Betty Webb Download VIDEO
By the end of her stint at Bletchley Park in 1945, Betty Webb had progressed from private to staff sergeant (Betty Webb) (Courtesy of Betty Webb)
Like everyone else who had served at Bletchley Park, she kept her secret, insisting her war had featured nothing more than “boring secretarial work”, until 1975, when the operation was finally allowed to be made public.
Then, in her eighties, long released from her duty of secrecy, she wrote a book about her part in defeating fascism August 1938: members of MI6 and the Government Code and Cypher School check on Bletchley Park’s suitability as a secret codebreaking base (GCHQ) (Crown copyright, reproduced by kind permission, Director, GCHQ)
In 1943 she moved to Block F, to paraphrase decoded Japanese messages. (The paraphrasing was a precaution, so if the Japanese picked up any subsequent British messages, it would not be obvious to them that their codes had been cracked.)
Such was the strength of Bletchley’s secrecy culture that it became instinct for Mrs Webb to dismiss the precise content of the messages from her memory. They were about troop movements, she thinks.
It seems to explain a lot.
As for Bletchley Park and defeating 1940s fascism: “I was just in the right place at the right time, one of those fortunate enough to be a member of the team.”
Like everyone else who had served at Bletchley Park, she kept her secret, insisting her war had featured nothing more than “boring secretarial work”, until 1975, when the operation was finally allowed to be made public.
Then, in her eighties, long released from her duty of secrecy, she wrote a book about her part in defeating fascism August 1938: members of MI6 and the Government Code and Cypher School check on Bletchley Park’s suitability as a secret codebreaking base (GCHQ) (Crown copyright, reproduced by kind permission, Director, GCHQ)
In 1943 she moved to Block F, to paraphrase decoded Japanese messages. (The paraphrasing was a precaution, so if the Japanese picked up any subsequent British messages, it would not be obvious to them that their codes had been cracked.)
Such was the strength of Bletchley’s secrecy culture that it became instinct for Mrs Webb to dismiss the precise content of the messages from her memory. They were about troop movements, she thinks.
It seems to explain a lot.
As for Bletchley Park and defeating 1940s fascism: “I was just in the right place at the right time, one of those fortunate enough to be a member of the team.”
As part of the top secret codebreaking operation at Bletchley Park that cracked the Enigma cipher and let the British read Nazi messages, Mrs Webb was involved in an intelligence triumph said by historians to have shortened the Second World War by between two and four years.
Two years ago, she learned from a researcher that those soon-to-be-decoded messages she had been ordered to catalogue – strings of letters and numbers that meant nothing to her at the time – had in fact been communications between the worst of the worst: members of the SS and the Gestapo, some of them discussing the beginnings of the Holocaust.
Two years ago, she learned from a researcher that those soon-to-be-decoded messages she had been ordered to catalogue – strings of letters and numbers that meant nothing to her at the time – had in fact been communications between the worst of the worst: members of the SS and the Gestapo, some of them discussing the beginnings of the Holocaust.
It does seem that Mrs Webb was fairly typical of many of the 8,000 women who found their way to Bletchley during the Second World War. (By 1945, women made up three-quarters of the workforce at ‘The Park’.)
By her own admission, she had led rather a sheltered life, growing up in Richard’s Castle, a village on the Shropshire-Herefordshire border, father a cricket-loving Lloyds Bank employee, mother a music teacher.
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By May 1941 she was at Radbrook College near Shrewsbury, on a domestic science course where young ladies were taught how to cook, run a house and do household accounts.
“I remember listening to news of the war on the wireless,” she says. “Bad news, things like ‘one of our aircraft is missing’.
“We wanted to do something for the war effort, and domestic science wasn’t it.”
By her own admission, she had led rather a sheltered life, growing up in Richard’s Castle, a village on the Shropshire-Herefordshire border, father a cricket-loving Lloyds Bank employee, mother a music teacher.
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By May 1941 she was at Radbrook College near Shrewsbury, on a domestic science course where young ladies were taught how to cook, run a house and do household accounts.
“I remember listening to news of the war on the wireless,” she says. “Bad news, things like ‘one of our aircraft is missing’.
“We wanted to do something for the war effort, and domestic science wasn’t it.”
Betty Vine-Stevens – as she then was – volunteered for the Auxiliary Territorial Service.
After basic training, to her surprise, she found herself ordered to London, to an office in Piccadilly where she was interviewed by “a very pleasant, twinkly-eyed Army Major from the Intelligence Corps.”
From there she was ordered to take a train to Bletchley in Buckinghamshire, without being told why.
The mystery only deepened on her first day at Bletchley Park, where her first duty was to sign the Official Secrets Act, and to listen to an Army captain talking her and the other girls through how severely they would be punished for breaching it.
“He took his service revolver out and put it on the table. It did rather add to the atmosphere.”
“I can only assume,” adds Mrs Webb, “That the reason I was picked in the first place was because I was bilingual.”
Her genteel childhood had not been without its peculiarities.
Betty had had German and Swiss au pairs. There had also been a month-long exchange trip to Herrnhut, near Dresden, in 1937, four years after Hitler had come to power.
She may have been a naïve 14-year-old, but Betty saw no reason why she should give the classroom Heil Hitler salute that was compulsory for her German exchange and all the other girls at the school.
After basic training, to her surprise, she found herself ordered to London, to an office in Piccadilly where she was interviewed by “a very pleasant, twinkly-eyed Army Major from the Intelligence Corps.”
From there she was ordered to take a train to Bletchley in Buckinghamshire, without being told why.
The mystery only deepened on her first day at Bletchley Park, where her first duty was to sign the Official Secrets Act, and to listen to an Army captain talking her and the other girls through how severely they would be punished for breaching it.
“He took his service revolver out and put it on the table. It did rather add to the atmosphere.”
“I can only assume,” adds Mrs Webb, “That the reason I was picked in the first place was because I was bilingual.”
Her genteel childhood had not been without its peculiarities.
Betty had had German and Swiss au pairs. There had also been a month-long exchange trip to Herrnhut, near Dresden, in 1937, four years after Hitler had come to power.
She may have been a naïve 14-year-old, but Betty saw no reason why she should give the classroom Heil Hitler salute that was compulsory for her German exchange and all the other girls at the school.
