What happened to the women of Bletchley Park ?

04 Sep 2012

What happened to the women of Bletchley Park ?


As a new ITV drama, The Bletchley Circle, imagines them as post-war 
sleuths, Iain Hollingshead learns the truth.

By Iain Hollingshead

After three decades shrouded in secrecy, there now appear to be few 
stories untold about Bletchley Park, the code-breaking centre in 
Buckinghamshire whose work is thought to have shortened the Second World 
War by up to three years.

Historians have had huge fun with a cast of 12,000, ranging from 
mathematicians to Egyptologists. Dillwyn Knox, a Cambridge classical 
papyrus expert, used to work in his pyjamas, while Alan Turing, the 
pioneer of the computer age, liked to take his cat on walks. When 
Churchill, an avid supporter, visited, he said to the head of MI6, "When I 
told you to leave no stone unturned recruiting for this place, I didn't 
expect you to take me literally."

Much, too, has been written about the impact of the Bletchley alumni after 
the war. Michael Smith, author of "The Secrets of Station X", points out 
that they included the chief prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials, the music 
directors of Sadler's Wells and the BBC, the founder of Amnesty 
International, and John Cairncross, the traitor.

But what of the Bletchley women? Outnumbering the men by four to one, they 
included Wrens, Waafs, linguists, a handful of codebreakers and a 
smattering of dutiful debutantes recruited by telegram. What did they do 
next? An ITV murder mystery starting this week, The Bletchley Circle, 
imagines how four of them might have dusted off their wartime intelligence 
skills in 1951 to try to stop a serial killer.

The post-war reality, however, was a little less dramatic. Sinclair 
McKay's recent book, "The Secret Life of Bletchley Park", details how most 
women returned to traditional family roles. Those who didn't sometimes 
found themselves bored or thwarted - ITV's drama in fact gives us just 
such a character, the frustrated librarian Jean ( Julie Graham ) who once 
was handling top secret documents. Of one real-life ex-Bletchley lady, 
McKay writes, "After the relative comfort and even romanticism of 
Bletchley Park, this new prospect of dull work for low wages began to gnaw 
at her."..../snip/

- 'The Bletchley Circle' begins on Thursday on ITV1 at 9.00pm


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9520807/What-happened-to-the-women-of-Bletchley-Park.html

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02328/bletchley_2328727b.jpg

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/news/docview.rhtm/667251


http://www.itv.com/thebletchleycircle/

http://www.radiotimes.com/episode/r4bnj/the-bletchley-circle--06092012