Anne Chetwynd-Stapylton

I was in a train on a hot July day in 1941, heading for Bletchley, now part of Milton Keynes. I had joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) as a writer, which is what the Navy calls secretaries and clerks. I had completed my month-long initial training in London and was travelling with three other newly-fledged Wrens, all equally bewildered as to why we should have been sent about as far from the sea as it’s possible to get in this country.  
When we arrived at Bletchley station we were met by a leading Wren and marched up to a perimeter fence with sentries standing guard. We were then taken to an office in a grand Victorian mansion where we were told that the work we were going to be doing was of the utmost secrecy and vital to the war effort, and we were required to sign the official secrets act. One was left with the distinct impression that contravening it would mean a spell in the Tower at the very least. Next we were escorted across the large grounds to a concrete hut, and had to press a bell and wait to be admitted. When we went inside I was immediately aware of the large back machines making a terrible din and smelling of hot oil. These were the bombes, which were essential to the breaking of the German Enigma codes.
On that first day we were soon taken off to our billets in private houses in the area. I was billeted about 8 miles from Bletchley, at Old Bradwell in a council house with Mr and Mrs Bunce. Mr Bunce was a retired railway worker and his wife was a neat little woman with grey hair scarped back in a bun. I found that another girl, Anne Marcel, was billeted there too. It must have been hard work for Mrs Bunce, providing meals for us at all sorts of strange hours. What I remember most was having enormous slices of fried bread such as I had never seen, with our breakfast. They were delicious. At Christmas, the first one I’d ever spent away from my family, the other Anne must have had leave, and I must have been on evening or night watch, because I remember that while Mrs Bunce cooked Christmas lunch, Mr Bunce took me to the pub – another first for me. When he asked me what I would drink I hadn’t a clue what to ask for, so ordered something I knew my mother sometimes drank, gin and orange. After several of these I don’t think I remembered much about Christmas lunch.
Work in the bombe hut went on 24 hours a day and we worked 8 hour watches with one meal break. The first week was from 8 am to 4 pm, the second 4pm to midnight and the third midnight to 8 am, with one day off each week. On the fourth week we worked everybody else’s days off and then had 4 days leave. There were two Wrens to each machine and our job was to change the wheel orders, which has a different colour for each number, in accordance with the list given by the code breakers in Huts 6 and 8. They also dictated how the alphabetised sockets on the back of the machine should be connected to each other. The piece of paper given to us for this purpose was called, interestingly, a menu- the same word we have for starting points on our computers today. Once all this had been done the machine was started up and it clanked and whirred and eventually it would stop. We noticed the wheel order running at that time and the position at which it had stopped and phoned it through to Hut 6 and 8. This could go for hours or even days, with several machines working on the same job, but eventually the cry would be heard: ‘Job up’, which meant they had a match. Occasionally the job didn’t come up and was abandoned because the next day’s settings would now be in operation.
It was quite physical work, plugging and unplugging the menu, working as fast as we could to change the wheel orders and, most importantly, checking the drums when we took them off the machine. The underside of each drum had four circular rows of small wire brushes which had to be kept in a state of perfection. A stray wire could cause a short and distort all the information gathered by the machine, so we had to straighten them with wire tweezers. I don’t think all that close work did our eyesight much good and the noise in Hut 11 properly affected our hearing, too.
It was a long way for me to travel home to Yorkshire for my four days off and expensive too, when my pay was 14 shillings (70p) a week. So mostly I came home only when I had a week’s leave, tacked on to the four days, when I used one of my four annual rail passes and travelled free. Sometimes I spent my four days leave going home with other Wrens or with relatives or family friends whose homes were not too far away. Once I stayed with a cousin in Sussex who said on my arrival that I looked tired and perhaps I’d like to have a rest before supper. I went to bed and the next thing I know it was 11 pm and there was a plate of sandwiches and a thermos of Ovaltine by my bed. Having polished those off I went back to sleep again till 7.30 next morning.
Often when I went on leave with my friends we would hitch-hike to save money. There wasn’t a huge amount of traffic during the war because of petrol rationing, and we usually ended up in the cab of a lorry. It properly sounds to modern ears a reckless thing to do, but we thought nothing of it and never had any unpleasantness but only kindness from the lorry drivers who often went out their way to drop us near to where we wanted to go. Sometimes we spent our four days, or part of it, in London which was only about 50 miles away. There were various hostels for service women where we used to stay. There was also a kiosk in Trafalgar Square where there were free theatre tickets available for members of the armed forces, for that evening’s performance, and we often took advantage of those.
The number of machines that we operated expanded quickly and those of us who were at Bletchley in the early days won quick promotion, so that I was a leading Wren within 6 months and a Petty Officer (at the age of 19) not long after that. Bletchley Park wasn’t big enough to allow for more huts to be built, as there were many other, different kinds of intelligence work going on. So outstations were formed, usually in large country houses in the area with special huts built for the bombes, though there were two big purpose-built outstations at Eastcote and Stanmore, near London. The first outstation I went to wasn’t far from Bletchley, at a village called Wavendon. It was now time to leave the billet with the Bunces as all of us Wrens were installed in proper quarters and the first one I was in was at Walton Hall, now the headquarters of the Open University. Later we lived in Wavendon House itself.
After a while, when I was back in Bletchley Park itself, one of the senior mechanics, who were all ex-Post Office engineers and who sorted out the many mechanical problems with the running of the bombes, noticed that I was taking an interest in the way the machines worked, and the result was that I became a technician, mostly rewiring plugs and doing various muddane tasks, leaving the mechanics free to do more important jobs. Later still exams were introduced to qualify for promotion to leading Wren and I coached Wrens for this.
In 1944 I applied to go to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) where some of our Wrens were employed on machines that broke Japanese codes. I had my 21st birthday on my embarkation leave and sailed in a troop ship two days after D-day.