Dulcie Primrose Chua (14 Mar 1923 - 7 Dec 2024)

In loving memory of Dulcie Primrose Chua who sadly passed away on 7th December 2024

Instead of my words, which will always be inadequate, I thought I would post my mother's own account of her time at Bletchley Park during the War, which gives a better sense of the person she was than anything I could say:

After being interviewed with all the other final year undergraduates before we’d even sat our final exams, I found myself recruited for the Foreign Office at a place called Bletchley Park, presumably because I’d done German as far as the first year of my degree.
On arrival at Bletchley Park in August 1943, with all the other new entrants, I was pleased to see that the personnel officer had been music teacher at my old school during the two terms I was evacuated to Windsor in the sixth form. She obviously discouraged any familiarity, and was more concerned with getting us to sign the Official Secrets Act.
From the administrative offices (in the house which is always shown in pictures of Bletchley Park) we were taken to whichever of the buildings dotted about the grounds where each of us had to work. I was allocated to the Naval Block, where I was told I was to work on Japanese naval intelligence, as by that time they were decoding and translating a fair amount of Japanese signals. If I finished the day’s work early I was to go to help out in the German section.
We were fed in the refectory and then taken to our various billets. I was billeted in Bletchley itself with the pharmacist wife of a policeman who was at that time a Major stationed in Palestine. Naturally I walked to work each day, but most workers were billeted in towns in Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire, and fleets of buses and smaller vehicles brought them to and from Bletchley Park at 9:00, 4:00, 6:00 and midnight (many of the drivers were ex-debutantes).
As for my work, I hasten to say it was not on breaking codes, which has been glamorised in TV programmes, but to me it looks to have been boring and frustrating, especially when the code for the day’s signals wasn’t broken within 24 hours, after which the settings would change. My work was recording information on one of the vast indexes: mine was on Japanese naval activities.
When I started at Bletchley there was only a trickle of Japanese material coming through – mainly signals and some captured documents. Soon there was so much work that we had three shifts, each with about a dozen girls, so that work was done around the clock. Another girl and I were in charge of alternate day shifts: the night shift had to get on without us, though any difficulties would be referred to a naval officer, as there was always one on duty. Every day we were given a batch of signals which had been decoded and translated, printed on papers headed ‘ULTRA’. I believe the Germans gave some Enigma machines to the Japanese, but they had other codes as well. The information was on movements of Japanese ships, activities at ports, etc. (by the time I went to the Far East I was familiar with the names of most of the ports there). We had to record all the information on thousands of index cards, usually routine stuff, but it was interesting when new names and code letters came up and we had to work out new titles for the cards.
The workforce at Bletchley was pretty high-powered: plenty of graduates of course and even the girls on our index had the equivalent of today’s O and A levels. We had a great variety of people – writers, poets, musicians, actors, teachers, and society women as well as officers in the services. On one occasion Angus Wilson (the novelist) came to my index and asked us for information on wireless telegraphy. I wondered how much he’d known about the subject before Bletchley Park. We were all amateurs who had to learn quickly.
At one time in my group there were the Honourable Sarah Norton, granddaughter of Lord Northcliffe, later married to one of the Astors, and Jeannie Campbell-Harris – quite mad and I think still lively when as Baroness Trumpington she was a minor minister in the Thatcher government.
One advantage of the motley crowd was that we had professional musicians and actors to put on concerts and plays. I was interested to read that Pamela Barton, one of my colleagues, who had been in the prestigious Birmingham Repertory Company, was on the London stage again recently, and she must be over 80. She was a very good Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing at Bletchley Park.
Captured films were shown to us, and it was the first time we had seen the beautiful gentle German colour as opposed to the rather garish technicolor. I only saw one Japanese film, about the Samurai – not to my taste. On the day the war in Europe ended, the Ballet Rambert had been booked to entertain us. We listened to Churchill’s speech in the interval.
Our day shifts were from 9:00 until 6:00, evenings from 4:00 to midnight, and nights started at midnight. We had one day off each week, but could save a day and have two days each fortnight, when we were allowed to leave at 4pm and not return until 4pm on the third day, which was a good arrangement. It was lucky for me that Bletchley was only about 50 miles from both Cambridge and London, and I spent alternate leaves in each place.
What has always amazed me is that almost all of the thousands of us who worked at Bletchley Park were completely unaware of the Enigma machine and Colossus, invented by the great Alan Turing and the Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers. We just realised that codes had been broken, but had no idea how. We all had to read about it in newspapers and books just like everybody else. It was very good for security, of course, that so few people knew of it. It was also remarkable that none of the thousands of us ever revealed the nature of our work.
The Germans were so sure that the complicated and ever-changing Enigma codes were unbreakable that they failed to suspect anything despite some scary close shaves. How was it that so many supplies for Rommel were sunk in the Mediterranean? How was it that Rommel found British soldiers waiting when they arrived to attack a certain place in the desert? Apparently Bletchley Park had informed our Desert Army about this intended attack and the expected time. It so happened that Rommel was delayed by ten hours and that was why our lot were there first – highly suspicious, surely? (I read this in a book).
For the last few months of the war I was promoted to one of the research units led by Jack Plumb, then a jolly young history graduate, who much later became notorious for his rudeness when a professor at Cambridge. I worked with a naval officer studying and commenting on changes or new developments in Japanese naval activity.
It was when I was working there that I was given a truly frightening document to read, which had been captured from a German ship or submarine on its way to Japan. After the Japanese entered the war the Germans were anxious to convince them that they were reliable allies and were certain to win the war eventually because of their secret weapons. Of course these were the V1 and V2, which were more horrifying from the descriptions than they actually were. Later on, when the V1s first started to fall on London, I had been intending to spend my two day leave there, but my brother Edgar somehow managed to telephone me at work to ask me not to as there had been an air raid for the last 48 hours and still the all-clear had not sounded. Edgar told me that he thought the Germans were sending over remote-controlled planes. Of course I knew exactly what they were, but dared not say so and quickly ended the call in case someone was listening in.
Freddie and I were married in June and I returned to Bletchley Park for a few weeks until Freddie was offered a commission in the British Army to go to do social work – rehabilitation work – in Singapore or Malaya after the war. For the last two years of the war he had been funded by the Colonial Office to study (at LSE) social work in the colonies, and had signed an agreement to work for two years. As he could get back to Malaya far sooner in the army than as a civilian, he took the commission and left London on 11 September 1945. I at last obtained a passage in July 1946.