Well the first thing obviously one has to say is that all this was a very long time ago and we’re now quite old, we’ve just celebrated our 80^th birthdays, both my husband and I. So it is very difficult to recall, particularly since none of us have been allowed to speak about any of the things we did since the 1940s. So I’ve had to think very hard to try and remember how it all fitted together and if there are inaccuracies, I’m very sorry but I can’t help it.

So the start was that I was 17 when I decided I wanted to be a ballet dancer. Went to Sadler’s Wells, and had all the greats like Margot Fonteyn, Robert Helpman, was taught by Ninette de Valois. It was a red-hot period to be there, quite wonderful. But at the end of, I don’t know how many, 6 months maybe, I was said to be too tall. So they said if you want to be in the corps de ballet, you have to be no more than 4 foot 8 and by that time I was about 5 foot 8, so obviously that was out of the count.

So then, that was unbelievably disappointing, and I was still only 17, so what to do next? Well, I did have a place in the Michel St Denis’s Acting School, but for some reason I decided I didn’t want to take it up, didn’t want to go on being a student. So I was sent off to learn German. And this was a rather curious choice, it was my parents’ choice and because this was 1939, it wasn’t possible to go to Germany to learn German, it was considered too dangerous. So I went to Switzerland, with a friend, and we stayed in a very boring place called Richlicon, outside Zurich, and we used to go in to our German lessons every day in Zurich. One day when we were catching our train, I saw these wonderful photographs of St Moritz and the snows, and I rang up my parents and said, "What on earth are we doing in Richlicon, when we could be in St. Moritz." They got the wind up because they thought they had found some rather suitable people for us to live with, and they hadn’t any idea how to find anyone suitable in St Moritz. Anyway the long and the short of it is, we did go to St Moritz, we did a great deal of skiing, we did a good deal less German than we might have, had we been staying in Zurich, but anyway we were there for about 3 months. Then we came back, and then there was a very useless period, I think, when we became debutantes. And I cordially disliked more or less everybody I met during that period, and I thought it was a complete waste of time. But it seemed to be the general pattern of quite a number of the girls who eventually fetched up at Bletchley.

And then the war started and I did a secretarial course, which again was thought to be a good preparation for doing something useful. And at the end of that time, two of my great friends wrote to me from Bletchley and said, "Well, we really need you here, Jane, we’re desperately short of staff, and what we’re doing is rather important." And by this time – this was February 1940 – we had just discovered how to break the Enigma, which was the German operational code. So quite suddenly everything took off at Bletchley, and I went for an interview with a charming fellow called Stewart Milner-Barry, who was an academic from Cambridge. A great many of the academics were from Cambridge, and they were nearly all dons – and he was the English chess champion. He was terribly shy, he didn’t know what to say to me, but he did take in that I had learnt some German, and that I had done a secretarial course and I had got friends there already. Because there was no advertising, of course, for recruitment. It was called, this Bletchley place, the Government Code and Cipher School. And it was known by some of us inside it as the Golf Club and Chess Society, because we were always putting out blinds about what we were doing and who we were. So he said, "Yes, well I think we can offer you a job." So I came along and I was interviewed by the man in charge who was called Commander Dediston, who was very firm Scotsman. And he pointed out that what we were doing was not only very important, but extremely secret, and we had to sign the Official Secrets Act and we were never to say anything about it. So that was a good beginning. And then I was introduced to these strange dons, and maybe I won’t bother you with their names, but they have become very famous. And they were, some of them, rather eccentric. Possibly the most brilliant of all was a man called Dilley Knox, who was so absent minded that he used to stuff sandwiches into his pipe, instead of tobacco. And there was another very well known, brilliant man who was said to have really invented the modern computer called Alan Turing. And he used to sit on the edge of the lake drinking his cups of tea, mugs of tea, and when he’d finished, he couldn’t think what to do with them so he used to throw them in the lake. So they were an eccentric crowd.

And I was put into Hut 6, which was where everything happened in fact, and I was terribly lucky to be there. And Hut 6 was structured in such a way that we had the organisational Preliminary Room, in which the messages, which came in by courier, were sorted out and given to the Registration Room. The Registration Room was full of female graduates, nearly all from Newnham College Cambridge, because Milner-Barry’s sister was the Vice-Principal, and they were known as the Blisters. I can’t quite remember why, but these frightfully clever graduates were known as the Blisters. And they had to sort through this massive amount of messages and decide which ones should go to who. Well then the next thing in the chain was the Code Breakers’ Room and that was where the most eccentric and the most brilliant people worked and they were possibly the most important people in the whole set-up. Because had they not broken the Enigma Code, we would never have been able…I think we wouldn’t have won the war in fact. Anyway, they went through these messages and when they thought they had broken them, or in other words, when they had broken them, they weren’t interested in reading them, they were only interested in finding whether 2 or 3 words turned themselves into German, from the sort of gobbledegook that they arrived in, and then they passed them onto us. And we were called the Machine Room. Well the formidable thing about the Machine Room, which was an extremely important operation, because we had to turn gobbledegook into German. And there were only 6 girls, 6 of us, between the German High Command and Whitehall, so we were in a position of great responsibility, and I think the most important thing it did for all of us was to give us a work ethos, which I suppose we’ve never forgotten, that when you’re doing an important job you just get on with it. So quite early on I realised that sleep didn’t really come into our pattern of things at all. We very often worked sixteen hour shifts, and we quite often worked twenty four hour shifts, and we hardly ever had any leave, except… what we used to do was, when we had worked from midnight to eight – there were 3 shifts, midnight to eight, eight to four and four to midnight – and when we had worked on the midnight to eight shift, we then used to catch the train up to London, and I used to go and meet Teddy in London. And I was fairly exhausted and so was he, and then in the evening we came back for the midnight shift again and got on with it.

When we did have a little time off, which was very occasionally, I had a little motor bicycle called The Famous James. And the Famous James was not a long distance kind of motor bicycle at all – I think it was called a two stroke, or maybe it was a four stroke, I can’t remember. Anyway, it kept breaking down and I used to make these journeys between Bletchley and my home, which was a village called Ugley in Essex. And what happened was the plugs heated up and the thing stopped, so and I then had to – I discovered the formula – I just had to sit in the ditch, wait for the thing to cool down, and then I went off again. So The Famous James was very useful to me and I enjoyed my journeys through the cornfields, and I also had a bicycle and my first – oh no I haven’t gone onto Hut 3. I must talk about Hut 3 first.

When we had decoded these messages, we had to decide whether in fact they were turning into German, so we had to know a bit of German, because otherwise it wouldn’t have made any sense. And if we had managed to produce a German message, of course we looked to see whether it was from Rommel, or even from Hitler, both of which went through our hands. We then handed them through a little tunnel into the next hut, which was called Hut 3 and this was where the linguists were. And they not only had to turn these messages into understandable German, but they had to decide where to send them to. And we had a direct line to Whitehall of course which started by being a telephonic communication and then it was thought that was too dangerous so we then had teleprinters and I expect they were quite dangerous too. But the fact is, nobody knew what we were doing so they can’t have been that dangerous. And there was a good deal of coming and going of course between the 6 girls in Hut 6 Machine Room, the Graduates, the Blisters, also in Hut 6, and the men, because they were all men, in the Hut 3 Department. And one of my friends, who was called Diana Russell-Clark, who had a Bentley and dashed around the country in her Bentley and I regret to say was quite often seen in the Bentley with…somebody. And she married a charming mathematician, who was a Fellow of Kings’ College Cambridge, called Dennis Babbage. But within a few months, a very charming much older historian called Geoffrey Barraclough kept coming through the door, and in no time at all, she had given up Dennis Babbage and gone over to Geoffrey Barraclough, and as far as I know she’s still Mrs Barraclough. She became Mrs Barraclough before she actually got married because in those days you didn’t actually live with other people, especially not married men. So she produced quite a lot of interest for all of us. And of course she wasn’t the only one who was doing this.

Well now, the business about not speaking was something that was instilled into all of us. When I went there, there were only two hundred of us and so we had a very personal warning that we must never speak. But by the end of the War there were 7000, and a lot of them were in the Armed Forces, in fact the majority of them. A lot of them hadn’t been there very long, we jacked up the numbers very abruptly when we were preparing for D-Day for example. And the amazing thing is that none of them said anything. And at one point, in 1941, Churchill came down to see us. He was a great supporter of ours and he recognised that what we were doing was of unique importance for the war. And he gave us a little speech and he said, "You are the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled." Which was a very good statement. That was in September 1941.

Well shortly after that, my boss, Milner-Barry and about 5 of the other senior members of staff became so desperate at the degree of understaffing and underequipment that they decided to write a letter to Churchill. And Milner-Barry decided to take it up to 10 Downing Street. And when he got to 10 Downing Street, he was intercepted eventually by Churchill’s private secretary, who said, "Who are you and what do you want?" Well, he couldn’t say what he wanted, because he was bound by the Official Secrets Act, and his name didn’t convey anything, so he wasn’t allowed to see Churchill, but his letter was conveyed to Churchill. Immediately Churchill issued one of his great directives and he said, this was to General Ismay, who was the Chief of General Staff, "Make sure that they have all they want. Report to me that this has been done. Extreme priority." And across it he had written, "Action this day." So after that I suppose our numbers in the machine room might have gone up from 6 to 12, I can’t remember – but anyway I think at that point I should tell you what the equipment was like.

We were working in sheds, there was no heating in them, except one or two of them had coke boilers which smoked so we had to keep the windows open to let the smoke out. And we all worked in coats and mittens and it was bitterly cold in the winter, and rather hot in the summer because there were quite a lot of windows, and they had no insulation in these sheds at all. They had concrete floors, we worked on trestle tables, we had unshaded lightbulbs, we had no curtains if course. Furthermore, we had to go out at night – and you remember that everything was blacked out – to the canteen, which was in the big house. Well, in order to do that we had to negotiate a lake, it’s amazing we didn’t all fall into the lake, lots of bushes and mud and all sorts of things. So the conditions were really quite rough.

Well then the billets. I was first billeted with a charming young family. He was a driver for the London Brick Company and it was a Council House and I slept in a sort of cupboard. They had two little boys who were extremely noisy, very lively, below school age so they were very noisy all day and I was trying to sleep half the time because I was on night shifts, and I found this very difficult. There was also this ghastly smell of brick smoke because we were more or less under the chimneys of the London Brick Company, which I think is the largest brick company –well, it was then anyway – in England. So this acrid smell poured out of them. And eventually my father had some rather well-heeled friends called Bonser, and he was called Sir Reginald Bonser, and he had the great good fortune to be married to a Hambro, as in Hambros Bank, and they had a rather beautiful house called Liscombe Park near Leighton Buzzard, and when they heard about me sleeping in a cupboard and all this, they said, "Well, we’re finding it rather difficult to get staff at the moment, so perhaps you’d like to borrow our Staff Wing with some of your friends." So we did. And the Staff Wing didn’t have very much furniture but it was a great improvement on the council house of course. But the trouble there was that there was this complete divide between their lifestyle and ours and the gardeners used to appear at the back door, and my bedroom was immediately above the back door, and make a big noise thumping their boots and banging on the door and so on, bringing in the vegetables while I was trying to sleep. And although they said they couldn’t get any staff, nevertheless they kept up a very good standard of living, and we were slumming it next door in the staff wing. And the other thing which was very uncomfortable was that we had to catch these buses in the middle of the night if we were on night shift. So at midnight we used to have to walk, in total darkness, down these lanes in order to get to the point where the bus was supposed to pick us up. And that, I still remember, as being quite a dicey thing to have to do. And I suppose there was a huge network of these – in fact there was – buses, going around the countryside picking us all up. Some of our dons were billeted in some of the pubs and I think they had rather more fun than we did in the staff wing. And there was a famous pub, at a place called Great Brickhill, which was the Duncan Arms, in which a number of them lived, and it became known as the Drunken Arms, naturally, and a lot of fun went on there. So I think that gives you a very rough outline of the sort of pressures we worked under, the responsibilities we had.

We did occasionally have a little time off and I think in a way we were rather like people in the prison camps: we were an entirely closed society and had to be. I mean, they didn’t really want us to go out at all because they thought that anybody we met there might be a danger of us saying something silly. So we had these Societies, and most of us belonged to most of them, and I was very keen of course, being a dancer, on the Scottish Dancing Society. And this was run by a charming, absolutely eccentric man called Hugh Fosse, who was also an academic from Cambridge, but he had run the Chelsea Reel Society which was rather well thought of. And he used to dress up in this ludicrous way with these Scottish brogues with laces going halfway up his leg, and then he put on a kilt of course, rather a short kilt, and pranced around, and we all thought he was wonderful. That was great fun. And then there was a Choral Society, and we put on plays and pantomimes of course, all rather silly but they were quite fun for us. And we all used to play a lot of rounders which was a terribly silly game, and we didn’t have any posts so we used the trees as posts, and there was always a lot of argument about whether somebody had got to the spruce or whether they had been caught out when they’d only just left the oak, this kind of thing. So anyway that was all fun.

But what were we doing? What was the serious work? So I’ll now start to tell you a little about that bearing in mind that I only know very little, because we were never told anything, we were only told what we were doing, and we just got on with it. Because, as I say, it did create this great sense of commitment that we knew that the spend with which we worked depended on maybe saving thousands of lives.

So first of all, the Blitz. We were very deeply involved in this because we got the Luftwaffe’s strategic orders and intercepted all their tactical intelligence. And this was the time when they were doing this annihilating bombing on various of our – it so happened they were the historic towns but it didn’t matter much – so we had Plymouth, we had Birmingham, we had Liverpool, we had Coventry and above all we had London. And we were able – if we worked very, very hard and if the codebreakers were very lucky – to get through the information to Whitehall before lunchtime. And this was our darkest hour when we were absolutely on our beam ends and very nearly sunk. And we had very few anti-aircraft guns but it did enable us to move the anti-aircraft guns from Plymouth to Coventry, say, for the next raid the next night. So minutes were of the essence and it was a terribly exciting period to be working. And we got a lot of advance information about the London Blitz of course. But the tragic thing was that we were really so hopelessly ill-equipped that we were able to do very little about it. But I think it was a help.

The next thing was the sinking of the Bismarck. And the Bismarck was the crack German battleship, quite new, and it was up in one of the Norweigan fjords. And at this time, we had some trouble in persuading the Admiralty that what we were telling them was really true because it seemed so improbable that we should know in advance exactly what the Germans were going to do. They tended to think it was a lot of rubbish, so we told them that the Schanhorst and the Kanneisenhau were coming out of the Baltic to attack our fleet in the North Sea. And this was the time when we were desperate for loss of merchant ships, and we very nearly died of starvation and it was therefore terribly important to intercept them. They didn’t listen to us and the Admiralty failed to believe us and HMS Glorious, which was our crack aircraft carrier, and two destroyers, were sunk by the Kanneisenhau and the Schanhorst, with the loss of 1500 men. And we felt very bitter about that because it was entirely unnecessary. Well then in the spring of 1941, the Bismarck was expected to come out from the Baltic and attack our convoys. And the Bismarck and the Prince Eugen, which was their newest cruiser, came out. And they were attacked by the Hood, which was sunk, and the Prince of Wales which was badly damaged, so it wasn’t a very successful encounter, but then the Bismarck escaped and disappeared and I was on duty all that night and the next day when we were trying to find out where she was going so that we could intercept her before she safely into port and we intercepted a message from the Luftwaffe’s Chief of Staff, who was worried about his son, who was on the Bismarck, and he was asking where she was going. And we intercepted the message, saying she was going to Brest, to get safely into harbour. So this time the Admiralty did believe us, and they intercepted her and they sunk her. And that was entirely our Hut 6 and Hut 3 initiative, and it was very exciting indeed.

Well the next thing was the Battle of the Atlantic – that was all sort of preliminary to the Battle of the Atlantic. And in July 1941 we managed to break the Naval Enigma code, which we had not previously managed to get into and it as said that as a result we saved one and a half million tonnes of shipping. And the losses from the U-boats dropped from 282,000 tonnes a month sunk in the summer of 1941 to 62,000 tonnes by November. It was said to be entirely our doing. And it was said that by attacking the U-boat menace we had taken 4 years off the length of the war. So that was a big moment. It was an amazingly exciting thing to be involved in because one knew enough to realise that what one was doing did actually make a difference. And that was, as I say, our darkest hour when we very nearly starved to death, with the U-boat campaign. And Teddy’s father was involved in the Asdic which was the other great breakthrough for the Atlantic War.

The next thing was the North African campaign. And we managed through our Enigma, which was also called Ultra, to send information on all Rommel’s supply convoys from Italy, reinforcing his troops in North Africa. And this enabled the Navy and the RAF to sink most of them and had a very substantial effect on Rommel’s ability to win the war. We also were able to supply information, which went direct to Montgomery on the movements that Rommel was planning, so that Montgomery was therefore able to plan his counter-attack and eventually to win the war. And it was said after this that Ultra was one of the main reasons behind the British defeat of the Afrika Corps and it showed that it was a powerful weapon and that it could win the war. So there was no more nonsense from Whitehall that they didn’t believe what we were saying any more. They recognised that it was an absolutely vital source of information.

So then we came to the D-Day landings, June 1943 (1944). Well by that time our staff had been substantially increased to 7000 to prepare for the invasion and, of course, no one was supposed to know anything about what was happening. And they were said to have recruited the whole output from the Scottish Universities, all ladies, all wearing tweeds and flat shoes, which were known as butter spreaders. And they were an absolutely formidable addition to our strength.

Well we were instrumental in convincing Hitler that our main invasion was going to be in the Pas de Calais. And not only were we dropping bundles of straw, which were simulating paratroopers, but we were also launching dummy boats across the Channel in the Pas de Calais, but we were also informing them that this was where our invasion was going to be. The result of which was that Rommel with two divisions went up to the Pas de Calais area and left the Normandy beaches, and it took him 3 days to get back and those 3 vital days just helped us to get a foothold and make a landing. And you’ll be hearing a lot more about the landing because Teddy was right in at the very beginning of bombarding the German positions, but fortunately because we had told them that we were going to be invading in the Pas de Calais, the positions that he was bombing from the sea were not manned, because they’d all gone off to the Pas de Calais. So it was very interesting the way the things that we were both doing had a big interplay. And when the actual landings were taking place, one signal from Hut 3 was able to move a whole airborne division which was going to be landed among the German troops and saved 15,000 men, so that was a great initiative. But anyway Ultra told us the complete German order of battle and it was said that Operation Overlord, which was what the D-Day landings were called, could not have been won without the contribution of Ultra. So that was something.

And then we had VE Day and we were all disbanded. I had incidentally had a short period when I was seconded to the Naval division during the War of the Atlantic because they were desperately short of staff and they had just managed to break the Naval Enigma Code, so that was very exciting too. And after VE Day I was transferred to the Japanese Department in London at Berkeley Street and they wanted us all to go down to Bedford and learn Japanese in preparation for being sent out to the Far East. And I thought, "Well I’ve spent God knows how many years in Bletchley", and the idea of having to go and spend 6 months in Bedford to learn Japanese didn’t really appeal to me, so I didn’t do that.

So I left and went to the Royal Academy of Music and became a singer. Well when I left, I had an interview with the man who was then the boss, who was called Travis, and I had to sign the Official Secrets Act again, and this is what he said, not just to me but as a statement: "I cannot stress too highly the necessity for the maintenance of security, which is as vital as ever not to relax from the high standard of security that we have hitherto maintained. The temptation now to own up to our friends and families as to what our work has been is a very real one. It must be resisted absolutely." And it was. End of story.