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

and you always managed to keep in touch. The most lovely man, Mr Gibbs, the head hall porter at Claridge’s, knew exactly where all
our boyfriends were. He used to say: “Hello, Miss Norton. Lord Hartington’s back. He said he would see you here later. I think he said six o’clock.” Soof course I was back there by six o’clock. It was so nice to have a boyfriend.’
    But there was absolutely no way that any of them were prepared to have sex before marriage.
    ‘We just didn’t think of that at all. We were brought up to what my mother used to call “behave nicely”. The boys could kiss you on the cheek, but not much more. We knew
what the more daring girls were doing but as far as I was concerned it was all much too frightening for me to do it. You were supposed to go to the marriage bed as a virgin. There was no such thing
as birth control so if a girl got pregnant, she married almost immediately.’
    Their favourite haunt was the 400, a nightclub on Leicester Square where you could dance all night. It was very small, but it was members only and there was live music every night.
    ‘As days off were so precious and time so short I usually took the milk train from Euston back to Bletchley at five o’clock in the morning, arriving in time for the 9am watch a bit
bleary-eyed and hoping the head of the watch would find my work satisfactory and not notice I was a bit overdressed.’
    The intelligence on the German U-boats and attacks on the Allied convoys was still coming mainly from messages sent in low-level codes and clear text messages analysed by
Jocelyn Bostock and Susie Henderson. They’d been joined by a young man called Harry Hinsley, one of the graduates recruited by Commander Denniston from Cambridge.
    Slight and bespectacled, Harry was about as far as it was possible to get in social terms from the well-to-do youngwomen like Sally and Osla who made up a substantial
proportion of the early recruits to Bletchley. He came from Walsall in the Black Country, where his father drove a horse and cart, ferrying iron ore and finished metal goods back and forth between
the railway and the local ironworks. Phoebe Senyard immediately developed a soft spot for him.
    ‘I can remember quite well showing Harry some of the sorting and how delighted he seemed when he began to recognise the different types of signals. Those were very enjoyable days indeed.
We were all very happy and cheerful, working in close cooperation with each other. If I was in difficulty, I knew I could go to Harry. It was a pleasure because he was always interested in
everything and took great pains to find out what it was and why.’
    The intelligence analysts in the Admiralty who plotted the movements of enemy shipping had been ignoring Jocelyn and Susie, and the increasing amount of intelligence they were managing to glean
from the intercept logs flowing in from the wireless sites at Winchester and Scarborough. The Admiralty analysts weren’t as skilled as Bletchley at analysing radio communications. They
didn’t understand how Hut 4 had worked out the intelligence, so they didn’t believe it. There was some hope in Hut 4 that Harry would make a difference, that the Admiralty would listen
to a man in a way that they wouldn’t listen to Jocelyn and Susie. But it made no difference at all. Two young girls and a weedy student in corduroy trousers and a pullover knitted by his
mother. What could they know?
    The situation came to a head in June 1940. Harry, Jocelyn and Susie had been reporting that the German battlecruisers
Gneisenau
and
Scharnhorst
had left
the Baltic to track the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet. The Admiralty refused to tell the Home Fleet because their analysts didn’t agree. On Friday 7 June 1940, Harry spent much of the day
trying to persuade the duty captain to send out a warning. He refused. On the following day, the
Gneisenau
and the
Scharnhorst
attacked the Royal Navy’s aircraft carrier HMS
Glorious
and her