As a geek, Bletchley Park is one of my favourite places in the world. Today, it houses the National Museum of Computing as well as the National Codes Centre. During World War II, this top secret location was the main code-breaking site in the UK, intercepting and decoding German messages.
Bletchley often features in LGBT history as the place of work of mathematician and computing pioneer Alan Turing, who as well as being a genius was also gay and was tragically hounded to death by the state because of it. It was only in 2009 that the UK government officially apologised for the state’s actions in this matter.
What is less well known about Bletchley Park (or Station X, as it was known during the war) is that the vast majority of the 12,000 people stationed there over the course of the war (around 80%!) were women. While the senior officers and most of the mathematicians and cryptographers were men, there was a lot of manual clerical work and machine operation to be done which was performed by women. Anything from transcribing coded messages to operating Turing’s Bombe machines for decoding Enigma messages – one of the most demanding jobs on site – was done by women.
One of the ways in which women were recruited to Station X was through Times Crossword competitions. You needed people with good general knowledge, outstanding analytical and problem solving skills, and ability to work under pressure. What better way to find them than to set a challenge to solve the Times Crossword in under 12 minutes? Those who did were offered a position at Bletchley Park – and those reluctant to take it up were offered the most ghastly alternatives available, providing a good incentive to move to the relative peace and quiet of the countryside.
At its peak, there were 9,000 people stationed at Bletchley Park in January 1945, all of whom needed to stay in touch with their families. The quiet town of Bletchley couldn’t be seen to attract attention through vast quantities of post, so up to four separate addresses were set up, all of which redirected to the secret Bletchley Park post office. There was a limit on the number of letters the women could send and receive each week, and the arrival of post from their families had an appreciable effect on the women’s morale.
Women’s contributions to the war effort at Bletchley Park were not something I was aware of until I visited there a few months ago. It is definitely something that deserves a lot more attention than it gets, and therefore a perfect topic for Women’s History Month.