9. Dance Round the Bonfire Words and Music by Kevin Adams
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At the end of the 2nd World War, the special decoding machinery at Bletchley Park (BP) was summarily dismantled, its materials were burned and shredded. Its erstwhile activities stayed secret for 30 years. However, the prelude to - and process of - the extended cover-up caused considerable challenges for its staff. It certainly involved very hard work:
‘One morning in June 1944, JH beckoned me to a corner and whispered, ‘We’re invading Europe today!’… From then on was a most hectic time for BP.’ A year later when, after the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, BP was no longer needed, staff had to dismantle their BP ‘Bombes’[1] ‘bit by bit, wire by wire, screw by screw’: ‘We sat at tables with screwdrivers taking out all the wire contact brushes. It had been a sin to drop a drum but now we were allowed to roll one down the floor of the hut. Whoopee!’ There could be tangible relief and pleasure in this metaphorical Dance Round the Bonfire[2]. However, when the clearing-up party had nearly finished, one worker noticed a crumpled piece of paper wedged in a crack in a wall, found to be an ‘incriminating signal’. With the hurried construction of the huts, and the subsequent cold winters - ‘- people had stuffed the cracks with whatever paper came to hand. Wearily we went back through all the hundreds of rooms we thought we had cleared and on our hands and knees, or perched on ladders, armed with skewers, we gouged out an incredible amount of crumpled documents.’ Even before D-Day BP workers had endured frustrating conditions – such as a 20-mile travel ban: ‘This was a miserable restriction, as most of us had nowhere for our weekend off. We were also forbidden to eat at the cafeteria and had to eat in a Nissan hut by ourselves and the food was much worse. Our work intensified under pressure.’ Nevertheless the heaviest burden for all BP staff throughout their time there - and afterwards - was the combined continual pressure of absolute secrecy and its accompanying lack of appreciation of their achievements. As the song laments: ‘Not a word must slip out of the part that we played. No-one will know of it, nothing to show for it, No medals, no credit, no big parade...’ Not even their closest loved ones could know: ‘The saddest thing for me was that my beloved husband died in 1975 and so he never knew. It became public in 1977.’ As BP was abandoned, the realisation dawned that its special work really was all over: ‘It was so strange. It was already nearly empty - a ghost town with just a few removal men shifting furniture. Thousands of people just walked out the gate never to return.’ All that was left now were empty huts and memories. As one worker put it: ‘What was unnerving was when everything stopped so abruptly. It felt as if part of our own being had suddenly died and the mental shock was probably akin to that experienced by a hospital patient following an amputation.’[3] [1] ‘The Bombe is an electro-mechanical device used by the British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during World War II.’ (see The Hut Six story: Breaking the Enigma codes by former BP codebreaker Gordon Welchman, 2005 pub. Cleobury Mortimer) [2] The song 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 [3] All quotations are from Bletchley Park People by Marion Hill pub. THP, available from www.livingarchive.org.uk |
Some of the huts at Bletchley Park
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