Last spring I was captivated by a three-part series from the UK called Bletchley Circle. I assumed it would be about the brilliant men and women who worked secretly at Bletchley Park during WWII to decipher intercepted German radio broadcasts and turn the deciphered messages into intelligence reports. Winston Churchill referred to these individuals, led by brilliant mathematician Alan Turing, as "the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled." In 1941, when the top Codebreakers wrote to him that they were starved of resources to do their essential work, Churchill ordered, "Action this day! Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done."
However,
Bletchley Circle was different from the “women in war” theme I was expecting and enjoy.
It did start out showing four women working at Bletchley –
Susan, an inspired puzzle solver; Lucy, who has a photographic memory; Millie,
gifted at languages and strategy; and Jean, who appeared to be their boss
during the war and seemed to know where to go to get information at all times –
then jumped to seven years after the war.
The women have lost touch and Susan has married (Tim, who does not know
of his wife’s past as a code breaker because she and many others had signed the
Official Secrets Act and can’t tell anyone – it is amazing how these people
respected their pledge) and is raising two children, dealing with post-war
rations. Slightly acquainted with a
woman who was murdered, Susan starts following newspaper reports of her death
which turns into coverage of a serial killer.
Susan notices a pattern which she thinks the police have missed and
insists on bringing her concerns to Scotland Yard. The detective is polite at first but can’t
find anything to back up her theories so sends her home. Frustrated but convinced she is right, Susan
hunts up her old friends and convinces them to help her investigate the
killer. They are reluctant, and in
Millie’s case, a bit hurt that Susan gave up their plan to travel the world to
marry and settle down, but soon they also believe it is their duty to catch the
killer to prevent additional deaths.
However, while the police scoff at them, the killer becomes aware of
their efforts and recognizes in Susan an intricate mind worthy of his
respect. In one chilling scene, after
Susan’s husband, Tim, has suggested she do crossword puzzles rather than worry
about silly old murders, Tim picks up the newspaper and said, “Look, you
managed to get all of this one done quickly!”
Susan looks at the nearly completed crossword on her breakfast table and
realizes the killer was in her home and that she has put her family into grave
danger.
As with Homefront, one of my all-time favorite TV
shows, this series shows the displacement certain women who had made
significant contributions to WWII experienced afterwards, here relegated to
housework
and childrearing (Susan – which would be fine if she weren’t so
bored by it), waitressing (Millie, despite all her language skills), ironing
(Lucy, who also gets beaten by her husband).
Only Jean seems to have established a career, working as a
librarian. Perhaps it is implausible
that the women could have obtained the information that enables them to solve
the mystery (as I said to my sister, a modern version would include a hacker to
get the needed data), but it was very enjoyable despite that. The only flaw was that Susan, the most
interesting and most important character, was hard to understand. I think the rapid-fire way words came out of
her mouth was supposed to show how urgent she considered the issue and to
contrast with her somber demeanor.
However, I wished she had enunciated more clearly! I was pleased to read that more episodes have been commissioned. You can still
watch the series on PBS.com and Bletchley Park is now a museum, which I hope to
visit on my next trip to England.
If
you are interested in this topic, here are a couple books you would enjoy:
Nonfiction
Fiction
Enigma/Robert Harris
I
feel as if I have read other fiction in which young women were sent to
Bletchley Park (and had exciting adventures once there) but I can’t remember
specific titles. Survivors of Bletchley
were legally prohibited from discussing their work for many years and have criticized
Enigma and other novels as inaccurate. Agatha Christie, having named a character
Major Bletchley, in a 1941 mystery, caused some concern to British Intelligence as it wondered if she had heard about their secret operation.
2 comments:
I loved The Bletchley Circle. Using the Bletchley past as a backdrop made a great deal of sense and was a great way to put tgether a group of four very different women to solve a mystery, during a time when a woman's ability to think intelligently and logically was still doubted by many of the men in power. Bletchley is also interesting on its own. I believe Bletchley also figures in the Blitz-based time-travel novels BLACKOUT and ALL CLEAR by Connie Willis. We met a few times at Betsy-Tacy luncheons.
I loved Homefront! It was such a shame that it was not allowed to find an audience.
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