Secrets of a Bletchley code breaker
Mavis Batey tells Legion about her secret role in WWII
When the war started, I was supposed to be writing a thesis on German Romantic poetry,
but that was how Dr Goebbels
got his doctorate so I thought
I had better do something else!
But even when I got a job at Bletchley, I still had no idea about what I was going to do, we were just told it was top secret.
The person who’d interviewed me at the Foreign Office had no more idea of what I was going to do than I had myself. That’s what it was like back then. Of course,
if you were captured you couldn’t give away the whole works because you really didn’t know.
When I met Dilly Knox, who was to be my boss, on my first day, he said: “We’re breaking machines, have you got a pencil?” I wondered how on earth you would break a machine with a pencil, but what he meant, of course, is that with breaking codes using mechanics... you really have to slog it out by hand.
Dilly really was wonderful – an eccentric genius. He was like a Catherine Wheel with sparks coming off him. We would try to pin his ideas down, and one of us might be working on one of his ideas one day, and another one of us the next.
To begin with, there were three shifts, but it varied after the training was over. Men’s lives depended on you getting codes broken by midnight or so. You could work 15 hours straight sometimes. It was the luck of the draw really – if you got an important message through, you had to crack it. I decoded a message about what became the Battle of Matapan, which was a really major milestone. The first thing that came through was: “Today’s the day – minus three.”
I knew then I had to decode the whole message. So we found out that the Italian fleet – which didn’t come out often – was actually coming out. We had to wait for two or three days to see the outcome, it was terrifically exciting.
There was a lot of supporting that went on at Bletchley too, because obviously all our friends and relations were out in the thick
of it. Quite often on night shifts one girl would have a message through that her husband was missing, that his plane hadn’t returned.
We would make sure that someone was with her all the time and that she never had to go for her meals on her own or walk home alone.
I met my husband, Keith, while I was working at Bletchley. We tried to play it very carefully initially because we did work together. We met each other away from work in the evenings but we found out later that apparently everyone had a bet on when we were going to get engaged. So we hadn’t done as well as we thought!
Quite a number of couples met there, a lot of people got married and of course when the Americans arrived we thought they were wonderful people. We couldn’t decide whether one of them in particular looked more like William Powell or Cary Grant – he was so gorgeous!
When the film Enigma came out in 2001, it was quite surreal. The actors were lovely. It was extremely well done, the only thing that my husband objected to was when the top brass came into the code-breaking huts all of the workers stood up. We didn’t behave like that, in fact, it was rather a nuisance! No one would dream of standing, and nor would anybody give a bottle of whisky for the first chap who got an important message. We were a team. It was a wonderful experience at Bletchley, one we were very privileged to have.
