8. Day After Dreary Day Words and Music by Kevin Adams
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Room 47 at the Foreign Office housed a secret team of people set up after the 1st World War to decipher coded messages from abroad. When war threatened in 1938, the team – now 90 strong – was transferred to Bletchley Park (or ‘Station X’ and ‘BP’). By 1945, numbers there had increased a hundredfold[1]. They were mostly women (75%) and over a third of them were civilians.
Only a relatively small number of BP staff were cryptographers. Most of the workforce provided their support structure – working and maintaining the machinery; typing decrypts for decoding, translating and analysis; sorting, filing and cross-referencing; and distributing typed papers to other branches of the service. The work was relentless and tedious with a six-day working week: ‘The evening shift was by far the most unpleasant - one’s free morning was more or less useless for any social purpose. One ended the shift at midnight tired and irritable but unable to sleep.’ Kevin Adams’ song Day After Dreary Day conveys such drudgery and discomfort as endured by these BP workers, even beyond work: living in digs in wartime Britain, for example, was basic: ‘In the very hard winter of 1943-4, the frost was permanently on my bedroom window. My billet in Newport Pagnell was an unfurnished boxroom. BP provided a bed, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, and a bowl to wash in. Very few houses had bathrooms, so you were wakened with a jug of hot water. The loo was outside - if you got caught short in the night there were about three doors to negotiate and unlock in the dark.’ ‘I was billeted with a railwayman and his wife in Wolverton. The only tap in the house was a cold one in the kitchen. I was told that I could have a bath on Mondays but discovered I had to carry upstairs pails of stinking hot sludge from the boiler in which my landlord’s railway overalls had been washed.’ As for ‘excitement’ to alleviate the tedium, some enthusiasts would organise lunch-hour rounders on the BP lawn; or they could engage in badminton, fencing and chess - facilities that evolved through the BP Recreational Club because of the lack of entertainment locally: ‘The towns of Bletchley, Stony Stratford and Little Brickhill offered very little - a few pubs and one movie house where both British and American films were shown.’ The food on offer was mostly not to be relished either - ‘We were rationed like the rest of the country and the food in the billets was not that good – we got a lot of tinned rabbit.’ ‘At 3am they fed us corned beef and prunes. I’ve never touched either since.’ - but it was difficult for the BP canteen workers too: ‘We did shift work. We were collected by a mini-coach from villages around Bletchley. The work was very hard… A very large boiler cooked lots of puddings and vegetables which we’d help prepare, and lots of sandwiches had to be made for various departments. As far as I can remember, it used to be dried egg, spam and salad etc.’ Every day throughout the long years of the war, it was the same for all these workers – Day After Dreary Day[2]… [1] In January 1945 there were 3,396 civilians and 5,559 from the armed services, a total of 8,995. These figures and the subsequent interview quotations from BP’s archive are in Bletchley Park People by Marion Hill, pub. THP, available from www.livingarchive.org.uk [2] The song - Day After Dreary Day | Kevin Adams (bandcamp.com) - is part of Kevin Adams’ collection A Crossword War specially composed about Bletchley Park and can be found on https://kevadams.bandcamp.com/album/a-crossword-war |
Palace Cinema, Fenny Stratford
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