The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories by Michael Smith Read Free Book Online

lip and got on with it. Fletcher sent her to join Joy in the Registration Room.
    ‘You had a sheet which was called a B-List on which you analysed each message which came in which was believed to be in your code. You put down the number of letters, the origin and the
frequency. Occasionally there was a third group of letters used.’
    One of the most important things Pam had to note down was the number of groups in each message.
    ‘If you saw exactly the same-length message sent out at the same time you could think that it might be a re-encodement from one code into another and that would help enormously because if
you’d broken one code you could break the other code.’
    During the early spring of 1940, Hut 6 stopped being able to break Enigma. The main code they’d been working on was a Luftwaffe system which allowed the German Air Force
to talk to the two other services. The codebreakers called this the Red and used red crayons to chart theirprogress against it. It was already clear from the time when they
had been breaking it that if only they could decode it, there was a lot of intelligence to be had, but they just couldn’t get back into it. When the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway in
April they used a completely different Enigma code, which Hut 6 called Yellow. It was much easier to break than the Red and produced lots of details of German operations and plans, but there was
very little that could be done with the intelligence. British troops could do nothing to stop the Germans invading Norway and the ineffectual response led in early May to Mr Chamberlain’s
resignation as Prime Minister and his replacement by Winston Churchill. The new Prime Minister told Parliament that he had nothing to offer the British people ‘but blood, toil, tears and
sweat’ and that they had no choice but to win the war. The nation’s very survival depended on it.
    There might not have been much blood spilled at Bletchley, but there was certainly toil, sweat and tears. The invasions of Norway and Denmark, and the certain knowledge that Holland, Belgium and
France would be next, forced Hut 6 to work round the clock, with two or three people working in each room overnight. But plans to put the Blisters and the Decoders on night shifts alongside the men
were blocked by senior civil servants worried about what young men and women working together through the night would get up to.
    The bosses wanted to put three women on the Hut 6 night shift, since this was all that was needed to keep the B-Lists up to date and do the decoding. The CivilService
bosses insisted there must be six women on shift. Mr Milner-Barry said sarcastically that this was probably because the men would be ‘overworked’ trying to keep so many women happy.
Three women had to be brought in from another hut to sit on the night shift doing nothing in order to protect the other three girls’ morals. Given the shortage of staff across the Park, this
stupidity was dispensed with after a couple of weeks.
    Most of the women were in billets with people they’d never met before, some of whom were welcoming, some of whom were definitely not. They had to pay their own rent, which was set at a
guinea a week. Joy Higgins was lucky.
    ‘I explained that I could live at home and every week I religiously paid my mother the statutory one guinea for my board and lodging.’
    Others weren’t so fortunate, although most eventually found somewhere reasonable to stay. Ailsa Macdonald was reading economics at Edinburgh when she was recruited. She and two other girls
were placed in a house in Wolverton, where a large number of the young women were billeted. It was a pretty disastrous couple of months.
    ‘We shared a small bedroom, three of us. They had a bathroom but we weren’t allowed to use it. After quite a short time we were moved. I was sent to a new housing estate and it was a
modern house. They had a small child and I was very happy there. But I was lucky