Free The Secret Life of Bletchley Park by Sinclair McKay

instructed that inter-hut discussions were forbidden. Absolute secrecy was a given. ‘You just assumed,’ says Keith Batey drily, ‘that you’d be shot.’ Recruits would be allocated to their hut and, during working hours, would be metaphorically hermetically sealed within. No one else, save the occasional messenger, would be allowed entry.
    Even though the word ‘hut’ implies a cramped construction, these were long structures, with central passageways and rooms off either side. There were plain windows (shuttered at night for blackoutpurposes), floors of squeaky lino, basic desks and chairs. Green-shaded lights hung from the ceiling. A great many people worked side by side among plain filing cabinets; the rooms were suffocating in the summer sun, and draughty and cold in the depths of winter. As one cryptologist commented: ‘Nothing … seemed less likely to house great matters than the ramshackle wooden building (its atmosphere nauseating at night when the blackout imprisoned the fumes from leaky coke-burning stoves) to which I reported …’
    Heating was a perennial problem. Mittens were commonplace. Added to this was a faintly comical, Heath Robinson dimension: messages were passed between some huts by means of an extemporised wooden ‘tunnel’ and propelled by means of a tray with wheels on the bottom, and a long broom-handle.
    John Herivel recalled the unique atmosphere in the ill-ventilated and sporadically heated huts. There were the big tables, covered with maps. Then there were the spartan lights giving out yellowish light on the simple desks and the bare whitewashed walls. Mr Herivel recalls that he was ‘provided with a blackboard set on a low table’ so that he could write while seated. And before him was a desk piled with intercepted messages.
    The phrase ‘need to know’ was constantly evoked. Even for the young messenger girl, Mimi Gallilee, moving from hut to hut delivering the post and packages, entry was sometimes forbidden. Even though her older sister worked in Hut 10 alongside Josh Cooper, Mrs Gallilee recalls: ‘I never knew what my sister did in Hut 10. I never even asked her. She wouldn’t have told me anyway. She knew where I worked. Later, when I was promoted and moved into office work at the house, she never came to my department. I had to go to Hut 10 on a few occasions for my own department. I’d be asked to go over to Commander This or Squadron Leader That in Hut 10 and I’d see my sister sometimes.
    â€˜On the few occasions when I had to go over to her Hut, to talk to someone – if it was in the room she was working, I can rememberseeing pieces of paper – not slips of paper but sets of figures. And so my sister would have been working on figures or letters, I don’t know which.’
    As the work of the Park continued to expand, so too did the demands for space. The Secret Intelligence Service had now, briefly, evacuated to Bletchley. They were occupying the upper floors of the house, though thanks not only to issues of space but also to straightforward operational concerns, they did not stay long. Meanwhile, in the early days, the ground floor played host to GC&CS, with the numbers growing daily. The corridors of the house were full of trestle tables. The telephone exchange was in the ballroom. The Naval Section, for a while, had to find a temporary home in the library.
    For Dilly Knox, Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, sanctuary was found in the Cottage. By this time, Turing, then just turned twenty-eight, was already at work on the design of his revolutionary ‘bombe’ machine.
    In these first few months, the irascible Dilly Knox was beginning to take stock of the people that he had gathered around him. In a handwritten letter to Denniston, he reported of his young underlings: ‘As you know, Joan H is a great personal friend of my family and myself. But as a secretary, she is frankly a