The unfortunate title of Michael Smith’s The Debs of Bletchley Park suggests that he might be veering down the same alleyway. And she is as excited by a title as a 1930s dowager: I lost count of the times that Jean Fforde is introduced with some breathless reference to her ducal forbears. Yet Dunlop’s flat-footed attention to social pecking orders obscures the broader wartime achievement that saw women of all backgrounds working together – at Bletchley too (as Dunlop’s interviewees, when they are given space, make clear). Billets in Woburn Abbey, for example, were snapped up by the posher girls and the rest had to make do with local lodgings. It is true that Bletchley was marked by a degree of class difference, as was the world outside it. She cannot resist inserting her own sometimes patronising embellishments: one woman has an “impish grin”, another “a coquettish giggle” of a third, “even at the age of 11, little Betty was a realist”.ĭunlop is also obsessed by class – in the manner of one treading uneasily in the foreign territory of a past where she believes people thought of nothing else. There is too much of her and not enough of her interviewees. These have yielded some good stuff, especially on the particular intensity of wartime sexual relationships: Alan Turing’s homosexuality was common knowledge among the girls, she was told, and regarded with sympathy: “BP was avant garde and I was young and picked up on the feeling among people that this was perfectly normal.” It went on and on, ticking, ticking.”ĭunlop has interviewed some of those Bletchley women still alive and draws on one or two unpublished diaries. “I would get up every morning with dread. In 1944, the sick rate at Bletchley was more than 4%: the monotony of her work (“If you can call it a job, ticking boxes”) drove Jean Fforde to the brink of a nervous breakdown. Ann Mitchell cycled 10 miles to her night-shift every day, sustained by a cup of Oxo and a boiled egg.
For most of the women at Bletchley, the work was indeed grindingly dull and monotonous and made more so by their having no idea to what purpose they were collating information.
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