100-year-old Bletchley Park Codebreaker, Charlotte ’Betty’ Webb on keeping her wartime secrets

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Bletchley Park, Britain’s secret centre of code breaking housed the finest minds of a generation, and has always been perceived as a predominately male institution.

Countless books, films and documentaries have paid tribute to the genius of eccentric code-breakers like Alan Turing, widely regarded to have brought the war to a premature end by cracking the infamous Nazi Enigma encryptions, but little has been said of the quietly formidable women of Bletchley Park.

By 1944, Bletchley had over 8,000 personnel – 75 per cent of them women. These women, who outnumbered the men three to one, formed the backbone of the entire operation. 

Women like Charlotte ‘Betty’ Webb, a former Bletchley park codebreaker. I went to visit Betty at her home in Worcestershire and was charmed by this lively, whip-smart 100-year-old. Betty is full of surprising stories about her time at Bletchley, or as she described it ‘Britain’s Wartime University’. Rather than jitterbugging with a GI at London’s teeming dancehalls, on her leave weekends, Betty would head instead to an Indian restaurant for a curry. "Unusual, but so much nicer than boiled beef and beetroot’,’ she told me. This episode is full of fascinating tales of her time at Bletchley and after VE Day, her experiences of working in the Pentagon in Washington.

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