Imagine ... you're six years in to a brutal and bloody conflict
which has left towns and cities across your homeland in ruins, cost the lives
of friends and loved ones, and threatened everything you hold dear.
Now imagine you
know the end is finally in sight, the bombs and guns about to fall silent, the
peace deal just days away from being signed.
It's what
everyone has been waiting desperately for as they cram into overcrowded air-raid
shelters, queue for strictly-rationed food, and dread the arrival of bad news
from the Front.
But you can't
tell anyone.
For Joan Joslin,
this was the "reward" for years of work among the code-breakers,
cryptanalysts and cypher machines at Bletchley Park during World War II: a sneak preview
of history, but one she wasn't allowed to share.
"It was May
5, late in the evening, and we were working the evening shift ... Suddenly the
news came through that Italy had given in, and so they immediately gave us 48
hours' leave, because it meant the war [in Europe] was over," she recalls.
"We went
out of Bletchley as quickly as we could, onto the last train. We arrived on
Euston station and it was teeming with all sorts: civilians, Army, Air Force,
Navy ... it was chock-full with people waiting to get the first train or tube.
We sat there and I just wanted to shout 'the war's over!' and I couldn't.
"I arrived
home at five in the morning and my mother gave me a good dressing down for
being out all night -- and I still couldn't tell her," Joslin says with a
laugh, a sparkly hummingbird brooch glittering on her turquoise jacket, as she
sits in the sun at a Bletchley reunion marking 70 years since the end of WWII.
Wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously described the
team at Bletchley as "the geese that laid the golden eggs, but never
cackled."
It was only
decades later that their story became widely-known, thanks to books and movies
like the Oscar-winning "The Imitation Game," starring Benedict
Cumberbatch as computing pioneer Alan Turing.
Joslin and the
hundreds of men and women (mostly women -- the ratio was about three to one)
based at Britain's Government Code and Cypher School during World War II had
all signed the Official Secrets Act, which banned them from talking about the
work were doing -- even with each other.
Betty Webb, who was sent to Bletchley while
serving in the Auxiliary
Territorial Service (ATS) --
the women's section of the British Army -- remembers being made to read and
agree to the Official Secrets Act as soon as she arrived.
"It was
conducted by an intelligence corps officer with a gun on the table, just to
emphasize the importance of the document one was signing," she explains.
"It was very intimidating. I think it was meant to be."
Webb says those
who signed it faced "pretty dire punishments" if they spoke out.
"The worst of it was if you were really naughty you could be probably
shot. I've not heard of anyone who was, but the provision was there."
The high levels
of secrecy meant those who worked at Bletchley had to think fast if anyone
asked what they did: "My landlady used to sometimes say, 'What have you
been doing today?' and I'd say, 'Oh, boring old secretarial job,'" says
Webb, who recorded signals and messages as they arrived at the base.
They also had to play dumb when "news" they were
already aware of broke: "We had decoded the message that the [German
battleship] Scharnhorstwas in a
Norwegian fjord, and so battle commenced, and we got word that the ship had
been sunk," recalls Joslin, who ran decoding machines.
"On the
news the next morning in my billet, my landlady said to me, 'The news is wonderful,
we've sunk a German battleship,' and I said 'Have we really?' I couldn't tell
her that I'd been involved in it."
But both say it
never dawned on them to spill the beans -- with signs declaring "Careless Talk Costs Lives"
hanging all over the place, they were only too aware of the risks of discussing
their top-secret work.
"It was in
the interests of national security," insists Webb. "The whole country
was aware of the need to not talk about troop movements that they might have
seen, and there were posters everywhere [saying] that it was a good idea to 'Be like Dad, and keep Mum!'
And despite the dark
times they were living through, both Webb and Joslin have happy memories of
Bletchley, which had a thriving social scene, with clubs, sports, a choir and
dances.
Joslin met her
future husband Ken on her first day there -- Christmas Eve, 1940 -- though she
admits it was some time before romance blossomed.
"I was with
another girl, both of us arrived the same time; I was dark and this young lady
was blonde," she says. "I'm told that he said 'I'll have the blonde
and you can have the dark one!' So, he wasn't very interested in me, and to be
honest I wasn't very interested in him, because he stirred his tea with a
pencil, which I thought was absolutely disgusting!"
The couple
married as their time at Bletchley drew to a close, and recently celebrated
their 70th anniversary.
For Webb, though, the war wasn't over on V.E. Day -- she had
been working in the Japanese section at Bletchley, and with the conflict in the
Pacific still raging, was sent to the U.S. to continue her work at the
newly-built Pentagon, the only ATS member among the 32,000 people there.
After six years
of wartime austerity back in Britain, she says she fully enjoyed her time in
Washington D.C.
"You can
imagine, going out from a ration situation here -- food and clothes -- and in
America there was a bit of rationing, but it was minimal; you could eat almost
anything, and you could buy as many clothes as you wanted, so it was absolute
bliss from that point of view."
"Normal
life" soon resumed for both Webb and Joslin after the war -- which experts
say they and their Bletchley colleagues helped shorten by two or three years,
thanks to their work breaking Germany's Enigma and Lorenz codes.
But they kept
their secrets for decades, and even now find it strange to talk about the work
they did.
"I never
told my parents, because they both died before 1975, when the veil of secrecy
was lifted," says Webb, who was recently awarded an M.B.E. for her work
promoting Bletchley Park.
"Funnily
enough, when it became agreeable to talk about it, we never did," says
Joslin. "We never talked about it ... even my children, they didn't know.
We never discussed it.
"I worked
with Ken for five years, in the same area, and he didn't know what I did. Isn't
it weird?"
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