visitors, the park was still not raising anywhere near the amount it needed. Things were still so bad that, at Smith’s first trustees’ meeting, the finance report was a printout from a cashpoint. Smith substantially improved financial management and developed several income generating streams, including the setting up of a shop and small café. Charity nights were organised and, in 1996, The Andrews Sisters showed their support by giving a fundraising concert (with their daughters as backing singers). Smith even organised a licence to have weddings conducted on site, and he and his wife Lindsey became the first couple to be married there. By 1998 the Trust had built a £25k operating surplus and a reserve of £59k. Consequently, the Trust was able to strike a deal with the landowners in 1999, obtaining a 250 year leasehold of the core historic areas of the Park with an option to purchase it for a nominal sum 25 years later.

For the next decade, the Trust worked hard to raise funds and develop the site. There were disagreements and some infighting between strong-minded individuals; some wanted to preserve the park as a living museum, in as original a form as possible, while others wanted to develop it into a more lucrative business venture, like a conference and conventions centre. But still the renovation work went on, mostly carried out by keen enthusiasts for no pay. Some, like Tony Sale who was working on rebuilding the Colossus computer, even used some of their own money. He was boundlessly enthusiastic about the rebuild and gave talks and lectures about the earliest days of programmable computing which kept public interest high in what they were trying to achieve at BP.

In 2002, the Trust’s new leader, Christine Large began talks to nego-tiate a controversial but necessary sale of land to raise funds. It was not a popular decision; the Motor Vehicle Group left the Park when told that their area – the transport depot and H Block land – was being sold. And there was one moment of high drama around this time when one of the estate’s Enigma machines went missing. To this day, no one knows if it was a genuine thief or someone disgruntled by the sale of the land. The good news, however, is that the machine was safely returned to Jeremy Paxman and the BBC Newsnight show.

The proposed sale also proved to be an issue for Tony Sale and his colleagues. By 2004, they had finished the rebuild of Colossus. The computer had recently been officially switched on by the Duke of Kent in the presence of Tommy Flowers, its original designer, and many wartime veterans. When told that the huge machine would have to be moved from H Block as the buildings were likely to be part of the land sale, the team began looking at various venues for relocation but none were appropriate. Therefore Tony and his colleagues set about forming a separate charity. In March 2005, The Codes and Ciphers Heritage Trust, which now trades as The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC), was formed. The land sale went ahead but H Block itself could remain on site if the TNMOC leased it from the Bletchley Park Trust. It meant that Colossus could stay in its rightful home in H Block, a building originally erected in 1944 to house six Colossus machines.

But despite any resentment, the sale of land generated much-needed cash. It meant that the estate shrunk to something like 21 acres, but this became a more manageable size; more than 70 buildings still needed renovation work. The iconic code breaking huts were damp and derelict, the Mansion had major leaks in its roof and issues with asbestos, and the annual heating bills alone were costing the estate half a million.

But even the land sale didn’t guarantee the preservation of the site. When Christine Large left, Simon Greenish took over. He joined BP on a Monday and, at his first board meeting, the first question asked was, “Are we still open for the rest of the week?” Greenish began letting out buildings to companies and organising conferencing events. Gradually, the Trust built up the name of Bletchley Park and got visitor numbers increasing. Tim Reynolds became a leading light at this time, helping to create a successful Innovation Centre on site. The centre provided, and still provides, much needed revenue whilst ensuring that Bletchley Park’s reputation as a centre of innovation is maintained. Greenish was forced to make some unpopular but necessary changes including cutting wages, losing some paid staff, encouraging more conferencing, organising professional catering and paying for good marketing, but it paid off and income improved. All of which meant that, now that finances were stable, if precarious, the real work of renovating the buildings could begin; Tim Reynolds had already renovated two, but many more needed attention. Plus there was a great deal more work to be done to ensure that Bletchley Park was saved.

It was, more or less, at this point that Dr Sue Black entered the story. But I won’t steal her thunder – the remainder of this book is the story of what happened next.

During WWII the staff of Bletchley Park managed to overcome difficulties that we today, with all of our computers and instant access to knowledge, would still find problematic. Much of what was achieved there is now public knowledge thanks to various documentaries and dramatisations (although, thanks to dramatic licence, the accuracy of some dramas has to be taken with a pinch of salt). We will tell that story in this book too. Throughout Sue’s narrative you’ll find accompanying text that will explain the historical significance of some of the people, projects and places she mentions. Every effort has been made to make the historical account as accurate as possible; unfortunately, what went on at BP was so shrouded in secrecy that almost no documentation exists and we are reliant on the memories of people who were there at the time. Much of the content is culled from interviews with surviving veterans.

An army of inspiring, wonderful people has spent the past 25 years working hard to save Bletchley Park for us and for the generations to come; the list of enthusiasts, experts, volunteers, funders, donors and visitors is simply too long to include them all here, and some of them, sadly, are no longer with us. In this 70th anniversary year of the end of World War II, all we can do is thank them and dedicate this introduction to them for performing such a selfless, noble service for the benefit of us all.

I now hand you over to Dr Sue Black who will take up the story of how Bletchley Park was saved.

Stevyn Colgan

01

My first visit to Bletchley Park

My first visit to Bletchley Park was on 9th April 2003. I was attending the British Computer Society’s Specialist Groups Assembly representing BCSWomen, the online network for women in computing that I set up in 2001. In 1998, I had set up a similar network called London BCSWomen, and it had been a massive success – so much so that we had appeared in a two-page spread about women and computing in the Daily Mirror. National publicity for London BCSWomen led to requests from women all over the country who wanted to join. I set up a national version and it quickly garnered a few hundred members. The idea behind BCSWomen was to support and encourage women in computing. I had found doing my PhD in software engineering on the whole enjoyable but sometimes lonely, with few women around, and I had often wished for a group of friendly women to talk to. I set up BCSWomen to bring together such a group and found many friends there.

April 2003

• 7th MentorSET training day (Institute of Physics)

• 8th Reception to commemorate birthday of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (Institution of Civil Engineers, Westminster)

• 8th Presentation of Oxfam parliamentary briefing paper: “Hands up for girls’ education” (Portcullis House, Westminster)

• 9th BCS Specialist Groups Assembly representing BCSWomen (Bletchley Park, Herts.)

• 22nd SQUFOL European project in software metrics
  (South Bank University)

I’d heard of Bletchley Park but didn’t have a very well-formed idea of what it was, and I had no idea what it looked like. I knew that it was something to do with code breaking and World War II. In my mind’s eye was a picture of 50 or so middle-aged blokes sitting around in tweed jackets, smoking pipes and doing The Times crossword. I’ve since learnt that that view is not uncommon. In fact, I shared my image of the tweed-clad blokes with the wonderful Stephen Fry when he came to visit Bletchley Park in May 2009; he then used almost exactly the same words to describe his own preconception of Bletchley on QI – I wasn’t alone in my thinking!

On the morning of 9th April, I got the train from Euston Station to Bletchley. I had no idea yet what a momentous visit it would prove to be.

I spent the day there, mainly in the mansion house ballroom, listening to BCS specialist group talks and chatting to colleagues in the break. At the end of the day, I decided to go and explore the grounds. Bletchley Park now occupies a 26-acre site, with many huts, blocks and various outbuildings, plus a lovely lake, so there was plenty to look at. I entered one of the blocks and started looking at the exhibits on display; moving from one room to the next, I saw a group of middle-aged men working on what looked like the most amazing contraption at the end of the building. It was probably seven feet high and six feet across, a wonderful vision of engineering, with wires and what looked like cogs of some sort. I walked over to take a closer look.

I started chatting to a man who told me that he and his team were rebuilding something called the Bombe machine. I first heard this as “Bomb” machine, which sounded almost too exciting, but I soon learned all about it.

That man was John Harper, who, with a team of enthusiasts, was rebuilding Alan Turing’s Bombe machine, which was used during WWII to mechanise the breaking of Enigma codes. John told me that it was taking years to rebuild because they didn’t have a complete set of instructions or information to help them reconstruct it. Most of the details of the construction of the Bombe had been destroyed at the end of the war, so they had the task of working with incomplete information to put together a plan and then rebuild the Bombe from scratch. They had a couple of photos and an incomplete plan that had been found on a window ledge in a toilet. But that wasn’t the only difficulty. The parts for the Bombe were, of course, no longer manufactured, so they had to be scavenged, sometimes from old telephone switching equipment which had been thrown away, or sourced from various manufacturers, or especially designed and manufactured. It sounded like a very long, complicated and difficult task; I was completely in awe of this labour of love.

After John had told me all about the Bombe and what it was used for, he asked me why I was at Bletchley Park. I told him about the British Computer Society meeting and said that I was there representing the network for women in computing that I had started in 2001 and now chaired.

“Did you know that more than half of the people that worked at Bletchley Park during the war were women?” said John.

“No, I had no idea. How many people worked here during the war?” I replied.

“About 10,000.”

I was astonished. For many years, I had been interested in women in computing, women in science and women’s contribution to the world of work, but I’d never heard anything like this before. It was amazing to find out that more than 5,000 women had worked at Bletchley Park during the war, and more amazing still, considering their massive contribution to the war effort and my interest in women, that I had never read or heard about it before.

John then showed me a plaque on the wall listing all the names of the generous people who had donated their time and money to making sure that the Bombe was faithfully rebuilt. Some of them were women, and John said that they had worked with the Bombes during the war and that some of them were still around, working as volunteers at Bletchley Park. At the end of our chat, I thanked John and we said our goodbyes. As I exited the block, I bumped into a group of my colleagues, including Professor Jonathan Bowen and Conrad Taylor who had also been walking around having a look at the site and taking photographs.

We decided to head back to London together. On the way, I told them about the Bombe machine and repeated what John had said about the people that had worked at Bletchley Park and that how more than 5,000 of them were women. I wanted to find out more about the work that the women had done at Bletchley Park and asked everyone who I thought would be interested in funding a project which focused on researching and promoting this amazing story. By the time we arrived at Euston, I was resolved to find some funding to run an oral history project which would capture the memories of women who worked at Bletchley Park and bring them to a wider audience. The women that had worked at Bletchley Park deserved recognition, and I was determined to make sure that they got it.

Looking for funding

I started talking to everyone I knew about my trip to Bletchley, recounting my conversation with John Harper about the Bombe and the women who worked there. I was sure that if I talked to everyone who might be even the slightest bit interested, I would, at some point, come across someone who wanted to help – or at least someone who knew someone who would want to help.

Between 2003 and 2006, I talked to countless people about the women who worked at Bletchley Park, how many of them there were, how amazing their achievements had been and how we needed to record their experiences and raise the profile of their contribution. In those days, I had no idea who to talk to about funding and I also didn’t know very many people who were actually in a position to help. Talking to lots of people, asking for help, and getting lots of (kind) rejections gave me some really good experience and taught me not to be put off by rejection. It was, looking back, very good training for what was to come.

Eventually, in late 2006, someone suggested that I apply for money from the special fund set up to support projects related to the British Computer Society’s 50th anniversary. I applied for £5,000. At around the same time, I was encouraged to apply for matched funding from the UK Resource Centre for Women (UKRC) in Science, Engineering and Technology, so I did. I was delighted when both applications were approved, and I was granted £10,000 in total, £5,000 from each organisation. I quietly filed away what I’d learned: that it’s usually easier to get matched funding than initial funding. No one wants to be the first one to jump in, but once one person or organisation has taken the leap, others will follow.

We get funding

After years of trying and failing to find funding, it was wonderful to finally get not only the financial backing for BCSWomen to run the Women of Station X project, but also the moral support and buy-in from established organisations and people. It gave me a great buzz when I found out that that others felt the same way I did about something important to me and wanted to help me make it happen.

Finally, I could get going with the project: we had £10,000 to work with. Unfortunately, the funding came through just as I was starting a new job. I had worked at London South Bank University full-time for about eight years, but in the summer of 2006 I got a job at the University of Westminster in Harrow as Head of the Department of Information and Software Systems. I was due to start at the beginning of 2007. It was my first management role and I was very excited about being able to make a real difference to students and to staff, but I was also worried about how I would manage the Women of Station X project at the same time. How could I run the project when I’d just started the most demanding role of my whole career?

Luckily Jan Peters, then working for the BCS, came to the rescue and offered to run the project. She found an interviewer, Ann Day, and put together a plan for the project. She got in touch with Bletchley Park to find out if they were happy to put us in contact with the female veterans. The plan was to interview a few female veterans in depth to find out about their experience of working at Bletchley Park.

Since first finding out about the thousands of women working there, I had wanted to make sure that their stories were captured for posterity. I was well aware that the veterans who were still around were aged 70 plus and weren’t getting any younger. Everything that had happened at Bletchley Park was kept secret for such a long time – everyone who worked there had to sign the Official Secrets Act – and there had been almost nothing recorded about what happened there and what life was really like. There were a few stories floating around, but I knew there were more to be found. For one thing, I wasn’t just interested in what the veterans had done at work, I was also interested in their lives outside of work. Many of them were only teenagers when they started working at Bletchley. Thousands of teenage girls carried out essential wartime work, so I knew there had to be some great stories there and I wanted to hear them and share them with the world.

Jan managed to persuade Bletchley Park to send around a letter to the female veterans asking them if they were happy to be interviewed by us. We then recorded several in-depth interviews, and Conrad Taylor made a short film about the women of Station X narrated by Sarah Winmill – a great friend and BCSWomen committee member.

Bombe rebuild switch on

On 17th July 2007, John Harper and his team’s rebuild of the Bombe machine was complete and ready to be officially switched on. I was invited up to Bletchley Park along with others from BCSWomen and the BCS. My good friend Professor Wendy Hall had been invited to give a talk about the Women of Station X project, which she did with all of her usual intelligence and charm.

After Wendy’s talk and the reception that followed, we went down to see the Bombe rebuild, which the Duke of Kent switched on. John Harper and his team had done a fabulous job of rebuilding the Bombe, and seeing it work was incredible. It had taken many people several years to build and was a remarkable feat of engineering. Hearing the sound of it working for the first time was very evocative. The loud, rhythmic clicking of the drums rotating on the Bombe machine made me wonder: “What must it have been like for the women working there during the war?” It must have been so noisy, day after day, month after month, working in a temporary hut full of machines. The sound reminded me of the journey from Wickford to Chelmsford when I started grammar school in the 1970s. I remembered being 11 years old, sticking my head out of the window to drink in the sunshine and look at the fields, listening to the rhythmic sound of the train going over the tracks as we flew past cows, crops and the odd tractor.

The women of Station X

Every September the Enigma Reunion is held at Bletchley Park, bringing veterans from all over the UK and the world together to catch up, have dinner and listen to a few lectures. In September 2007, while the Women of Station X project was running, I was invited to Bletchley Park to speak about the project.

I gave my talk in the lovely wood-panelled Mansion House Ballroom at Bletchley Park. I was so excited; it was the first time I had really had the chance to speak to any of the veterans. I spoke about my first trip to Bletchley Park, finding out how many women had worked there and wanting to do something to raise the profile of those women. How wonderful for me to now be standing in front of some of the very women that I had so looked forward to meeting. After I had finished speaking, several veterans came up to tell me how much they had enjoyed my talk and how grateful they were that I was seeking to highlight their contribution. I was so delighted to meet them, and we had the first of many discussions about what it was like working there during the war. It also drove home the point that many of these women had been teenagers when they had worked at Bletchley, and that going to work there had been the first time that they had left home. One woman told me how, wanting to do her bit for the war effort, she had gone along to the local office to sign up for whatever it was they thought she was suitable for. It was only upon leaving the office that she realised she was the only one there wearing Clarks sandals – she had been wearing schoolchildren’s shoes.

Talking to the veterans reinforced my feeling that we really had to do more to help tell the full story of what happened at Bletchley Park. I left Bletchley that day feeling more resolved than ever to do my own bit to get the story out to the world.

Bletchley Park Veterans Day

bcs.org
23 September 2007

Several members of BCSWomen, the BCS group with 800+ women studying and working in IT, visited Bletchley Park on 23 September 2007 to attend the veterans day.

Dr Sue Black, founder and chair of BCSWomen, as part of the special talk to veterans, told the audience that she had first visited Bletchley Park some five years ago and been absolutely fascinated by its history.

But, when wandering around the Park she had been surprised to find that even though more than half of the people working there during WWII were women, there was almost no information at Bletchley about this. She went home determined to do something about it, to make sure that there was fair recognition for the contribution of the women that worked at Bletchley.

Funding was secured in 2006 from the BCS 50th Anniversary fund and the UKRC for Women in Science and Technology, and an oral history project is now underway recording the memories of women that worked at Bletchley.

Dr Ann Day and Dr Jan Peters have been working on the project this year and are currently working to produce a website and other resources in collaboration with Bletchley Park Trust to make sure that these stories are passed down to future generations and that the contribution is not forgotten.

02

“That is all you need to know”

“There was this song around at the time that went, ‘We joined the Navy to see the sea, and what did we see? We saw the sea.’ The Wrens sang a different version. We sang, ‘And what did we see? We saw BP.’”

—Jean Valentine WRNS

When 18-year-old Anne Pease[1] arrived at “BP” in July 1940, she had no real idea of where she was or why. All she knew was that a telegram had ordered her to report to a railway station to catch a particular train to somewhere called Bletchley in Buckinghamshire. The telegram had ended with the slightly ominous words “That is all you need to know”. She later found that she was one of hundreds of young women who’d received similar mysterious requests. Some had been told even less than she had. One Wren[2] says that, “On arrival at Euston, we had no clues as to our journey so we enquired from the engine driver where he was going. He replied with a broad grin and told us that ‘the Wrens get out at Bletchley.’”

“I travelled 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,” says Anne. “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. 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.”[3]

The grand Victorian mansion in question was Bletchley Park, a country house and 58-acre estate in Buckinghamshire, some 50 miles north-west of London.

“We weren’t told where we were going,” says Lorna Fitch. “We just had a piece of paper saying catch this, do that, wait there and change trains here, and you just did. I was collected from the station and taken to Woburn Abbey where I was to be billeted. Then I was put on a coach to Bletchley Park. I had no idea what was going on.” One Wren reports that, for her and some colleagues, things were even more mysterious than that: “Six of us were put in an enclosed van and driven away . . . ”

Irene Humby was also quite alarmed by all of the secrecy, especially after being warned that if she ever mentioned anything about her work, there would be “someone on the train keeping a lookout”. It made her feel nervous during every journey she took thereafter. Daisy Phillips was told that she would receive a minimum prison term of two years if she broke the Official Secrets Act.

We can only imagine how these young women – mostly aged between 17 and 21 – felt as they passed through the gates of Bletchley Park and walked up the drive towards the rather ugly and imposing Mansion House within. For many of them, it was their first experience of being away from home. In her memoir, Irene Young says that, “The establishment was ringed with barbed wire and guarded by men of the RAF Regiment whose NCOs kept discipline by threatening their men that misdemeanours would result in their being sent ‘inside the park’, as if it were some sort of madhouse.”

The fact that BP was only ever referred to as “BP” or “Station X” by the staff on site must have added an additional flavour of melodrama to their situation.