Mavis Lever thought she really ought to be a nurse. She had been studying German at University College London when the Second World War broke out, and decided to put her degree on hold to do her bit for the war effort. Nursing, she thought, was where she could help. But the powers that be knew she was far too clever for that. “‘No you don’t,’ they said. ‘You’ve got an interview at the Foreign Office’,” she recalled.
By the time she was through she had been recruited to work as one of the Bletchley Park code-breakers, that curious collection of linguists, mathematicians, crossword puzzle experts and eccentrics who helped to shorten the course of the war.
Yesterday Mavis Batey — as she is now — was one of about 70 Bletchley veterans who made their way to the stately home in Buckinghamshire for a reunion to mark the 70th anniversary of the day the mathematician Alan Turing and his colleagues reported for duty. They all know the way to Bletchley now, but that was not the case back then. “Some people were told to go to Euston Station and they would be given a ticket,” said Mrs Batey, 88. “They could not tell their family whether they were going to Watford or Glasgow.”
Ruth Henry, 83, who was recruited after she left school, was told she would be working for SDX. SD meant Special Duties, she knew, but what about X? “Well, it’s not Y,” they were told. It was not until 30 years later that she learned that Y meant the wireless interceptors. “They told us we would be joining HMS Pembroke V. That gave us ideas of handsome sailors and boats, but we fetched up in the back of beyond.”
Many of the Wrens and other staff at Bletchley operated the Turing Bombe — the machine that helped them to decode the Enigma settings used by the Germans — but it was the likes of Mrs Batey who provided the intellectual muscle to enable the machine to break the ciphers.
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“At first it was huge sheets of dots in squares, and writing out endless alphabets, but later on you got the hang of it, especially if you had a flair for crosswords and Scrabble,” she said.
Often they had no idea of the relevance of the material they worked on. She recalled one night when they were given the orders “Jumbo Rush”.
“That meant action stations, men’s lives at risk,” she said.“But we did not know what it was. Then we put on the radio and heard that our troops had successfully landed in Algeria, and we knew what we were doing.”
The man she worked for, Dilly Knox, was the most brilliant cryptologist of his day who had broken German Navy codes in the First World War. He died of cancer during the war and Mrs Batey believes he has never received the recognition that was accorded to Turing. She has now published a book about him to remind people of his achievements.
“He was the most wonderful eccentric genius,” she said. “He lived in a world of puzzles.” The cottage where they worked had two doors, one that led to a cupboard and the other to the outside world. “Almost invariably he went into the cupboard instead of going out,” she said.
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At Bletchley she met her future husband, Keith, a Cambridge mathematician. Their romance did not get off to a good start. “I dropped my pencil to see if he would pick it up. He said, ‘You’ve dropped your pencil’.”
Strict rules were in place to ensure their work remained a secret. “We were not even allowed to talk to people in other sections about what we did,” said Helen Reay, a translator. “So we talked about people’s love affairs. It was the only safe subject.”
After the war Churchill ordered that the Turing Bombes be dismantled so that no one would know about Bletchley’s code-breaking work. “We had to sit there unsoldering every bit of wire and dropping them into buckets,” recalled Ruth Henry, now Ruth Bourne. “It was sold off as Army surplus.”
For 30 years after the war she said nothing about her work at Bletchley, until the secret was finally revealed in 1975. “I said, ‘This is what I did in the war’. My husband said, ‘That’s interesting. What’s for tea?’”