At the age of 101, Betty Webb could still be seen at the wheel of her car, driving around the small village where she lived in Worcestershire, in the English Midlands. In retirement she was spritely and active in education, giving talks to over 200 schools and travelling abroad to speak to groups on her wartime career. When asked about her war years, she once said, ‘I wanted to do something more for the war effort than bake sausage rolls.’

That she most certainly did as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park, the clandestine codebreaking site in the Buckinghamshire countryside. In one of my encounters with her a few years ago, Betty said that she wanted no attention on her own wartime career and that all of her colleagues equally deserve recognition; she was not to be turned into a heroine. Her modest sentiments were so typical of veterans of her generation who wanted no personal praise for their contribution to the defeat of Nazism and the restoration of democracy in Europe at the end of the Second World War.

During the war, Betty was at the heart of one of Britain’s most secretive establishments. One of the highest priorities in any war is to break the enemy’s codes and ciphers, and Bletchley Park was doing just that from 1939. The estate was purchased by Hugh Sinclair, the then head of MI6, in the summer of 1938. A small ‘shooting party’ arrived there that Summer, when it was believed war was imminent. When conflict did not break out, they left, only to return a year later when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and Britain declared war on Germany two days later, 3 September 1939.

Bletchley Park was ideally situated within easy distance to London by train. It was here in utmost secrecy that men and women went on to crack encrypted messages between the different German services and the German High Command, including between Adolf Hitler and his Secret Service (the Abwehr). The codebreakers at Bletchley Park went on to break the ‘unbreakable’ German Enigma code, and thereby gave Allied commanders vital information, including operational intelligence, that in the end saved millions of lives.

Betty Webb was 18 years old when she first arrived at Bletchley Park and was asked immediately to sign the Official Secrets Act. Born Charlotte Elizabeth Vine-Stevens, she had been studying at a college near Shrewsbury in Shropshire when she volunteered for the war effort. During her earlier education, which included some home-schooling, her mother had taught her German. In 1941, Betty enlisted in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), undertook basic training at the Royal Welch Fusiliers’ Hightown Barracks in Wrexham, and was soon attached to the British army’s Intelligence Corps.

On arrival at Bletchley Park, she first worked in the mansion house in a section that was headed by Major Ralph Tester. Here, she catalogued the encrypted German radio messages that had been intercepted by the Y Stations located around the UK. Her early work contributed to the breaking of the German cipher Enigma.

She was then transferred to Block F, the Japanese section, which in 1942 broke the particularly difficult Japanese codes. In this section, Betty registered the messages on small cards and organised them into shoeboxes, which formed an early database that could be consulted when necessary.

Alongside this vital work, Betty writes in her memoirs, No More Secrets, about the social life, the men and women she met, and the more mundane weekly jobs. ‘We have to keep our bunks spotless and make our beds in a specific way,’ she wrote. ‘Every Monday we had to polish an allocated section of floor in the barracks with a sort of bitumen type polish until it shined.’ Her vivid account gives a valuable snapshot of the realities of life in wartime.

By the end of the war in Europe, nearly 10,000 personnel worked at Bletchley Park; two thirds of them women. When, 30 years later, they could begin to speak about their wartime work, a public perspective emerged that these women were recruited solely from among the ‘debutantes’, from the higher echelons of society, including the daughters of admirals and commanders. That was largely true prior to 1941, as it was believed that these ladies were better able to keep a secret than young women from humbler backgrounds. Of course, this proved not to be true.

For decades, the story of the ‘debutantes’ masked the true picture of those talented young women, not from an aristocratic background, whose brains were used in codebreaking and cryptanalysis. By the time Betty arrived at Bletchley Park in 1941, 200 of the young women at the site were graduates in economics, mathematics, law and languages from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. They included Jane Hughes (later Fawcett), who played a key role in the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck in May 1941. She had been recruited by a friend who wrote to her: ‘I’m at Bletchley and it’s perfectly frightful. We’re so overworked, so desperately busy. You must come and join us.’ Patricia Bartley (later Brown) had a knowledge of languages and was given the task of working on the main German diplomatic code, a system that had been ignored because it was deemed to be too difficult. She succeeded in breaking it.

The following year, 1942, the new head of Bletchley Park, Edward Travis, undertook a massive recruitment drive to scale up the workforce ahead of key events that were being planned, including the Normandy Landings (D-Day, 6 June 1944). It saw an increase in the number of women from all backgrounds, working right across the site, some as senior codebreakers. One of the women in Hut 16 in 1943, where German army and air force Enigma messages were decrypted, was Valerie Glassborrow, the paternal grandmother of Catherine, Princess of Wales (née Catherine Middleton). She helped to decipher German codes, along with her twin sister Mary; both were from a middle-class background.

The women proved to be good at codebreaking, as in the case of Margaret Rock, whom Betty Webb mentions in her memoirs, and Mavis Batey. Margaret and Mavis played a leading role in cracking the complex Enigma code of the Abwehr. Its Enigma machine had four rotors, instead of the standard three, and these rotated randomly and had no predictable pattern. It had not been possible to break it, until Mavis Batey broke a message on the link between Belgrade and Berlin, allowing the reconstruction of one of the rotors. Within days, the Abwehr Enigma was broken at Bletchley Park and shortly afterwards, Mavis cracked a second Abwehr machine.

Caroline Chojecki (née Rowett) was a pioneering naval intelligence analyst at Bletchley Park. Her comprehensive knowledge of German U-boats helped the codebreakers to read the enemy’s messages and save allied supply convoys that were rerouted to avoid attack from German U-boats. She was recruited in June 1942 from Cambridge University, where she was studying German. She was involved in building up a database of information about the U-boats that could help provide ‘cribs’ – pieces of plain text to help the codebreakers crack the German Naval Enigma again (codenamed ‘Shark’ by Turing) and thereby decipher the messages.

The same year as Chojecki was recruited, Helene Aldwinckle (née Taylor) became a senior codebreaker in Hut 6, sorting messages that could be linked together by the same call signs or the length of the messages. Having helped to break those codes, she went on to work in a section known as the ‘Quiet Watch’. Messages were handed to the Quiet Room to try to unravel if it had not been possible to break a code in another section because, for example, a British intercept operator might have made a mistake or misheard a letter. It was also directly responsible for breaking a number of keys. On 10 April 1944, Helene broke one of the keys called ‘P’, almost certainly the Luftwaffe leaders’ key (the Pink Luftwaffenführungsschlüssel), used to transmit ultra-sensitive communications.

At the end of the war, and still in ATS uniform, Betty Webb was posted to the Pentagon in Washington, as the war in the Far East was continuing with little end in sight. While at the Pentagon, she transcribed the decoded Japanese messages. Other young women from Bletchley Park were also posted to Washington, including Margaret Denniston, daughter of Alastair (head of Bletchley Park before Travis). Betty and Margaret became lifelong friends until Margaret’s death in 2005. At the time they met, Betty was working in the office of the British Joint Services Mission near the White House. It was here that Betty learned about the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, which finally brought an end to war in the Far East.

‘At the end of a long war, all we understood was we were winning,’ she recalled. ‘Only later did the horror of devastation caused by the bombs sink in.’

Back in Western Europe, the Iron Curtain had descended as a new threat emerged between former Allies; the Cold War was underway. Not all of Bletchley Park’s women had been demobbed after the war; their expertise remained vital at a time when peace and democracy were fragile. They continued to contribute to national security and signals intelligence (SIGINT); and almost certainly with GCHQ. One of these women was Joan Clarke, always remembered for being the fiancée that Alan Turing never married, who went on to have a distinguished career in GCHQ that is still classified today.

These women remained tight-lipped about it. Betty Webb herself joined the Territorial Army (TA) in 1955, joining the 321 (Cheshire Battalion) WRAC, becoming a commissioned officer. In autumn 1958 she became a Permanent Staff Officer in her battalion, holding the rank of captain, and adjutant to the commanding officer. While not working, her leisure activities included badminton, tennis, and membership of Deeside Orpheus Music Society.

The importance of education and remembrance was central to Betty Webb’s work in her latter years. In 2015, she was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the Birthday Honours for ‘services to remembering and promoting the work of Bletchley Park’. In peacetime, she was at the forefront of ensuring that her colleagues were remembered. Having signed the Official Secrets Acts, many of them had died without ever speaking about their work because they were still bound by their oath of secrecy. Betty lived long enough to see the files released and know that she was able to share – and did – her personal story of life at Bletchley Park. She posed the question – what would life have been like had there been no war and no Bletchley Park? She replied: ‘I would probably be an old spinster sitting on the porch of Ryecroft [her parent’s home], feeding the goats.’

Were there any more secrets from Betty’s life? If so, she took them to the grave on 31 March 2025, a few weeks short of her 102^nd birthday.

Public knowledge of Bletchley Park and its clandestine codebreaking remained classified for 30 years, until the 1970s. Today, as more files are released into the UK National Archives in London, there is a much deeper understanding of the significance of the work carried out by the codebreakers, mathematicians, and cryptanalysts. The men and women of Bletchley Park have left an incredible legacy.