126 | 12 BOmBES
that we don’t know about ourselves’, they said. ‘We haven’t been told, so we can’t pass it on to
you—but we have been told to look for girls like you. So tomorrow you are going to London—
where you will be told. Dismissed.’
The next day I got into an express train for the first time in my life and travelled from my
native Scotland to London. There I saw Underground trains—I didn’t even know they existed.
I reported to a depot in Earls Court, where I waited a week. One day some of us went to the
Houses of Parliament and I heard Mr Churchill speak. He stood up to start his speech, but was
a bit incoherent, and somebody said ‘Sit down, Winnie’. So he sat down, and that was the end of
that. Eventually we received orders to report to Eastcote. They told us that we were the first five
‘watch-keepers’ to be sent there.
Our new quarters at Eastcote were filthy, because the builders had been camping out in them,
waiting to leave—which was why we had had to wait in Earls Court. I was shown into a room and
told to clean it up, then given a spanner and told to erect two-tier bunks. Next day, we were taken
to the working part of the establishment. We walked into a room and my heart sank when I saw
a huge machine, about 8 feet long and nearly 7 feet tall.
I wondered how on earth I was going to reach this gigantic machine’s highest parts. That’s what
the ‘Stand up, Sit down’ business had been all about—to see if I would be tall enough to operate
the machine. I discovered later that there was a height minimum, but in my case the panel at
Tullichewan seemed to have waived it. I stood diminutively beside the machine and the people
there said ‘Oh dear’. But a large block of wood was produced, and standing on that I could reach
everything well enough.
With 108 revolving drums at the front of the bombe, and a mass of wires and plugs and
whatnot at the back, it was quite a frightening machine, especially for someone who didn’t know
very much at all about machinery of any kind. But actually, once you learned to use the bombe, it
really didn’t present much of a problem.
We weren’t told about Enigma, but we were told that we were helping to break into encrypted
German messages. So we knew we were doing something important.
After my training I was sent to Bletchley Park. This was in the autumn of 1943. We drove there
in an estate car, about ten of us, and walked the final hundred yards or so to Hut 11A, at that time
the Bombe Room. There were five or six bombes inside. We relieved the women who were on
duty and spent the next 8 hours working at the bombes, with only a half-hour break in the middle
in which to wander up to the Mansion for a quick meal.
I never saw the rest of Bletchley Park, nor even the rest of the Mansion—I saw only those
few yards between the Mansion and the hut where I worked. The organization was completely
compartmentalized. You didn’t go to anybody else’s hut, nor they to yours. When you took your
meal in the Mansion it was a help-yourself affair (something else I’d never come across before)
and you sat down randomly at a table with two or three other people. These might have been
fellow Wrens, or civilians, or even officers—there was no hierarchy at all. You talked about the
weather, or the films showing in the local cinemas, never about work. To be at Bletchley Park
during the war was an isolating experience.
On one occasion we were invited to give up a precious day off in order to visit the factory of
the British Tabulating Machine Company in Letchworth, where the bombes were manufactured.
We said ‘Well, why?’, and were told that morale was so low in the factory that the workers
needed something to cheer them up. ‘But don’t tell them what they’re doing’, we were cautioned.
‘Don’t tell them what you’re doing, don’t tell them anything, just go and . . . cheer them up’. A few
of us piled into a station wagon and off we went to Letchworth. The British Tabulating Machine