The writer, the spies and leaf-mould memories by Deborah Burrows

I first visited the museum at Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, UK in 2014, and went again last month. 

It is a fascinating museum, in many ways representing the triumph of eccentricity over evil. At Bletchley a group of dedicated men and women – many of them amateurs with a gift for crosswords or mathematics – managed to decrypt German secret service messages sent over the German secret coding ‘Enigma’ machines. They did so by building their own ‘Ultra’ code-breaking machine.

The official historian of the Second World War British Intelligence, Harry Hinsley, believes that the information obtained by the code-breakers at Bletchley Park shortened the war in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and Europe by not less than two years and probably by four years. 
[Harry Hinsley, The Influence of ULTRA in the Second World War, retrieved 10 September 2017] http://www.cix.co.uk/~klockstone/hinsley.htm

The reason for this was that once the Enigma code was broken Britain was able to read all the top secret communications of the German Military Intelligence, the Abwehr. This included communications relating to the arrival of German spies into the United Kingdom. Every spy who entered the country was captured as a result. Most of these were turned into double agents under the British Double-Cross Operation. From then on, all intelligence information received by the Abwehr was false intelligence and MI5 knew exactly what the Abwehr did with it.

Obviously it was crucial that the enemy remained wholly unaware of the breaking of the Enigma codes at Bletchley Park. 

One of the most important men at Bletchley Park was MI5's Chief Cryptographer, Alfred Dillwyn "Dilly" Knox, a British Classics scholar and papyrologist at Kings College, Cambridge. He was a key figure in the breaking of the Enigma code in October 1941. He was also a close friend of Agatha Christie. 

At the very time the Bletchley Park code-breakers were working so hard to break the German Enigma code, Agatha Christie was writing her first spy thriller. “N or M” was published in 1941, simultaneously in the UK and the US. In the book, the daring detective pair, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, are recruited by Military Intelligence to find an evil fifth columnist or German spy hiding in a seaside resort.

The blurb for N or M reads:

“The final words of a dying man ... the code names of Hitler’s most dangerous agents ... the elusive clue that sends that elegant detective team, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, to a fashionable seaside resort on a mission of wartime intelligence. But not as husband and wife. As strangers, meeting by chance, setting an elaborate trap for an elusive killer.”

One of the main characters in the book is an annoying retired Indian army major who professes to have inside knowledge of the war. His name? Major Bletchley. 

Chillingly, the plot of ‘N or M’ deals with unmasking German agents who had been sent to Britain. By the time it was published, Knox’s work in breaking the Enigma code meant that all German agents sent to Britain could be unmasked. Was Christie sending a message to the Abwehr? Or was it a strange coincidence?

MI5 was concerned about the naming its top secret installation in a popular novel, but it was loath to send agents or the police to interrogate Christie about her choice of character name, as this might bring damaging publicity. They did question Knox, who was dismissive of the idea that Christie knew anything at all about what was going on at Bletchley. However, he agreed to talk to her. 

Over tea and scones at his home in Buckinghamshire, he asked Christie how she came to name her characters. Major Bletchley, for instance. Christie's reply was that she had been stuck at Bletchley Station on her way by train from Oxford to London and took revenge by "giving the name to one of my least lovable characters." [Richard Norton-Taylor (4 February 2013), Agatha Christie was investigated by MI5 over Bletchley Park mystery, The Guardian, retrieved 10 September 2017] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/04/agatha-christie-mi5-bletchley

MI5 were apparently reassured by this explanation. I am less so. In the 1940s the "Varsity Line" went between Oxford and Cambridge through Bletchley, but it seems to me a most peculiar route to go through Bletchley from Oxford to London when there was a direct Oxford-London line. However, I accept that the UK railway service was in a parlous state during the war because of the bombings. Diversions and long delays for non-military transport were common and very irksome to travellers. Perhaps Christie's explanation for the name of the character is indeed the simple truth.

Christie took character names from all sorts of places. In a letter to a fan who had asked her the origin of Miss Marple's name, she wrote that it lay in a visit to Marple Hall in Cheshire, where Christie had once bought two Jacobean Oak chairs. The children's author, Beatrix Potter, lived close to Brompton Cemetary from 1863 to 1918. Apparently she used to wander around cemetery for inspiration, and it is telling that in the graveyard are tombstones engraved with the names of Peter Rabbett, Jeremiah Fisher, Mr Nutkins, Mr Brock and Mr McGregor. The Beatles discovered Eleanor Rigby on a tombstone in a Liverpool cemetery close to Strawberry Fields.

There is another, very interesting but probably not sinister, facet to the story behind the writing of "N or M". During the Second World War, Christie lived at the Isokon building in Lawn Road, Hampstead. An avant-garde building in which reinforced concrete was used in British domestic architecture for the first time, it attracted as tenants those who wanted a minimalist lifestyle, with few possessions. It is now accepted that the building was a haunt of Soviet Russian spies. It is estimated that between the mid-1930s and mid-1940s, around twenty-five Soviet spies came to live next to each other in the Isokon. 

One of Christie's neighbours was Arnold Deutsch, a university lecturer who was the controller of the infamous group, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald McLean and Anthony Blunt. All four turned against Britain during the Second World War. [Alex Bellotti (3 April 2014) How Agatha Christie secretly lived amongst Soviet spies in Hampstead. Retrieved 10 September 2017] http://www.hamhigh.co.uk/etcetera/books/how-agatha-christie-secretly-lived-amongst-soviet-spies-in-hampstead-1-3520592

It is in that building, among those people, that Christie first tried her hand at a spy novel, so far removed from a murder in a vicarage. 
The Isokon is not a large building and Christie must have come to know her neighbours. Is it mere coincidence that she should write her first spy novel when she was living cheek by jowl with real spies? Is it coincidence that she should give a character in that novel the name of the top secret establishment where British code-breakers led by her close friend were hard at work trying to decipher Nazi messages, including those relating to German spies in Britain?

J.R.R Tolkien is quoted as saying that a story:

 “grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.” [Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (Harper Collins, 2011)]

Had Christie overheard something in the Isokon Flats that provided the seed for a story about spies? Had Dilly Knox let slip that he was popping off regularly to Bletchley Park? Or was it simply a strange coincidence that the name “Bletchley” allied to the idea of German spies slipped into the leaf-mould of her mind and took root?

[all photographs taken by me, other than the book cover which is from http://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=16728778815]

Pamela Gibson of Bletchley Park by Janie Hampton

Pamela Gibson is the oldest surviving person to have worked at Bletchley Park decoding centre during the Second World war. ‘But Bletchley was not my whole life,’ she says in her strong, velvety voice. ‘I’ve had other careers too.’ She also holds the world record for the longest ‘rest’ between jobs as an actor, proving that it’s quite possible to restart a career after 60 years.

Pamela was born in her grandmother’s drawing room in Knightsbridge in 1917, during a zeppelin raid. ‘I was almost called Zeppelina,’ she told me. Her favourite subjects at boarding school were elocution and horse-riding. ‘When the hunt came past, we all dropped our books and followed.’ Her father had been an opera singer and when she left school he sent her to Paris. There she was taught French by Yvette Guilbert, the Moulin Rouge singer portrayed by Toulouse Lautrec. After a few months improving her German in Munich, she attended the Webber Douglas Drama School. One of her first professional parts was opposite Cyril Cusack in The Playboy of the Western World. Then she went into rep; and when war broke out, into ENSA.
‘In 1941 an interfering godmother told me I was wasted on the stage and there was interesting work to be done if I applied to the Admiralty.’ Pamela was interviewed, and offered a secret job. ‘I was torn because my brother Patrick had just been captured in Libya, and was missing, so I wanted to be useful. But on the other hand, I had just been offered my first part in the West End, which was rather thrilling. I asked the man at the Admiralty who’d interviewed me, what he thought. “The stage can wait, but the war can’t,” said the man.’ So she accepted.
‘I thought it would be exciting and I’d be dropped into France as a spy. But I was sent to this big cold house called Bletchley. I suppose I was recruited because of my well to-do background. They thought that if they took in girls from families they knew something about, they were less likely to be German spies. I was very disappointed when I learned that my job was copying words onto index cards. The codes came in broken up and then we had to cross-reference them. There was a separate card for each battle ship, another for the port it was leaving, another for where it was arriving. Some days it was incredibly exciting but mostly it was quite dull, with messages about onions or something.’ Having lived on her own since she left school six years earlier, Pamela refused to live in a stuffy billet or share a room, so she rented a caravan in a field.

Bletchley Park Mansion, Buckinghamshire

By 1944 three quarters of the 9,000 workers at Bletchley Park were women. They were paid half what the men were, and only given temporary contracts. Pamela must have been outstanding as she was one of the few women who was promoted. As Head of the Index, she was in charge of 50 women in Naval Intelligence. ‘I was only promoted because I couldn’t type and at 24 I was quite old,’ she says modestly. ‘Although I was pretty fluent in German and French.’

Naval Intelligence hut, Bletchley Park.  Photo  by Toby Oxborrow.  

The tedium of long shifts was balanced with amateur dramatics, much improved by professional actors such as Pamela, and scripts written by Oxbridge graduates, such as the charming and gifted Wing Commander Jim Rose. ‘The best thing about Bletchley, was meeting Jim.’ At 32, Rose was considered too old to fly, so was put in charge of Air Intelligence at Bletchley Park. He had to decide which de-coded messages to hold back from the Air Force in case their actions then revealed to the Germans that Britain had broken the codes. On their first date, Jim took Pamela to dine at the Savoy. ‘It was very difficult to get a table, so he posed as an Irish peer whom he knew was not in London. Later we discovered that one of his friends had done the same thing, at the same place.’
They were married in 1946, a perfect match: both were cultured, generous and keen to make the post-war world a better place. They moved into a bomb-damaged square in Kensington, a few doors down from my family. When I was born, my parents asked Pamela to be my godmother. She was an unusually thoughtful one: my christening present included not only a silver mug (battered but still loved) but also a Swiss nanny for six months. Apparently Sister Klarli looked after not just me, but also my parents and my three older siblings; and was there for the arrival of my younger sister. Instead of toys for birthdays, Pamela paid for my piano lessons – a present that goes on giving. After the Roses children, Alan and Harriet, arrived, they moved to Zurich where Jim Rose was founder-director of the International Press Institute, an important global force for the freedom of the press.
For ten years after their return to London, Pamela was the school counsellor of North Paddington Comprehensive, caring for pupils who had recently arrived from the Caribbean. When she was 60 she had to retire, but didn’t give up. ‘I had to do something, so I became the vice-chair of the NSPCC,’ she said as if it was as simple as buying the weekly fish. After Jim died in 1999, Pamela, then aged 84, went back to her first career and renewed her membership of Equity, the actor's union. A few acting lessons later, she was cast as Lady Jedburgh in Lady Windermere’s Fan, directed by Peter Hall at the Haymarket Theatre. She also understudied for Googie Withers, then just 83. After only three nights, Googie Withers fell ill and Pamela was called upon to play The Duchess of Berwick. With several more parts over the next five years, she has maintained her position as the actor with the longest period of ‘resting’ between jobs. ‘It was wonderful to get back on the stage after 60 years. Acting helped me get over losing Jim. The fear of going on stage is the best defence against grief.’

Churchill described Bletchley Park as ‘the goose that laid the golden egg but never cackled’. Everyone there had signed the Official Secrets Act and until recently Pamela never spoke of her war-time career. Not even that she had known the computer scientist Alan Turing, though she insists not well. ‘He was polite and intelligent, but he really preferred the company of men.’ Even when the film Enigma about Bletchley Park was released in 2001, she only commented to a few friends, ‘We never wore hats like that.’ When The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, came out in 2014 she changed her mind. ‘I realised that everyone else was talking about it, so why shouldn’t I?’ she told me. Suddenly she was in the limelight with appearances in books and on television, and even Desert Island Discs. ‘But we don’t need to be glorified. We were all well protected and properly fed.’

The cast of The Marraige of Figaro,  Bletchley, 1943

Pamela will be 100 years young in November and remains as beautiful and chic as ever. She still entertains friends and grandchildren in the elegant Georgian house in Kensington that has changed little since she moved there 71 years ago. ‘I’ve had a lucky life,’ she says. Nonsense, I’d say it wasn’t luck, but resilience, determination and chutzpah.

www.janiehampton.co.uk

Lest We Forget... by Clare Mulley

There has been much in the press this month about Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, the impressive art installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies, each representing one British military casualty during the First world War, that flooded the Tower of London moat earlier this month. For many this was a beautiful and powerful statement of the size of Britain's sacrifice, for others, a mawkish display of nationalism. The wonderful Ring of Remembrance Notre Dame de Lorette, an elliptical structure engraved with the names of the dead of all nationalities in northern France, is another powerful but controversial war memorial. The who, what, how and why may be contentious, but what is generally agreed upon is the importance of remembering.

A while ago I was due to give a talk on the female special agents of the Second World War at Maddingley Hall, near Cambridge. En route I stopped to admire the beautiful stonework outside and bumped into a man doing the same thing. It transpired that he was Harry Gray, the stonemason, now artist, who had carved some of the pieces during restoration works several years ago. We soon discovered a shared interest in the two world wars, and fascination with the very different ways that the dead are remembered and, on occasion, honoured. A few weeks later Harry invited me, and my husband Ian, who is a sculptor, over to his studio for lunch.

Harry explaining that the foliage on Corinthian columns
are acanthus leaves, with leaf from his garden.

It turned out that Harry has worked on a number of war monuments and memorials, among other public art commissions. His first was the much admired frieze for the Animals at War memorial in Park Lane, but my favourite is the stunning Battle of Britain monument at the White Cliffs of Dover.

Approached from the ground, the Battle of Britain monument shows a young pilot, sitting, looking to the skies, calmly waiting for his call to action. Seen from above, however, from a pilot’s perspective, the figure is sitting at the centre of a propeller hewn from the white chalk of the ground. It is a beautiful and thought-provoking design that literally works on several levels, calling into question not just who these men were and what they were fighting for, but how their courage, skill and sacrifice has left a permanent mark on our country.

Pilot from the Battle of Britain monument

Battle of Britain monument from the air

Harry had only heard about the proposal for a Battle of Britain monument when he was commissioned to produce the stone base for the winning piece. Having rather cheekily asked if he could submit his own design, he was delighted to get through to the short list. Lord Tebbit, himself a former RAF pilot, was on the judging panel, and when he saw that Harry’s pilot figure was to be hewn from Forest of Dean sandstone his only comment was that it would weather badly. Harry protested that London pavements are made from sandstone, and ultimately it was Tebbit who backed his design. The Queen Mother unveiled the monument in July 1993. Earlier that day Harry had been checking everything was as it should be when he was surprised to see a woman let through the security cordons to join him at the monument statue. “At last,” she told him, “You’ve made my brother’s grave”. Her brother had fought in one of the Polish squadrons in the Battle of Britain, and had been lost over the channel.

Harry has since won many public commissions, and you can visit his website here. The current piece that speaks most loudly to me is his project for a public artwork to celebrate William ‘Bill’ Tutte’s code-breaking work at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Coded signals intercepted by Bletchey Park were printed as perforated tape, or ‘Baudot’ code. Reflecting this, Harry is producing a sculpture comprising of five steel sheets each of which are perforated like Baudot code.

Baudot code 

Harry's 'coded' metal sheets

When seen from a key viewpoint marked in the paving, the perforations reveal an image of Bill Tutte through the metal sheets. In this way the portrait image itself is encoded, with Baudot in place of DNA, showing people the essence of the man in face and form.

Bill Tutte, reduced to dots as a guide

Three of the six sample sheets for the memorial

I live in Saffron Walden, within walking distance of beautiful Audley End House which was used during the Second World War as a training base by the Cichociemni, the ‘Silent and Unseen’ Polish special forces. It has always amused me that my last biography was of one of the very few Polish-born special agents, Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, who never set foot in Audley End because she was trained and employed directly by the British. Nevertheless I am honoured that over the last few years I have been invited to lay a wreath for both Krystyna and the Cichociemni at our local war memorial on Remembrance Sunday. 

The Cichociemni are commemorated with a stone urn in the grounds of Audley End house, but I have often thought that it would be wonderful to have a more permanent memorial to Krystyna somewhere in Britain. I wonder now if it should be made from Polish soil, or how else to best capture the spirit of this passionate patriot and fighter for freedom. But then, perhaps writing biographies has its similarities with Harry's kind of art, in seeking to capture and present a picture of their subject that is more than skin deep?

I was appalled to hear this month that cuts to the Imperial War Museum budget mean that access to the library and archives, which were hugely important during my research for Krystyna's biography, is now going to be severely restricted if not closed, and the school education packages may be stopped. I find it incredible that, at this time of remembrance in particular, we can even consider risking losing one of the most important repositories of these stories. If you feel the same, please take a moment to sign the petition against these cuts, so that we can continue to remember, honour and consider, in an informed way.

Bletchley Park - Celia Rees

Now, I have to admit that I'm useless at codes and cyphers which is probably one of the reasons that I'd never visited Bletchley Park. I assumed it was a couple of huts in the grounds of a crumbling country house  with nothing much to look at when you got there. Perhaps some machinery. If you were lucky. 

I could not have been more wrong. Yes, there is a country house but it is no longer crumbling. Yes, there are huts but even though the paint is peeling and the fabric decaying they are far from dull and lifeless. They are empty now, some in dangerous condition so you can't go in them, but there is something about them that is highly evocative. It is not hard to imagine a time when they were full of activity of a top secret nature. Uniformed young men and women coming and going, civilian boffins like Alan Turing wandering around in tweed sports jackets, smoking pipes and cracking codes while   Tommy Flowers and the Dollis Hill telephone engineers were busy inventing the computer.  

Even today, something feels illicit about seeing the code breaking machines. Mysterious mechanisms  humming away, coloured wheels turning and clicking; cables dangling like loops of red spaghetti  making connections, carrying secrets. 

I did listen very carefully to the man who explained how the code was broken and I actually understood for a second or two, until it fell right out of my head like algebra in school. The intricacies of the codes, how they worked were never going to be my major point of interest. I was much more excited by the human stories here. By the ingenuity and the vision of the codebreakers who knew it was impossible to crack the Enigma encryptions head on, the possibilities ran into millions of millions. Rather, Turing thought about what the machine didn't do and the code breakers pounced on the mistakes of German operatives made complacent by the apparent invulnerability of their coding system. Even so, Enigma would have been remained just that, almost impossible to crack, without the knowledge passed on by the Polish cryptographers and mathematicians who were the first to discover how the machine worked and, as their country fell to the Germans, smuggled out their knowledge, code books and copies of the machines.

Mixed in with the day to day workings of the place are stories of great heroism. Several young sailors lost their lives capturing code books from a sinking German submarine. Their sacrifice meant that  even though the Enigma machines had been modified, the codes could still be broken. 

Over 12,000 people, 80% of them women, worked at Bletchley Park at some point in the war, yet the centre was never penetrated by German Intelligence. How do we know that? If it had been, it would have been bombed into oblivion. Churchill referred to the Bletchley staff as 'The geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled.' 

 After the war, those who had worked there kept the secret. It wasn't until the 1970s that the work done at Bletchley was revealed to the general public. By the 1990s the site had fallen into serious disrepair and might have been lost altogether but for the efforts of Milton Keynes Borough Council and the formation of the Bletchley Park Trust. The site opened to the public as a museum in 1993 and the work goes on to open more of the huts and to re-build the machines that broke Enigma

Never in my wildest historical fantasies do I see myself as a member of the Bletchley Circle (despite the outfits). Cryptography is really not my thing. If I invented a code, it would be very different. Nevertheless, Bletchley has me hooked. I have my year long pass. I'll be back! 

Celia Rees' latest novel, This is Not Forgiveness is published in the U.K. by Bloomsbury and in the U.S. by Bloomsbury U.S. and has been long listed for the Carnegie Medal and for the U.K. Literary Association Book Award.

www.celiarees.com