Jean Valentine
Jean Valentine, the son of a businessman, was born in Perth, Scotland, in 1925. On the outbreak of Second World War she did some firewatching but wanted to become more involved in the defence of her country: "I got to be eighteen and I thought, if I don't hurry up and do something positive apart from a bit of firewatching and working in a soldiers' canteen... then I might end up in a munitions factory. Or on the land. Neither of which was my cup of tea." (1)
In 1943 she joined the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS). Jean did her training at Tullichewan Castle in Dumbartonshire. "I spent a fortnight there learning to do what you do - marching, saluting, that sort of thing." She did an intelligence test and her scores were high so they sent her to work at the the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) at Bletchley Park.
Bletchley Park was selected because it was more or less equidistant from Oxford University and Cambridge University and the Foreign Office believed that university staff made the best cryptographers. The house itself was a large Victorian Tudor-Gothic mansion, whose ample grounds sloped down to the railway station. Lodgings had to be found for the staff in the town. (2)
Jean Valentine at Bletchley Park
The main objective of the GCCS was to break the code of the German Enigma Machine. A group of codebreakers, including Alan Turing, Alfred Dilwyn Knox, Peter Calvocoressi, Keith Batey, Mavis Lever, Joan Clarke, Margaret Rock, Gordon Welchman, Hugh Alexander, Oliver Lawn, Stuart Milner-Barry, Francis Harry Hinsley, Jack Good, Frank Birch, and Max Newman, had produced a machine to help translate the Enigma messages.
The first machine, named Victory, was installed at Bletchley Park on 18th March 1940. A more improved version, called Agnus Dei (Lamb of God), was delivered on 8th August. From this point onwards, Bletchley Park was able to read, on a daily basis, every single Luftwaffe message - something in the region of one thousand a day. (3) At the time, the Battle of Britain was raging and the German codes were being broken at Bletchley Park, allowing the British to direct their fighters against incoming German bombers. When the battle was won the codebreakers intercepted messages cancelling the planned invasion of Britain - Operation Sealion. (4)
By 1943 there were nearly 200 of these machines at Bletchley Park and its various out-stations. (5) These machines were run by the Women's Royal Naval Service. One of the women working on these deciphering machines, Cynthia Waterhouse, described how they worked: "The intricate deciphering machines were known as bombes. These unravelled the wheel settings for the Enigma ciphers thought by the Germans to be unbreakable. They were cabinets about eight feet tall and seven feet wide. The front housed rows of coloured circular drums each about five inches in diameter and three inches deep. Inside each was a mass of wire brushes, every one of which had to be meticulously adjusted with tweezers to ensure that the circuits did not short. The letters of the alphabet were painted round the outside of each drum. The back of the machine almost defies description - a mass of dangling plugs on rows of letters and numbers. We were given a menu which was a complicated drawing of numbers and letters from which we plugged up the back of the machine and set the drums on the front.... We only knew the subject of the key and never the contents of the messages. It was quite heavy work and now we understood why we were all of good height and eyesight, as the work had to be done at top speed and 100% accuracy was essential." (6)
Turing Machines
Jean Valentine was just over five foot and according to Bletchley guidelines, too short and had to use a special stool to reach the highest drums: "When you're younger, your fingers are very flexible, you can do things much more quickly. And the brain works quicker.... I don't like noise. But to me, it was like a lot of knitting machines working - a kind of ticketery clickety noise. It was repetitive but I can't say I found it upsettingly noisy." (7)
Valentine did not like shift-work: "I did not like working night shifts... It's the disturbing of your stomach. When you wake up in the morning, normally you have breakfast. But after a night shift, you wake up and have your evening meal. In other words, you come off at eight, go to bed, and when you get up at five or six, it's the evening meal that's laid on, so you are having an evening meal for breakfast. Most people suffered slightly bumpy tummies." She explained the women came from a wide-range of different occupations. "You did meet people from both above and below you, as it were, and it was OK. One girl had been evacuated to America at the start of the war, but when she reached eighteen, she came back in order to join up. There were others who were clearly a little more working-class." (8)
The encrypted message was typed out in German: "Everything was so brilliantly compartmentalised... I worked in the bombe room. And when we got an answer from the machines, we went to the phone, to ring through this possible answer to an extension number. It wasn't until all these decades later that I realised we were just calling Hut 6 across the path... Then they (the encrypted message) went to the pink hut which was just opposite to the entrance of Hut 11, not six steps away. There the translators changed it into English. And the analysts decided who was going to get this information. This was all happening in this tiny little square. I saw nothing of Bletchley Park except that grass oval in front of the mansion." (9)
Colombo
In 1944 Jean Valentine was sent to work in Colombo in Sri Lanka. The idea of travelling at sea, facing the dangers of U-boats was very worrying: "We went out into the Atlantic, down, and then through the Straights of Gibraltar, and eventually dashed across the Red Sea, and then across to Bombay... We were in Bombay for a week, then got a dirty old tramp steamer - which had been condemned before the war - and that took us from Bombay to Colombo." Valentine worked in a little concrete hut: "We were breaking the Japanese meteorological code. So I didn't need to speak Japanese. It was all figures." (10) She remained in Colombo until the end of the war.
Primary Sources
(1) Jean Valentine, interviewed by Sinclair McKay, for his book, The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (2010)
When you're younger, your fingers are very flexible, you can do things much more quickly. And the brain works quicker.... I don't like noise. But to me, it was like a lot of knitting machines working - a kind of ticketery clickety noise. It was repetitive but I can't say I found it upsettingly noisy....
I did not like working night shifts... It's the disturbing of your stomach. When you wake up in the morning, normally you have breakfast. But after a night shift, you wake up and have your evening meal. In other words, you come off at eight, go to bed, and when you get up at five or six, it's the evening meal that's laid on, so you are having an evening meal for breakfast. Most people suffered slightly bumpy tummies...
You did meet people from both above and below you, as it were, and it was OK. One girl had been evacuated to America at the start of the war, but when she reached eighteen, she came back in order to join up. There were others who were clearly a little more working-class...
Everything was so brilliantly compartmentalised... I worked in the bombe room. And when we got an answer from the machines, we went to the phone, to ring through this possible answer to an extension number. It wasn't until all these decades later that I realised we were just calling Hut 6 across the path... Then they (the encrypted message) went to the pink hut which was just opposite to the entrance of Hut 11, not six steps away. There the translators changed it into English. And the analysts decided who was going to get this information. This was all happening in this tiny little square. I saw nothing of Bletchley Park except that grass oval in front of the mansion.