Being a Bletchley Park codebreaker was the best time of my life

Decades after her vital work in World War Two, 101-year-old Betty Webb remains a committed ambassador for the Army Benevolent Fund

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My work registering messages from the Germans and Japanese as part of the code breaking team at Bletchley Park took place eight decades ago now, yet I still count it as the best time of life.
I signed up to help as soon as I turned 18 in May 1941. At the time, I was halfway through a domestic science course at Radbrook College near Shrewsbury, learning how to cook.
But I was terribly bored – especially after my sheltered childhood in rural Shropshire – and listening to the horrors of the Blitz down the wireless, I decided to leave my course.
After joining the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), which was a non-combat women’s unit, I got sent for an interview in London to test my language skills. My mother was a linguist and had taught me German – I even spent three months in a school in Germany in 1937 where I was expected to give a Nazi salute. I must have passed because afterwards I was given a railway warrant and told to get to Euston station immediately and make my way to Bletchley. 
Of course I had no idea what Bletchley was, but I arrived like hundreds of other women, with just a suitcase.
Previously it had been an English stately home and I was taken to the main building, which I called the mansion, and given the Official Secrets Act to read by an Army captain with a handgun on his desk.
It was a formidable document which said I could not discuss my work with anyone outside my department for 30 years and any indiscretions were punishable. Needless to say, this was a jolt and I wondered what I’d be doing.
It turned out I was to be employed in the Government Code and Cypher School under an army officer, Major Tester, who had had an extensive military and civilian career in code-breaking. A lovely man, he was also a brilliant linguist and spoke perfect German. I was very happy to be working with him.
In a cramped, freezing office above the mansion ballroom, three men and I sat at our wooden desks by an open fire, working on intercepting and decoding messages from the German police. At the start, much of my work was clerical, transcribing messages for the officers. But I soon began cataloguing the intercepted encrypted messages of the German military police, Army and SS, then logging them meticulously on index cards which I stored in a shoebox.
To be honest, I found it rather boring but soon came to realise it was vital because so much intelligence could be deduced from patterns and groupings.
At times, I would work night shifts, where I would pile wood onto the fire and wear my thick ATS coat, but my feet would be freezing, as the uniform for women was just stockings, and no socks.
I was also cut off from my family and couldn’t reveal my exact whereabouts. Instead, I gave people the standard Bletchley postal address in London, and once a Canadian boyfriend I’d been writing to turned up there expecting to see me and found instead a bemused clerk.
But Bletchley itself was an amazing place. In 1941, it wasn’t overcrowded and the mansion grounds resembled a pleasant park. It became busier later that year after the key codebreakers wrote to Winston Churchill in 1941 begging for more resources.
I was paid 10 shillings and sixpence a week – the first time I earned my own money – and was put up by a local family in the nearby village of Loughton. But it was the social life that made it what it was.
Bletchley was full of the most extraordinarily interesting people and fascinating aristocrats. Some were terribly eccentric, and I recall the story of Josh Cooper, a brilliant mathematician who threw the cup he’d been drinking from into the lake as he didn’t know what else to do with it. I don’t recall meeting Alan Turing, however, who famously broke the Enigma code, but I would have seen him as the poor man had asthma and used to cycle to work with a gas mask on. As a side note, I did watch the film The Imitation Game but thought it was quite exaggerated and not very well cast. I don’t think Benedict Cumberbatch was a wise choice but that’s just my opinion.
I joined the park’s gramophone society and Bach choir. There was a professional orchestra and we had dances in buildings outside the park so other people could attend. There was also a recreation club, which offered a chance to play table tennis – my favourite game – plus chess or badminton.
It was all terribly social, even if we were just queuing at a kiosk for some very rare chocolate, and I often went out on my bike with friends into nearby towns. There were no signposts so you had to remember your route home – but we would never discuss our work with one another.
Once I went to a restaurant and asked for beans on toast but the waitress accidentally slopped them down the back of my dress.
As the war wove on, I continued to register an ever-increasing number of messages in the German Police Section but then I was moved onto more challenging work in the Japanese Military Section in Block F, a concrete hut nicknamed the Burma Road because of its length.
There, I worked on paraphrasing Japanese messages which had been intercepted and decoded. I had to forward them on in a disguised way, so if the Japanese then intercepted them they wouldn’t know for sure that we had picked up on a particular frequency they were using and change it.
The messages, for instance, might be about a planned bombing of Burma, so I would find a way to relay this information discreetly. I found this much more fulfilling and was seemingly good at it. So when the Germans conceded in May 1945 I was sent to the Pentagon in Virginia to help their effort against the Japanese.
I felt so honoured to be chosen – especially as I was the only member of the ATS to be posted there, and as a humble staff sergeant at that. With its oppressive hundred degree heat, high humidity and cockroaches in my room, Washington was quite a shock after Bletchley.
But the work was similar and again I was tasked with paraphrasing intelligence reports derived from intercepted Japanese communications from Burma.
Like Bletchley, the social life was also brilliant and I spent my evenings attending cocktail parties, concerts and the ballet, and learning how to use a jukebox.
The main effort though was ending the war, and I still remember hearing the news about the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Everyone went crazy and steaks seemed to appear in restaurants as if by magic. It was only later that the horror of the radiation and deaths sunk in. Then the war ended, and I was sent back to Bletchley to be decommissioned. I remember feeling a little lost, but I was also relieved to go back to Shropshire.
I could never tell my parents about what I had done, but I think my father had an inkling. Instead, I got on with life, working as a secretary at Ludlow Grammar School. Fortunately, I got the job as the head had also been at Bletchley and we recognised each other – although of course we never spoke about it. Later I went on to work in the Territorial Army, doing recruitment.
It was in 1975 when the act expired and I was allowed to talk about my work, but I didn’t actually want to as it felt so strange.
I had become used to keeping it to myself. Even when I was persuaded to write a memoir, No More Secrets, I found that terribly tricky, but I suppose over time I’ve got used to it. I have given over 200 talks now about my work and even had my 100th birthday in the ballroom at Bletchley. Since 2020 I have been an ambassador of Operation Bletchley, a series of walking and codebreaking challenges which raises money for the Army Benevolent Fund.
I don’t use the fund myself, but I know it is there if I need it. In just 2023/2024 it has helped 75,000 former soldiers, veterans and their families across 51 countries.
It’s also funded 86 other charities and organisations that deliver frontline services, so I am proud to do my bit to help.
My life has been extraordinary. I have an MBE and also the Légion d’honneur, the highest honour from France, which arrived in the post one day in 2021, but mainly I have my memories. And it’s all thanks to Bletchley.
As told to Gwyneth Rees
Army Benevolent Fund is one of four charities supported by this year’s Telegraph Christmas Charity Appeal. The others are Humanity & Inclusion, Teenage Cancer Trust and Alzheimer’s Research UK. To make a donation, please visit telegraph.co.uk/2024appeal or call 0151 317 5247
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