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

always.’
    She wore a different dress to each event and they were much more fashionable ones, made for her by Victor Stiebel, one of Britain’s most famous designers, who was so fascinated by the
possibilities of Sally’s long legs and 18½-inch waist that he dressed her for free, while her godfather Lord Louis Mountbatten paid for a ‘wonderful’ Coming Out Ball at his
Park Lane home.
    The onset of war saw Sally working as a journalist for
Vogue
magazine, for five shillings a week (which barely covered the cost of travel), while writing dispatches from London for the
Baltimore Sun
. But eventually she and her close friend and fellow debutante Osla Benning, then regarded as one of the most beautiful women in London, decided to go to Slough and work at
the Hawker Siddeley aircraft factory, which was building Hurricane fighter aircraft for the RAF.
    ‘Osla and I wanted to do something really important, and we thought: making aeroplanes. So we trooped off to the Slough trading estate – ghastly place – and said here we are.
We want to make an aeroplane.’
    They lived with Sally’s father, Richard, now separated from her mother and working as an executive at Pinewood Studios. He had a cottage nearby and it was here that
Sally introduced Osla to a young man who was to be her boyfriend for the next three years. Lord Mountbatten had asked his goddaughter if she could find a girlfriend for his young nephew, Prince
Philip of Greece.
    ‘Uncle Dickie said to me: “I don’t think Philip’s got a girlfriend at the moment. I wish you could find a nice girl for him because he doesn’t know anyone.”
Osla didn’t have a boyfriend at the time, so I said: “I know, I’ll get them together.”’
    Early in 1941, Sally and Osla, who was also fluent in German, received a letter ordering them to report to Bletchley Park, to Commander Denniston’s deputy Edward Travis. Having spent most
of her life in a magnificent country house designed by William Adam, Sally was distinctly unimpressed by the Bletchley mansion – ‘an ugly Victorian monstrosity’ – where
Commander Travis welcomed them and told them they would be working in the German Naval Section in Hut 4.
    Probably because of their backgrounds, they were put up in a beautiful Queen Anne house in Aspley Guise eight miles to the east of Bletchley Park. ‘We were very lucky, Osla and I. We were
billeted with two darling elderly people who looked after us beautifully. They were marvellous really, very good to us. Kind. They never complained. The large garden was unattended except for
vegetables and in the summer the grass grew so long you could sunbathe topless without being seen.’
    Sally and Osla’s initial role was alongside a number of other well-to-do women working in the Index, logging down various details from the decoded messages, such as
facts about individual U-boats, on file cards held in what looked like long shoe boxes.
    ‘Each time a signal came in and was translated, you had to put down the salient points in that signal, such as the name of the U-boat commander on one card, the number of the U-boat on
another, the coordinates or the person; anything related to that signal went on different cards. Nobody explained anything. Within a couple of days we realised that this information had been
obtained by codebreaking but even then we had no idea of the whole picture.’
    The Index had to be operational twenty-four hours a day, so they worked in two shifts, a day shift and a very long night shift. ‘The night watches were pretty awful. They were called
watches because we were the Naval Section and the navy has watches not shifts.’
    On their days off, they rushed up to London on the train, making the most of every minute. Sally was going out with Billy Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington, one of the most eligible
bachelors in the country, who had taken a commission in the Coldstream Guards.
    ‘Sometimes boyfriends would be back from the war