Bletchley reject

By Tim Whitaker

This spring, Bletchley Park celebrated World Poetry Day by recalling notable poets who served there. Among them were Herbert Read and Vernon Watkins, who turned their creative talents to codebreaking during the war.

One poet firmly rejected was Philip Larkin. Sixty years later, he’s still firmly persona non grata at Bletchley.

How Bletchley recruited staff remains a mystery. It was informal and eccentric – essentially down to whether you were ‘right’ for the job. Larkin should have fitted the bill – public school and Oxford, with intellectual and librarian attributes.

Larkin (1922-85) was at Oxford when his compatriots were enlisting in the services. Declared unfit for service on grounds of bad eyesight, he was left in a career quandary. The natural route was the civil service.

He applied as a ‘temporary assistant principal’, saying, ‘I don’t know what it entails, and I don’t much care … the job will probably be loathsome’.

Rejected, Larkin explained, ‘I’ve not got a civil-service job. I went for an interview, and I suppose they didn’t like the look of me. That’s fine, because I didn’t like the look of them either and had been dreading the arrival of some footling 9-6 job in an out-of-theway place.’

But Larkin made an impression.

Writing to Kingsley Amis on 1st September 1943, he revealed, ‘I got a letter on Thursday, saying I had not been recommended for appointment. This makes me think I must have offended them terribly in some way…

‘Soon afterwards, another letter came saying they had sent my name etc to the Foreign Office who wanted people for a branch – “40-50 miles from London”.

‘This will be hackwork of the worst order, I imagine, but there’s no interview attached to it – which is just as well, for at interviews I must obviously show them that I don’t give a zebra’s turd for any kind of job, and which militates against me.’

Explaining more to a friend, he wrote, ‘They have forwarded my name to the Foreign Office, who sent me a form to fill up this morning, enquiring what languages I knew. Ha ha. I’ve got a good mind to put Anglo-Saxon down. Trouble is, I don’t even know that.

‘Or perhaps I might arrogantly reply that a man who is master of his own language needs no other.’

Describing his Bletchley interview to Kingsley Amis, he said, ‘Anyway, I saw some Admiralty people who were very nice, and gave me teas and a cigarette, but couldn’t promise anything. Pity.

‘Then on Wednesday I went to Bletchley and heard about the work you do there. “Of course, yah’re workin against the clock all the tahm … one day orf everah seven … one week everah three months … Christmas, Eastah, Bank Holiday – they don’t exist… Billets … evah been billeted? No… Very difficult … overcrowded … spread out all ovah the countryside … special ’buses and trains to bring you in … we work shifts. 12-9, 9-4, 4-12 midnight. Think your eyes can stend workin’ by artificial light…

‘Salary £260 [the Admiralty had been £300 plus war bonus] min. We’ll let you know within the next few days.’

Larkin came away singularly unimpressed, ‘I’m not sure I want to know. I think I should very soon want to go away from that place and not go back to it again. In fact, I felt like that when I went away from it on Wednesday. I felt that soon after I started work there, I should be put in a wooden box and lowered into a hole dug in the earth.’

His rejection spurred mixed emotions, outlined in a letter to Kingsley Amis: ‘The reasons for this gloom are several … they include receiving a letter saying that Bletchley doesn’t want me.

‘Now of course this is of course very fine as far as it goes: as I said before, I didn’t want to go to B, but there is something humiliating about being turned down a second time.’

Chased by the Ministry of Labour, Larkin landed a job as the librarian for Wellington, Shropshire.

When Larkin’s centenary was celebrated last year, I thought this story might interest Bletchley Park for its glossy magazine, Ultra. But this was clearly very much off brand.

My rejection letter stated there were ‘more positive and informative stories to include, instead of an article in which Bletchley Park is being described in such a negative way by a well-known poet, who only briefly visited the site’.

Worse still, ‘he fundamentally did not want to work here.’

We don’t have the notes from Larkin’s interview – only his letters. Of course, it’s the curmudgeonly Larkin with very contradictory views about work. But we’ll never know whether he’d have been a Bletchley success story, cutting years off the war.

For the time being, anyway, there won’t be a display board at Bletchley featuring him and other rejected notables.

Tim Whitaker is a member of the Larkin Society and the Friends of Bletchley Park. His mother served in Hut 3 from 1942 to ’44. Letters are taken from Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985, ed Anthony Thwaite