The Wrens at Bletchley Park

Bletchley Park, located fifty miles from London, is an estate which hosted the Ultra project during WWII. The purpose of Ultra was to break coded German messages and doing so required a large corps of people with varying skills. All of them needed to be able to keep the nature of their work a secret. Engineers and mathematicians as well as computer operators contributed to the codebreaking effort. The staff grew from 150 at the start in 1939 to nearly 10,000 by the end of the war. The majority of those employed at Bletchley were women, specifically members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, aka Wrens.

The exhibits at Bletchley Park had a model of a Bombe machine, with a button which allowed visitors to run it within certain settings to witness how it worked. The hut which focused on the Wrens used actors to describe their work at Bletchley. This worked alongside placards in the room, which described how the workers in Hut 11 would receive a “menu” or instructions from Hut 6 for what settings to put the Bombe in. This involved turning the 108 drums exactly as they needed to be in order to move on in the codebreaking and translation process. This work had to be incredibly careful and required significant effort and focus to operate the machines properly, and the Wrens provided the numbers and skills needed for this project. The exhibits at Bletchley on the process of codebreaking showed how the Wrens’ operating of the Bombe machines was a vital step in the process of decoding and conveyed to me just how necessary their work was yet how overlooked it is oftentimes. The conditions in the spaces where Wrens worked are described on placards as stuffy, dark, and claustrophobic. Being inside the huts felt this way to me even without experiencing them alongside the number of machines and people they worked amongst every day. The Bombe machines, as shown in pictures at the site, nearly reached the short ceiling and were set up in rows along the entire length of the hut. Operating the Bombe required precision, because putting a plug in the wrong spot or shifting the gear slightly over could cause a delay in finding the correct settings to decode with and, thus, waste time that could be used finding lifesaving pieces of information. The tenacity of the Wrens and all staff at Bletchley made the Ultra operation as successful as possible, even under the stressful conditions of their work.