Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio4. Cast away this week is Pamela Rose. She was a Bletchley girl, one of the women who spent the war years working in total secrecy, painstakingly indexing snippets of information that would prove vital to beating the Nazis. A clandestine role that has recently made its way from the

of Britain's wartime past to the megawatt glade of the silver screen in movies like Enigma and the Imitation Game. But my game... Yesterday has no truck with the glamorising of her wartime work. The truth is, she says, it was often boring. Something of a disappointment to a young woman who herself had early ambitions to be an actress. A half-hearted debutante, she abandoned her own life. And the season to spend time in Paris and Munich, going on to drama school in London later. Yet she gave up dreaming. Of her name in lights on Shaftesbury Avenue for the indexing section of Hut 4. Turning down her first... To appear in the West End and opting instead for the undercover job at Bletchley. She would finally... Achieve her dream nearly 60 years later, making her West End acting debut at the age of 83. She says, I think we... You're as old as I am, you feel as if you're walking alongside yourself, watching yourself with great interest, wondering what you're going to do next.

Pamela Rose at 97 now. I wonder what's on your to-do list? Desert Island is, I think. Good, I'm glad you've made the time. Many of us... Have seen the movies Enigma and The Imitation Game, those films about Bletchley Park. How realistic a picture do they paint? I myself, I haven't seen them because I'm very black. And I can't see in the cinema very well. I'm waiting for the DVD to come out and I shall watch it on that. And I will say all my friends who weren't at Bletchley think that The Invitation Game is wonderful. And all my friends who were think it's rubbish. It's a mixture of the two. We are going to talk I hope in in some detail later about how you ended up at Bletchley Park and about the type of work you did there. None of it was public

knowledge I think until the 1970s. What was it like when suddenly the truth came to light? Well, you know, my memory of the 1970s is that people weren't all that interested. They seemed much more interested now. It seemed quite a long way away, the fact that we'd broken the codes was wonderful, and perhaps saved lives, it was wonderful, but it was part of his... And we were all getting on with our lives and doing other things. That notion of it being part of history then, what did the war effort mean to you there and then as a young woman? Well I suppose underneath most of us Felt that we really were fighting for our survival and for the survival of the things that we believed in. But I think everybody seemed so friendly. I suppose it's like a match really. I've never been a great sports watcher but we were a team. The whole country was a team.

Ask you then for your first disc of the morning, what are we going to hear and why have you chosen this? Well my first disc is a duet from Mozart's Don Giovanni and goes right back to my parents. My father was an opera singer before the war and my mother had aspirations to be one. My parents used to have once a month what they called a PWE, a Pleasant Wednesday Evening and they would ask about fifty friends who would sit on little cold chairs and they'd Before or afterwards and then they would perform and many of their musical friends would perform too and they'd have little concerts once a month. The thing I remember my parents singing more than anything is this duet from Don Giovanni and I love to hear them singing it.

Andhiya! Andhiya! ♪ And you ♪ Lachi de Rem Lamanno from Act 1 of Mozart's Don Giovanni, sung there by Barbara Bonet and Holcan Harcagourt, played by the Drottingham Court Theatre Orchestra and chorus conducted by Arnold Oostman. And you chose that, Pamela Rose, because you said it was often sung by your parents during what they named their P.W.E's, their pleasant...

Wednesday evenings. Oh, that we should all have PWEs in our life. You were born then in 1917. Your parents were dolly and thorny. The first World War... Had been going on for three years when your father had been at the front but but he was injured? Yes my mother had a direct line to God she always made that quite clear and she was very specific in the things she asked. And she asked for my father to be wounded in the left leg because she said if he was wounded in the left leg he would get what they call a blight and would come home and otherwise he'd be killed

And sure enough he was wounded in the left leg. You were sent to boarding school at the age of eight. Tell me about that. My brother had gone to boarding school and I was left with a nanny, whom I loved dearly. I was sent off to a little sort of dame school at Broadstairs. And you liked it? I loved it yes because I had two things which I loved. One was elocution lessons with the elderly, actress but we did have a splendid time together doing Victorian ballads and I I was allowed to ride there. And we had a wonderful riding master who had been some sort of a cowboy. And instead of having very posh riding lessons, which we had at my next school, we were allowed to sort of try and stand up in the saddle and crack a whip and all sorts of things standing up and do really quite exciting things in a small field behind the school. Much more fun. When you had those early...

Elocution lessons with the retired actress. Did that immediately strike a You clearly still have a very beautiful, so quite sonorous voice really. I wanted to be an actress and that's why they read for the lessons for me. You already did at that age, did you? Yes, I wanted to be an actress from the start, from when I first remembered. We did quite a lot of acting at home. We quite often played charades. It's time for some more of your discs, Pamela Rose, your second of the day. Tell me what we're going to hear now. We're going to hear Yvette Gilbert now. And I don't suppose many people listening have even heard of Yvette Gilbert. But she was a sort of forerunner of Édith Piaf. And when I was sent to France to learn French after school,

The mother of the family that I went to felt very strongly for me that I wanted to go on the stage. You see, she signed me up with this lady who was giving a course of cabaret lessons, really, and she was one of the first singers of the Moulin Rouge. She is rumoured to be the mistress of Edward VII. The A-mistress of Edward VII. And she also taught me French. She was extremely nice to and she had these wonderful songs. I've chosen the voyage to Bethlehem because I also find it very touching. And it makes me think of her more than all the others.

The voyage to Bethlehem sung there by Yvette. Gilbert, one-time star of the Moulin Rouge and also your French teacher in the time that you spent in Paris. That was recorded in 1933. So this time that you... Spent in Paris, Pamela Rose. It was either that or learning to type here in London, was it? I mean also my parents did want me to learn languages. I already had done quite well in French at school. How many languages do you speak? Well, I speak French and German quite adequately well, and a bit of Italian, and a very little bit of Spanish at all. I think I went to France in '35. And Munich in 36. Now this is at a time then if you were in Munich in 36 when it was I mean it was the capital of the movement.

The Nazi movement at that time. I know it was. And it's most extraordinary. My mother had an aunt by marriage and they took a few boys and they didn't want to take me because I was a girl and she said it would be too much responsibility. So I went to a friend of hers opposite, called Griffin Malotti. And I stayed there for three months and learnt, I suppose, quite good German. I was very well aware of Hitler but not of quite how awful he was. Can I just try to have you describe a little the atmosphere in Munich at that time? Well, it's rather difficult. If I'd been living with a proper German family who didn't take other students, I should have seen more of it. But these were people who expressly took English.

And I suppose American students and I think the atmosphere was really I wasn't sensitive enough to realize what a lot must have been going on underneath I didn't much like the idea of Hitlerjugend. It didn't seem to me terribly warlike, of course I had no idea what warlike was and I didn't read the newspapers much. And I mean, it's very, very self-centered, I think, at that age very often. I wanted to get back more than anything and get onto the stage. Bye. I can remember even when I was rehearsing, the very first professional play I was in was at the time of Munich. And I wasn't praying.

You know, let there be no war for any other reason except that I wanted to open and play the part which I got was rather a nice one. And I'm sorry to say I'm deeply ashamed now, but I'm not to say I don't think I was very rarely political at all or aware. Of the ghastly things that were going on all around. I was just like, I suppose, many young people. Living my own life. Yes indeed I'm glad you said that because I think that is to It's to be preoccupied with yourself. Yes. Let's have some more of your discs.

Pamela Rose, tell me about this next thing that we're going to hear now, not a piece of music in fact, just tell us why you've chosen this. Oh, well the best part I think I had all the time I was on the stage both before and after my marriage. It was the Playboy of the Western world and that wonderful actor Cyril Kewisak was going to play the Playboy. And I put in for the part of Peggy Mike and got it. And so I played opposite Cyril.

Although we were never recorded, I would love to hear Cyril's voice saying some of those marvellous speeches, because it was one of the really important moments of my life as far as the theatre was concerned. I'll let you wait to hear me talkin' Till we're astray in Eris when Good Friday's by Drinkin' a sup from a well And makin' mighty kisses with our wetted mouths Our game and in a gap of sunshine With yourself stretched back unto your necklace In the flowers of the earth. Is it? Oh, if the mighty Bishop seen you that time. They'd be the like of the holy prophets, I'm thinking, to be straining the bars of paradise.

On the lady Helena try and she abroad pacing back and forward with a nosegay in her golden shawl and what is it I have Christy man to make me fit in entertainment for the like of you it has such poets talking and such bravery of By the light of seven heavens in your heart alone. The way you'll be in Ainsworth's lamp to me from this out, and I abroad in the darkness, spearing salmons in the owen of the carrow moor. - If I was your wife, I'd be along with you those nights. Act 3 of the John Millington Singh play The Playboy of the Western World performed there by Cyril Cusack and Siobhan McKenna. Went on to study drama then a very happy moment for you Pamela Rose at the Weber Douglas School and then in the early You were in something called ENSA, which was the Entertainments National... Entertaining the Troops. Yes, Entertaining the Troops. We all had to do that. You could stay on the stage, you had to be in work. And everybody had to do so much ENSA.

And at one point you were in Birmingham and that was during the blitz. What do you remember of that? Oh, I remember the blitz very clearly Just lots of bangs and red things and burning and smoke. Were you afraid? Enough, no. It seems so exciting. I mean, when something was very near and everything shook, I thought, Ooh, that was near. So we were all acting to one another, perhaps we were very deep down. I should have been afraid if I'd been alone, Of course, I was with always a group of actors. And did the show go on every night, or did you suspend performances? I don't think we ever suspended a performance, no. And then there came a moment, I believe, when it was your godmother, I think, that suggested that there was a place that needs girls like you. What did she mean and how did she know about Bletchley? Well, one of her sons was connected with it. I suppose, to be honest, she met girls like you, girls about who she was.

Families we know something. We know now after all those spy scandal, one thing that good family doesn't. Mean you're going to be loyalty or country necessarily. But the idea was at that time that if they picked, because they had to pick a great many girls, if they could try... Girls of good family who had adequate languages to cope with the signals, they would be very useful, naturally. And I suppose we were. And there weren't that many people speaking German in Britain to the standard that you could at that time. That's probably true, but I expect all over there were. But they had to also, they thought, know about us, and about our... Provenance. I mean they may have been wrong but on the whole I think nobody ever did find out about Bletchley because surely they'd have bombed us otherwise.

Application then and at the same time another letter, an important letter arrived from your agent. Tell me about that. It was offered an understudy and a small part in a play called Watch on the Rhine, a very popular play in the West End.

Would have been a very good thing. So when I had my interview, I was interviewed by a don called Frank Birch, who was head of Naval Sex and Intelligence. And I knew he knew about the theatre, I was very keen on it. So I said to him at the end of the interview, he said, Well, we'd like you. And I said, Well, now I've got a real problem, because I've just been offered my first West End part, and I'd quite like to do that too. What would you do? And he said to me, Well, the stage couldn't wait and the war can't. So I went to Bletchley. Tell me about your next piece then, Pemler Rose. What are we going to hear now? This is your fourth. Well, we're going to hear Night and Day, because Night and Day by Cole Porter is, to me, sort of resonant with all my...

Youth before the war, dancing, just being young. And they were still playing it a year or two later when I met my husband at Bletchley. So I should like that. ♪ It's no matter, darling, where you are ♪ Cole Porter's Night and Day, sung there by Fred Astaire. I should tell listeners, Pamela Rose, that throughout that you had the most beatific smile on your face. You were right back in the moment. Does it seem like only a moment ago? like only a moment ago and sometimes it seems like ages ago, so long. My life seems to me to have been very long I must say. Well 97 it is quite long. It is quite long.

A young girl then with this obviously a sense of drama. And creative notions, you know a life on the stage was what you were interested in. You were given the job at Bletchley and they would have asked you to sign the Official Secrets Act Given that you liked drama and you had an imagination, what were your expectations of your job? I fully expected that I might be dropped over France or something. It's a very glorified idea of my languages because they weren't nearly good enough for that. But I thought it might be going to be very exciting. I must say it wasn't when I first got there. Tell me about the pervading atmosphere in the indexing section of Heart 4. We had a lot of fun, but we were very serious too. I went there as a so-called linguist.

And I was moved to temporary senior administrative officer. So you were promoted? I did go to meetings and things like that with other heads of section but I had also to arrange for people like the Baroness Trumpington for instance who were... My younger girls, not to keep going on leave when they wanted to, so that they could see their bodies. Friends. Yes, she was Jean Campbell Harris. That's right, she was Jean Campbell Harris. And of course you say Baroness Tompington, she of the infamous two fingers. Saluting the House of Lords. That's right, saluting. She said of her... She was just as naughty then as she is now. Yes, oh good I'm glad you brought that up because she has said of her days at Bletchley I often behaved very badly indeed. What did she get up to? One night I remember we put her in a laundry basket and gave her a push and she careered off down the passage and ended up in a naval command

office. And he wasn't terribly pleased I must say. And did you behave badly? Were you sort of dashing off to see boyfriends here? Well I was dashing off to see boyfriends too, yes, until... Glorious day when I met Jim Rose. Then he was a Bletchley too. And so we... Had our fun where we were really. This day-to-day role then, if actually you know we mentioned earlier the index cards and the linguist skills, what were you actually doing? What happened was the codes were broken and then they were sent to something called a zed room. This happened in the Navy Section in the air section and in the army section, but all separately. The codes are broken. They were rather like text messages, really. And they were sent to a room where they were put into proper German. Then they came to us, and we had to, because there were no computers of course.

We had to make a note of everything in importance in the signal and index it so the people working on intelligence could come and get all the... say it's a ship like the Scharnhorst it was. Have an index card, then every move it made that was mentioned in signals would be on that card and cross-referenced with the ports it was at. And any other information we had about it really. So it was a very large index. And what of the famed cryptanalyst Alan Turing, et al., his highfalutin? team did you ever meet Alan Turing? It met him once at breakfast because he was having breakfast with Jim. I mean he just seemed like a perfectly nice ordinary person. And there were no rumours of what these very big-brained people were working on at the time? I think to say that none of us had any idea of what we were doing is not...

To. We did have. Tell us Pamela Rose about your next piece of music. This is your fifth disc of The Morning. First of all I love Kathleen Ferrie's voice and secondly Benjamin Britten who was quite young then also loved her voice and wrote this opera for her. And Jim and I, we were married in '46 and we went to it that summer and it was the first thing we went to together and it was wonderfully exciting. We had a walking tour on the Downs first with our evening dress in rucksacks and then took a taxi to Gynvorn. It was very grand and just very exciting to be there.

♪ Stop the gaping wood and see how wonderful this sky is ♪ ♪ Yes, what a lovely day it is ♪ Hush, she comes from Benjamin Britten's Rape of the Creek. Sung by Kathleen Ferrier with Anna Polak and Margaret Ritchie accompanied by the English Opera Group Orchestra conducted by Reginald Goodall and that was recorded in 1946 and you specifically chose that Pamela Rose.

Because of the memories you have of you and your new husband walking across the Sussex Downs with your evening dress in your backpack before you headed to Kleinborn. The fiercely looking wing commander Jim Rose then. When did you, you met him at Bletchley. I met him at Bletchley. Yes, can you remember the first time you met? Yes I can. It was at a dance and funnily enough Jean Campbell Harris comes into it again because we had continual hops in what I think you'd call a tour gramophone in a sort of drill hall. Where everything took place. There was one I didn't really want to go to and Jean said Oh do come, I don't want to go alone. So I said All right. And Jim asked me to dance and I'd seen Jim from afar in the canteen and places like that and thought he'd look rather attractive but he had a great reputation for taking care of sort of wallflowers and peaches.

We were sorry for. So immediately asked me to dance, I thought, What's wrong with me? But in fact, apparently not much. There was one small but significant fly in the ointment because he, like a lot of people, had rushed into a marriage in 1939, I think. So he was in the middle of a divorce when you met him. And getting divorced in those days was a damn sight trickier than it is now. It was terrible because if you were a gentleman you had to take the blame and Jim had to go down to Brighton With a lady whom he paid and apparently played cards on the floor.

Night and then when the chambermaid came with the breakfast in the morning she had been I suppose paid a fiver or something and she was then the witness. She'd seen you in bed when she brought the breakfast. You had to have definite testimony that you were in bed with somebody else. As proof of adultery? As proof of adultery, absolutely. Let's have some more music Pamela Rose. We went to Zurich after the war. They were looking for somebody to start up an international press institute. And the idea was to make countries love one another by their editors meeting and getting to understand one another.

In fact, we were in Zurich for ten years, and by one joy while we were in Zurich, really, apart from the fact we had two children. They were great fun and they liked Zurich. I was a little bit bored, I have to say, but my great friend there was really a friend of my father's called Edwin Fisher, who was a wonderful pianist and musician. One day he came to see us and he was going to play this Beethoven sonata. He was playing the concert that night. He said it's really dedicated to the great friend Brown, but I'm going to dedicate it to Pamela. So, always afterwards it's been my sonata and I love it very much.

as part of Beethoven's Sonata No.10 in G major, played by another friend of yours, Dennis Matthews there, Pamela Rose. When you did come back... To London is you say you've been in Zurich and your husband had worked before that as literary editor of The Observer and then he had set up and co-founded... Indeed in 1968 the Runnymede Trust. Throughout all of this did you have a sense of, aside from having your children and being a mother, of feeling slightly sort of chomping at the bit that there was something else? In Zurich, yes. In Zurich, because Zurich was also in those days... Very old-fashioned and very sort of... for instance when we brought our furniture over, although my husband was extremely busy, he had to go down to the border and sign for them because a woman couldn't sign for them. And a lot of the cantons hadn't got the vote in those days. Indeed so it was really like being in a 19th century play almost

Talking of plays, were you not indeed yourself tempted just to get back into the theatre? Well, I promised no, because I promised Jim I wouldn't. When he said, Shall we get married? he said, You know, I don't think it would work if you went back to the stage. Remember, these were... Old-fashioned days because he said you'd always be going out when I'm coming in and of course it's true and I've got a great many friends who did stay on the stage and most of them didn't stay with the same person all that long and so I suppose since I never wanted to be with anyone else really once I'd met him I did the right thing. I didn't go up to stage after he died. - You died in 1999 there. - Yes. Went back as I said in the introduction earlier this morning you went on to the West End stage and you were aged 83. 83 that's right yes. First of all how did it

Well, I had an old friend called Sam Beasley, and when Jim died, he said to me after a month or two, You know, you can't sit on your bottom for the rest of your life. You'd better come back to the Actors' Centre and do some classes and get back on the stage, which he had done. So I went to the Actors' Centre and they very kindly took me, and I did some classes which I thoroughly enjoyed. And got myself an agent and she suddenly rang up one day just before Christmas I remember and said I think I've got a job For you go down to the Haymarket and they are putting on Lady Windermere's fan and it was given the part of Lady Gedborough and also understudied Googie Withers and it was quite a distinguished production it had Vanessa Redgrave.

At Jack Davenport. It was quite alarming but of course if there's one thing that doesn't drive out, that subdues grief, it's fear. And I was pretty afraid really to start with. But I had a lovely time. At the age of 83 not just learning your own part but under studying one of the main... Parts? I mean was it easy for you to learn the lines? Well I really did study very hard. I mean all over Christmas I was learning not my part but Googie's part. Because on the third night suddenly I heard her say ladies and gentlemen and I'm ill, I can't go on. And she walked off. The stage manager looked down at me rather superciliously, I thought, and said, Can you go on? So I said, Yes. And on I went. Did it happen?

Caused to make you think being back on the stage after 60 years and given that you'd fallen in love with Jim and had a very very happy marriage for all those years, gosh what I gave up. No, not really. I'm not a regretter really much. You can't have everything and I think I've had more than my share really. It's time for your seventh piece of music then Pamela, tell me what we're going to hear now. We're going to hear 'Summertime' from Paul Guilbez. By Gershwin. To me it springs like a flower out of darkness and that's what I love about it.

♪ A voice for no care ♪ ♪ O, kill ♪ time from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess sung by Cynthia Hayman. The music was played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra with the Glyndebourne chorus conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. You said To me Pamela Rose you can't have everything and I've had more than most I wonder

given all the decades that you've lived, what do you think the ingredients are for living a long and fulfilled life? Well, luck's the greatest, I suppose. I think I've got an optimistic temperament, and I'm lucky in that. I inherited that from my parents, I think. And a good partner's the greatest thing of all. Family is a wonderful thing. A belief of some sort is great. I don't mean necessarily belonging to a strict religion. But I think believing in the human spirit, and the fact there is a spirit, is a great thing.

Something there that's worth preserving and being. I've today, because it's Desert Island Discs, I've been asking you to look back at your life and to tell me about all those decades and years ago in your time at Bletchley. I'm wondering though if you spend much time talking to your own children and grandchildren about the war. About the war? Yes. When they ask, yes. I'm much more interested in what they're doing really. There's a taxi driver the other day who was teaching his daughters about the war. And when I told him that I'd been at Bletchley in the war, he said... Can I take your photograph? He was so thrilled to find somebody who'd been at Bletchley. Now you know given that this is Desert Island Discs, I'm going to, I'm cruelly going to cast you away. I'm wondering if there's anything about... On your own on this desert island that you'll actually look forward to? Not really.

Mind being alone. I like people very much. I think if I can have my eyes back, which I'm sure I can, I shall enjoy reading. So tell me then about your final piece. I've chosen the Schubert piano sonata in B minor because it was a thing that was in Jim's CD player. When he came back from hospital he took a little CD player with him and also we had it played by a friend at his memorial service and it would remind me first of all of Jim. It's a little slow and it's a little sad but I think I'd feel rather nostalgic on that island and I'd like to have him with me.

That was part of the second movement of Schubert's piano sonata in B flat major played by Alfred Brendel. So Pamela Rose, I'm going to give you the books now, as you mentioned. You will take to this island the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible and another book too of your own. What are you going to take? I'd like the complete works, or if not the complete works, the complete poetry of T.S. Eliot. First of all, Cats Would Make Me Laugh and Ash Wednesday has my motto in it for old age. And now I rejoice at having to construct something upon which to rejoice.

Well we shall give you the collected poems of T.S. Eliot then. And what luxury would make your life just a little bit more bearable? A very, very, very comfortable four poster bed with a Macintosh roof. Would that be allowed? Definitely. I'll construct it myself. Yes, it certainly would be allowed. And finally, if you had to save one of these eight discs that you've chosen, which one would you save from the waves? I think Summertime, because such a pure, joyful note really. It's yours. Pamela Rose, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. It has been a great pleasure.

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