The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories by Michael Smith Page B

site a few miles down the road. Colette couldn’t hide
her disappointment.
    ‘It looked awful. They were still building it.’
    The girls were taken first into the accommodation, one of two parallel rows of large wooden huts, known as ‘cabins’, each housing around fifty Wrens sleeping in bunk beds. Each of
these ‘cabins’ housed a complete shift or ‘watch’ of Wrens. They were built close together with water and sewage pipes running down the gap between the two rows. Each row
had a central corridor linking the series of huts and at each end of each hut was a ‘single cabin’ for the petty officer in charge of the watch. The huts were all named after famous
warships. Colette’s was HMS
Orion
, after one of the ships which defeated the French at the Battle of Trafalgar, still regarded as the Royal Navy’s most glorious victory.
Colette was beginning to wonder if she’d made the right decision.
    ‘Someone had said to us, this is Pembroke Five. You’ll never get out of it. You’ll be here ’til the end of the war, unless you drop dead. We had to put the bunks up. We
had to put them together and we were scrubbing and cleaning the hut and the corridor and then finally we were taken to Block B where the Bombes were, and introduced to them.’
    Pembroke Five was the unit name for all the Wrens working for Bletchley wherever they were based. The Bombes were huge, bronze machines more than sixfoot high, seven foot
wide and two and a half foot deep (1.8m x 2.1m x 0.8m) set in rows of three, with a dozen Bombes, sometimes more, in each of the rooms or ‘bays’. The new Wrens were told that they would
be helping to break the German codes and that the Bombes were checking for possible settings. Each Bombe contained thirty rotating drums, every one of them replicating the action of an individual
Enigma rotor. The girls had to load the drums and wire them up at the back according to instructions on the ‘menu’ they were given. The wires had plugs on them which Colette and the
other Wrens plugged into sockets alongside the drums.
    ‘We were shown how to plug up the back. It was very complicated, it really was. It took some learning. The drums went round at different revolutions. I can remember the noise,
clackety-clackety-clackety-clack, and having your sleeves rolled up, working hard and so much stretching. They said they wanted girls not less than five foot eight inches. I was five foot eight and
a half tall and even I had to stretch. It was very noisy – the clackety-clack sound. Filthy mess and stench, hot black oil dripping onto the floor.’
    They worked in pairs, one of them plugging up the Bombe and the other sitting beside the Bombe at a machine designed to replicate the action of Enigma, checking the results to see if they
produced German language. Colette always did the plugging up, following a ‘menu’ worked out at Bletchley on the basis of a piece of German text the codebreakers thought might be
somewhere in a particular encoded message.
    ‘You’d put the drums up, and then go around the backand plug them up according to the menu. The menu was brought in to us. We had a Wren petty officer in
charge of us and she would hand out the menus.’
    Once it was set up, the Bombe would be switched on and go through its cycle with the drums turning round, taking just under a quarter of an hour to find the first possible setting for a string
of encoded letters that would fit the menu devised by Bletchley.
    ‘When the whole thing stopped we would take the reading from the side of the Bombe and that would go in to the girls who were doing the checking. I remember the joy of hearing the shout
“job up” from the checking room, which meant that the “stop” that you’d got made sense and gave them the words they were looking for and would be bunged through on the
scrambler phone to Bletchley.’
    There were a lot of ‘bad’ stops where the checkers found the settings the Bombe had thrown