For more than 70 years, Mrs Christine Harlock has kept mum about her ultra-secret work during World War Two.
Her vital role in the Intelligence Corps took her to Y Stations in Derbyshire and on the Yorkshire Moors, where she analysed enemy wireless messages. And towards the end of the war, she joined Station X – aka Bletchley Park – where she helped top-secret Nazi ciphers to be broken.
Not even her late husband, the heavily decorated Commander (William) Mark Harlock RN, knew that Christine analysed teleprinter transmissions from German high command – including troop and division movements, communications between generals, and possibly even messages from Hitler himself.
At the time, Christine herself didn’t realise the importance of her work. Like so many people who worked tireless shifts for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) – the forerunner of GCHQ – she had little inkling of the content of the messages she was analysing.
Now, with the release of Bletchley Park and other GC&CS records to the public – and with a commemorative medal and a certificate of thanks, signed by David Cameron – Christine, 91, is able to speak more freely about her work.
“Nobody could tell what anybody else was doing,” she says of Bletchley Park, as we settle down to chat at her home in Camperdown Terrace, Exmouth. “As a teenager, you did what you were told. To start with, you didn’t take in the whole picture.”
Christine was the daughter of Brigadier Leslie, MC, who was in charge of the Rangoon brigade in Burma. Caught in Rangoon when the Japanese started bombing it in 1941, Christine made it safely to India by boat, where she learnt typing and shorthand before joining up with the Women’s Royal Army Corps.
After her father made it out of Burma, the family returned to England, where he worked for the War Office in London. Her father suggested that Christine should try for the Intelligence Corps. After some interviews and a radio course, Christine – just 17 – was in.
Her first posting was at Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, the ancestral home of the Curzon family, which was taken over for the war as a Y Station. Here, intelligence was gathered from radio transmissions, and passed on to Bletchley Park for decryption.
“The officers camped in one wing of the house and we slept in Nissen huts in the grounds, which wasn’t much fun,” says Christine. “It was cold and we just had one fire in the middle. There was night duty, so if you had to sleep during the day it wasn’t easy, because people were coming in and out.”
From Kedleston Hall, Christine moved on to Queen Ethelburga’s School, near Harrogate. On night duty, Christine and her colleagues were sent up in army lorries to Forest Moor, a Y Station on the Yorkshire Moors. In one room, the signals girls would be taking down Morse code messages. In the next room, Christine and her colleagues were taught to analyse the start and finish of messages.
“We sat quietly – in great silence – and we had to look through the logs, every line and just try to find something that looked a bit different. The Germans were a bit lax in their chit-chat.
“So it was quite important, the beginning and end of their main message, tell-tale things, and a different call sign would come in, or one had disappeared. You just had to be switched-on, and if you thought you saw anything that might be interesting, you’d take it up to the officer in charge.”
It was these tell-tale signs that eventually led the code breakers at Bletchley to break the Enigma coding machines (used by regiments in the field and U-boats) and the much more complex Lorenz teleprinter networks (used by enemy high command).
Forest Moor’s output was so important that despatch riders would take the information direct to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, the central site of GC&CS.
Soon, Christine was off to Station X at Bletchley Park herself. Newly promoted to sergeant, she arrived there as a traffic analyst in early 1944.
“I was in Hut Sixta. Intelligence School, number six, traffic analysis. Absolute secrecy.”
The work – to “attack” Lorenz, the complex teleprinter cypher machine used by Hitler and his generals – was relentless. The team worked three, eight-hour shifts. “It was always a very silent place to work in,” says Christine. “Quiet concentration, not a jovial place. It was a fairly small room, about eight to 10 people. There were little wooden tables and wooden camping chairs.”
Attention to detail was paramount.
“You might spend hours going through something and not find anything, but that was the thing… you had to be so careful. The direction changes and the codes. That was one of the main things to find out… where the units were, and if they were moving. And, sometimes, they would chat together, the different people, and sometimes they’d have a joke. Sometimes they were moving, they’d just let something through.
“I can’t say it was a joyous time, it was very concentrated. Every day just silently looking through and making sure. And if you did miss something, you’d feel terrible.”
The traffic analysis that Christine and her colleagues provided was invaluable to the code breakers, including Alan Turing, and helped to crack the Lorenz cipher.
“Nobody – even in Bletchley – knew about the place,” she says. “They just thought it was an army camp doing a bit of paperwork. I’m amazed at how they kept it secret.”
But Station X’s success helped to turn the tide of the war in favour of the Allies. On VE Day – May 8, 1945 – everything stopped at Bletchley Park.
Christine smiles. “Oh yes, the war was over. Then there wasn’t any more use for us and demob had to be gradual. It was taken according to how long you had been in the services.”
Initially, Christine helped in the War Office’s salaries department, before retraining as a nurse. By now her parents had moved to Budleigh Salterton, where she met Commander Mark Harlock. They married in 1951, and had six children – three boys and three girls – born between 1952 and 1960.
What did she think of her certificate of thanks for her work at Bletchley Park, signed by David Cameron?
“It was kind to get something signed by the Prime Minister,” she says. “What I could hardly believe was that they keep a record of everybody that’s worked at Bletchley, all these years later.”
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