Fwd: OBITUARY : Irene Brown

Tuesday July 18 2017

OBITUARY : Irene Brown
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Bletchley Park decoder and author of a well-regarded memoir who married 
an SAS man lost behind enemy lines after D-Day

When Irene Young went to work in Hut 6 at Bletchley Park in the summer 
of 1942 it was with a broken heart. She had recently ended her 
engagement to Leslie Cairns, an army officer she had met while they were 
students at the University of Edinburgh, the two having argued about him 
volunteering for service abroad.

Life at Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire, was to prove a welcome 
distraction, even if Young did find the place “ugly”, and her “forced 
billet” was with a family an hour’s bus drive away in Wolverton. This 
journey proved especially exhausting when she was on the night shift. 
“We would tumble out of the bus into the blackout to grope our way 
home,” she recalled in her 1990 memoir, "Enigma Variations : a Memoir
of Love and War".

This memoir, written under her maiden name of Young, was unusual and 
insightful in that it told the story of Station X from the viewpoint of 
what she called “the rank and file”.

She was not one of the star Oxbridge dons and chess geniuses who cracked 
Germany’s Enigma codes, but rather one of the support staff, or 
“Indians”, as they were known, who arrived that summer as part of a 
rapid expansion after Churchill’s order that Bletchley should be given 
“extreme priority” and have all the resources it needed. Numbers 
increased from 150 in 1939 to 5,000 by 1943. “The net had been cast 
wider to trawl the less elite from universities other than Oxford and 
Cambridge,” she recalled.

She worked in Room 82 of Hut 6, “though in typical Bletchley fashion 
there weren’t 81 rooms preceding it”. As a linguist her duties included 
translation. She would spend many dull hours listing plots on graphs, as 
well as checking and classifying data. Boredom was an occupational 
hazard, one joke being : “I spent a month in Bletchley last Sunday.” The 
local residents, meanwhile, not having a clue about the top-secret 
decoding work going on at Station X, would refer to her as one of the 
“do nothings” of Bletchley Park.

She wrote about how they had their own vocabulary there — “blisting” was 
making a “B-list”, you “fossed” when plotting a graph, and so on. Staff 
were always hungry and baths were in a strictly measured 4in of water. 
They took it for granted that the Germans did not know about Bletchley, 
“for we had no air-raid drill, nor did we have a single air-raid 
shelter, slit trench, sandbag blast wall, nor even so much as a steel 
helmet”.

After a few months working there she had come to regard her decision to 
break off her engagement to Cairns as her “ultimate folly”. When he 
wrote to her out of the blue she was delighted. They met up again and 
she learnt that he had fought at Alamein and in Tunisia. He had then 
transferred from the Royal Artillery to the Parachute Regiment and, 
finally, to the newly formed SAS. Their relationship “back on”, he 
reserved a £30 engagement ring for a month until he could pay for it. He 
proposed again and this time she said yes. As one was at Bletchley, the 
other in the SAS, neither could talk about what each was doing.

Theirs was to be a cruelly short marriage, lasting a few months. Shortly 
after D-Day Cairns and all his men went missing in action when their 
aircraft disappeared behind enemy lines. It was to be one of the SAS’s 
heaviest and most mysterious losses. The wreck of what is almost 
certainly his aircraft was found in 2015, far off course, just inland 
from Omaha Beach in Normandy. How it came to be there, and why the 
authorities did not know of it, remain unclear.

Irene Young was born an only child in Edinburgh in 1919. Her father 
worked in the British Linen Bank, where he became head of the securities 
department; her mother came from a Morayshire family of doctors and 
lawyers. She was educated at the highly academic Esdaile School, where 
she excelled in Latin and French. She also studied ( privately ) drama 
and elocution, and wondered about a career on the stage. Wisely she did 
not seek to pursue this dream. Instead she went to Edinburgh and did a 
degree in English language and literature.

After the war, and still in the limbo of presumed widowhood, she 
abandoned the career in the civil service that beckoned. Passing up the 
chance to read for a B Litt at Oxford, she spent a year in London, 
living at Crosby Hall while taking a secretarial course with the debs at 
the Marlborough Gate college. She thought of becoming an embassy 
secretary and was offered a tempting opportunity to work in the Middle 
East. Instead she honoured an invitation from an aunt of her husband
( now officially presumed killed in action ) to spend some time in South 
Africa.

In Durban she met and was courted with sensitivity, but equal 
determination, by Reginald Brown, a quiet but drily humorous chartered 
accountant. He had experienced an interesting war, serving with the 
Royal Durban Light Infantry in the Western Desert where he was wounded 
and captured at Tobruk. At the Italian armistice he had walked out of 
his prison camp near Perugia to spend nine months on the run, being 
sheltered by peasant families and assuming an Italian identity. In later 
years he and Irene would make several return visits, first to locate, 
and subsequently to thank, the courageous and kindly Italians who had 
risked so much to help evaders.

Having married in 1948, they settled in South Africa, but it was 
changing fast under its nationalist Afrikaner government and Reginald 
was a man of liberal views. Irene joined him in membership of the Torch 
Commando, an anti-government organisation. They soon felt it was not a 
country in which they could continue to live and returned to Edinburgh, 
where Reginald became a partner in an international accountancy firm.

Irene devoted herself to homemaking, raising their son Iain, who was to 
become a principal curator of manuscripts in the National Library of 
Scotland. She took private pupils in Latin and English, worked for a 
publisher and for a departmental library at the University of Edinburgh, 
where she enjoyed life on the fringes of the academic world.

When Reginald died suddenly in 1982, immediately after retirement, Irene 
was devastated. She had published verse from her adolescent years, then 
as a student and subsequently. Now she found solace in writing a good 
deal more. Her style was rhythmic and structured. Early lushness gave 
way to a more controlled and simple expression. She edited her old 
school magazine and maintained her interest in languages, pursuing 
ancient Greek, Italian and German while keeping up her Latin and French. 
Silversmithing was among her other activities.

Her very small ( and, latterly, “bowbackit” ) stature, her speed of 
nervous movement, her bright eyes : all made the nickname of “Mouse” 
appropriate. She was resilient in body and spirit. When grazed by a bus 
at nearly 91, she heard the policeman in attendance report that “a woman 
in her seventies” had been in an accident. She looked up from the road 
and said cheerfully : “In her nineties, actually.”

Irene Brown, Bletchley Park worker, was born on February 16, 1919. She 
died on June 7, 2017, aged 98


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/register/irene-young-bletchley-park-obituary-kbg05rcmw

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http://www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/obituary-irene-mouse-brown-linguist-poet-and-author-of-a-pioneering-memoir-on-bletchley-park-1-4475420

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