Stephanie Jones: Book Review - The Bletchley Girls by Tessa Dunlop

The 15 still-living veterans who are the subjects of Tessa Dunlop’s The Bletchley Girls grew up in an era when discretion was still the better part of valour. In recounting their childhoods and family structures to the author, several remark on the taboo topics of the time, and on the prohibition against children asking questions. Undoubtedly, the worldview this fostered influenced their later attitudes toward the top-secret environs of Britain’s World War II code-breaking operation.

As each girl came to the Park, their perception of the value of secrecy only become more deeply entrenched. In fact, many of the estimated 8,500 to 10,000 people who worked there weren’t aware that they were contributing to an effort to win the war by decrypting German military codes.

When, in the 1970s, Bletchley Park’s long-held secrets began to seep out, many of the women were shocked. As Dunlop describes it, “The emotion with which this sudden revelation is remembered by so many women suggests a sense of betrayal – that they had kept their word only to be undercut by someone else.”

It is a fascinating, extraordinarily resilient group of women that Dunlop has collected. Aware of the crushing weight of extant Bletchley historiography, she has created a point of difference by offering a voice to those who worked there as teenage girls, and tracked down her subjects (average age 90), to hear their stories first-hand. Some have published memoirs and given lectures on their war-time work, while others have held their recollections close. Their pre-Bletchley backgrounds and subsequent lives are diverse and reveal much about Britain’s class system and the role of women through the 20th century.

In telling their stories, from their childhoods and education to their work at the Park (which included operating the Colossus, the early electronic computer, decoding Italian and German transmissions, and working in Hut 6, the Enigma decryption centre at Bletchley’s heart), Dunlop offers an alternative to the established male-dominated narrative about the Park’s operations. By 1944, women workers outnumbered men three to one, but the mood of the time was, among other things, one of prevailing sexism – and to this day, under Dunlop’s questioning, only one of the 15 veterans expresses a frank and unforgiving view of the era’s attitude towards women.

Many girls and women did tedious and thankless work both during and after the war, and it took decades for their efforts to begin to be acknowledged. A similar theme is evident in the topics of courtship and social life, about which the Bletchley veterans recall a period of innocence overshadowed by the knowledge that any potential suitor could be lost to war.

Of Dunlop’s 15 subjects, 11 were already married by 1950. Marriage was the dominant postwar trend, brides got younger and courtships shorter, and it was the rare girl who could rebuff this ubiquitous expectation. Y-station listener Pat Davies was one, pursuing studies at St Andrews, Oxford and Harvard before becoming a journalist at the Daily Mail (her presence as a female reporter horrifying the men in the newsroom). She eventually married in 1968.

Both as a distinctive glimpse into the Bletchley Park story and as a piece of social history, The Bletchley Girls is a success, and Dunlop’s determination to open the ear of the present to a remarkable group of participants in history has borne impressive fruit.