My mother (seen above with my father, many, many years ago) has recently moved into a residential care home for the elderly. Whilst clearing her house of stuff I found an employer's reference (pictured below) given to her when she finished her work as an operator on a decoding machine at Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking centre during World War II. The reference intriguingly reads:
Foreign Office S.W.1
30th August, 1945
I have pleasure in stating that Miss M. J. Coby was employed in this Department from 22.11.43 to the present time when her services were no longer required owing to the termination of the work for which she had been engaged.
At the conclusion of her employment her grade was temporary assistant at a salary of £3:8:0 a week (exclusive of war bonus).
During service with the Department she performed her duties in a very satisfactory manner.
During her service she was employed in important and highly specialized work of a secret nature. The Official Secrets Acts preclude giving any information in connection with these duties.
At the end of the War in Europe my mother was offered work in Japanese decoding, but she wanted to get back to Norwich and her family and took the reference instead. Prior to 1974 she always referred to her time at Bletchley as “At the Foreign Office”. It was nearly 30 years after 1945 with the publication of F.W. Winterbotham’s 1974 book “The Ultra Secret” that the true significance of being “At Foreign Office” started to emerge. Even now many people who passed through World War II have never heard of Bletchley Park and its role in revealing the military secrets of Nazi Germany. On the whole German military equipment and preparation was much better than that of the Western Allies and Allied military hardware took time to catch up. Quality hardware like the Lancaster Bomber, the Flying Fortress, the Mustang, and the Spitfire Mk IX (and later Marks) were not immediately available. In fact, only right at the end of the war did Britain and America achieve tank parity with the Comet and General Pershing tanks. In the face of this lack of preparedness Bletchley Park, along with the invention of Radar, provided the Allies with a much-needed advantage in the information war. In one sense the Park was the portent of a revolutionary new power, not the power of brute force but the power of information and the ability to process it; it was ushering in the age of the computer with theoretical geniuses like Alan Turing in the vanguard. Bletchley hosted the world’s first programmable electronic computer built by Tommy Flowers – The Colossus. This computer was specially designed to find the keys needed to decode the scrambled text produced by the German's 'enigma' enciphering machine.
My mother’s time at the “Foreign Office” started with an interview in London accompanied by her mother. Even though she went as a mere short hand typist she was nevertheless asked the standard question put to potential codebreakers: Did she do crosswords? The answer to that question was 'yes' but what really mystified her was why she was given a sheet of random text and told to type it out. Presumably she reproduced it with sufficient accuracy and speed to satisfy her interviewers and was offered the job of temporary assistant. She moved to a billet in Wolverton near Bletchley (a billet she hated) and began work in Hut 8, Naval Section, on a decoding machine. The decoding machine required the keys provided by Colossus to set them up, but once set up they would turn enigma enciphered text into readable German.
Her boss was somebody she referred to as “Willy” Alexander. I not sure where the name “Willy” came from: perhaps it was nickname because it seems that the Alexander concerned was none other than Colonel Hugh O’Donel Alexander whose Wiki entry reads as follows:
In February 1940 Alexander arrived at Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking centre during World War II. He joined Hut 6, the section tasked with breaking German Army and Air Force Enigma messages. In 1941, he transferred to Hut 8, the corresponding hut working on Naval Enigma. He became deputy head of Hut 8 under Alan Turing. Alexander was more involved with the day-to-day operations of the hut than Turing, and, while Turing was visiting the United States, Alexander formally became the head of Hut 8 around November 1942.
In October 1944, Alexander was transferred to work on the Japanese JN-25 code.
In mid-1946, Alexander joined GCHQ, which was the post-war successor organisation to the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) at Bletchley Park. By 1949, he had been promoted to the head of "Section H" (cryptanalysis), a post he retained until his retirement in 1971.
So, my mother may have even had contact with the great Alan Turing whose face she says is familiar.
During her work she frequently saw references to U boat numbers embedded in the decoded text her machine was generating and understood enough about the tactical consequences of what she was doing to realize that they were now revealed and their number was up, so to speak. Even so I don’t think even she was fully aware of the strategic importance of the messages passing through her machine. Only in retrospect, and that only with slowly dawning realization, did she understand how her apparently humble job fitted in the great scheme of things. A lesson there for us all perhaps.
Bletchley park is the historic site of secret British codebreaking activities during WWII and birthplace of the modern computer. It is open to the general public as a museum.
Hut 8 has been refurbished is also open to visitors.
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