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Company had expanded its operations into the factory next door to their own, where previously
Spirella corsets had been manufactured. These were ridiculous rigid garments for ladies that
allowed very little movement at all. But now the place was fulfilling a useful purpose, turning out
bombes.
We were introduced very briefly to Doc Keen, who in fact wasn’t a doctor at all. When he
was an apprentice, he had carried his tools in what looked like an old-fashioned doctor’s bag, so
the other apprentices called him ‘Doc’. It stuck right through his life. He was the brain behind
engineering the bombe. Turing designed it, with some help from Welchman, but Doc Keen was
the man who worked out how to actually build it.
No wonder morale at the bombe factory was low. They were even more compartmentalized
than we were. I walked into one little room and found two or three women sitting at tables; they
were repeatedly counting out piles of nineteen wires. The wires looked a bit like piano wire. I
would have needed a psychiatrist by the time I had done that for a few days. These women had
no idea what they were doing, and we could not tell them, even though I realized what the wires
were. Each of the bombe’s rotating drums had a circle of letters on the front of it, A, B, C, . . . ;
and behind each of these letters were four tiny little wire brushes, each consisting of nineteen
filaments. That’s what these poor girls were doing, counting out the nineteen filaments. Can you
imagine anything more soul-destroying?
I was myself very happy at Bletchley Park, content in the job of bombe operator. But one day
a notice appeared on a board, saying ‘The following are required to go overseas’. I didn’t want
to go one little bit. But I left Bletchley Park in April 1944, and soon I was in Ceylon, working on
Japanese codes.