Misread Signals

INTRODUCTION

The British people are very proud of Bletchley Park. It's where a war-winning weapon was created, relying on brains rather than brawn. The balance of power was tipped because the codes broken there gave hard-pressed generals and admirals an extra edge, a bonus card in a fight where every advantage was needed. What is more, the most secure German ciphers, created by machines, ought to have defeated the cryptanalysts, but somehow, through genius and new technology, the most complex secure communications systems were brought to their knees.

It's not just what was done there that makes us proud of Bletchley Park. The fact that continues to amaze is that we did not know about it until thirty years after it closed its gates. Not a whisper was breathed by any of its 10,000 employees. The revelation that codes had been broken - that the intelligence history of the Second World War needed to be rewritten from scratch - was explosive, but the effectiveness of the secrecy wall is astonishing. And those 10,000 employees grab our attention, too: so many of them, 75 per cent of them indeed, were women. Bletchley Park was a place of diversity as well as intellect. For many reasons, these included, what happened there in the Second World War seems to have anticipated the present century, our concerns and our values.

Probe a little, beneath the veneer of national pride, and the picture of Bletchley as a paragon of diversity begins to crumble. The women of Bletchley Park are celebrated as bombe machine operators, punched-card feeders, decoders using Typex machines to convert Enigma messages into plain German, indexers and drivers and messengers. By contrast, the 'famous names' of Bletchley Park: Alan Turing, Dilly Knox, Gordon Welchman, Tommy Flowers, John Tiltman . all seem to be men. The men, it seems, did the thing we are most proud of, winning the war by force of intellect. The women were there to help.

Go back to the earliest literature about Bletchley Park, and the gender divide seems to be written in from the outset. Take Peter Calvocoressi, who as a young RAF officer spent his war there, and as a retired barrister living not far from Bletchley, wrote one of the first 'I was there' accounts of the place when the secrecy restrictions were eased in the late 1970s.

There were at BP Chiefs and Indians. The Chiefs in both areas - cryptography and intelligence - were distinguished from the Indians because they were fewer and preponderantly male and had the better jobs - better because they were more responsible and closer to the brush of real events.1

It rings true; it's what we expect from the Britain of the 1940s. And when we see the numbers - 5,623 women known to have served at Bletchley or its outstations in the women's branches of the armed services, 6,640 women2 at Bletchley and its outstations in the last week of the war in Europe (75 per cent of the workforce at that point) - it reinforces the same picture.3 So do the memoirs of those who served. So does the business of the Women's Committee.

Women's Committee

. This Committee exists for the promotion of the well-being of all women working at the War Station. It does not deal with questions concerning work or pay. The Chairman of the Committee will be glad to receive for the consideration of the Committee suggestions from any women serving at the War Station. Any civilian woman who is in difficulty of any kind should ask to see Miss Wickham, Hut 9 . Service women should refer to their own officers.4

The coded message in Commander Travis's Serial Order No. 118 meant that unmarried women who became pregnant had somewhere to turn. So the business of the Committee could focus on hair-washing facilities, thefts, bathrooms and blood donations. Women, being a species apart, had different concerns from the 'chiefs'. If Bletchley Park was an intelligence factory, the blue collars were worn by women.

That much is incontrovertible. But something is missing. Bletchley Park was a place for codebreakers. Having identified the 'chiefs', those who managed the huge organisation, and the 'indians', where did the codebreakers fit in? Who were they, and were they men or women? It is very tempting to take the narrative of women in support roles at Bletchley Park, and conclude that the codebreakers were men. The roll call of famous names implies that conclusion is right. So does the archival material, which begins the Second World War with a list of men, and a letter by Commander Alastair Denniston, the head of the Government Code & Cypher School, that says: 'For some days now we have been obliged to recruit from our emergency list men of the Professor type .'5

Historians have not resisted the temptation. It is assumed that women were not recruited into codebreaking roles; rather, the women who were recruited - even women with degrees - were subordinated to the codebreaker professors, doing translations and working in intelligence analysis. Vital roles, but not codebreaking.

It makes sense, because it fits with post-war experience. As John Ferris, the official historian of GCHQ, explains in his massive history of the place:

In 1970, across GCHQ, all divisional heads were men and few women were branch or section heads. In administrative divisions, women headed all sections dominated by females, such as typing and libraries . Women had more status in intelligence-producing organisations, however. In divisions H, J, K and V, men and women attacked problems as teams, side by side, in different ways. J and K stemmed straight from GC&CS, though their members analysed intelligence much more than their predecessors had done . Women were marginalised in mathematics, and thus also among the cryppies of H division .6

If women were sidelined from technical cryptanalytical and management roles in the 1970s, how much more likely it would be for that to have been the case in the darker days of the Second World War?

Of course, there are one or two exceptions. Among the famous names is Joan Clarke. She is famous not because she was deputy head of Hut 8, where the codebreakers of Bletchley Park carried out their attack on the German Navy's Enigma-encrypted signals, the signals that directed U-boats to their prey in the North Atlantic. She is famous because she was briefly the fiancée of Alan Turing, a fact known to the public through a Hollywood movie. But having discovered Joan Clarke, we have stumbled upon a rarity: a woman codebreaker.

According to an extended obituary of Joan Clarke in the Annals of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers:

She was congenial but shy, kind, gentle, truthful, nonaggressive, agreeable to all, and always subordinate to the men in her life, except in Hut 8, where she was treated as an equal .7

Evidently - at least, it was evident to the obituarists, writing in 2001 - codebreaking at Bletchley Park was the province of men, to whom any women were self-evidently subordinate. Even as deputy head of Hut 8, Joan Clarke only claws her reputation up from subordinate to 'an equal'. The wonderful Roll of Honour, compiled by the staff of the current Bletchley Park Trust about the people who served there in the Second World War, lists no fewer than 171 people who worked in Hut 8 at various stages; thirty-four were men, not all of whom can have been Miss Clarke's superiors or equals. Something doesn't add up.8

And then there is the matter of the awkward photographic evidence. GCHQ has a small collection of photographs taken at Bletchley in the second half of the war, when most of the staff had moved into the ugly brick block buildings specially built for them (ugly, but better than the wooden huts they moved out of). The photos show women. Sure, some of them are minding bombe machines, the invention that helped find the daily 'key' used by the German military to change the set-up of their Enigma machines. Some are operating Typex machines, the British cipher machine rigged to work like an Enigma: these women are decoding intercepted signals, which they can do because the cryptanalysts have found the daily key. But a good proportion of the photos show women doing desk work. In some shots an Enigma machine is prominent. The places where these photos were taken are the codebreaking rooms of Bletchley Park. There is hardly a man in sight. In these photos, the codebreaking was being done by women. The same is true in the much more extensive library of photos of the US Army's Second World War codebreaking centre at Arlington Hall in Washington. These show roomfuls of women breaking codes - not typing or filing or minding machinery - with a scattering of men interspersed. On VE Day, there were 10,500 staff at Arlington Hall, around half of whom were women.9

Perhaps, we might wonder if we have been misled. Perhaps the standard narrative, of boffins breaking codes and Wrens (Women's Royal Naval Service) minding machines, was too glib. Perhaps there is evidence, beyond the photos and the special case of Joan Clarke, that there were women codebreakers; documents now available to researchers that might cast new light.

We might expect that America would find it easier to embrace women into a technical workforce than Britain; if so, our expectation would also be that Nazi Germany would have excluded women altogether. In 1945, American soldiers captured a huge volume of archival material belonging to the...