Mark Barbakoff gave us a fascinating talk about the women who served at the Government Code and Cypher School War Station (GC & CS), or Bletchley Park as it is more commonly known. Bletchley Park was one of the best kept secrets of World War Two, the people who worked there were sworn to secrecy and information about the vital work done there was not declassified until the mid-1970s.
Seventy-five percent of the workforce of Bletchley Park were women and they worked in a multitude of roles including code breaking and operating the code breaking machines. The people recruited to do this work had a range of abilities, from languages, to mathematics, cryptic crosswords and music, amongst others.
Among the code breakers were Emily Anderson, who was reputed to be one of the top three female code breakers in the world. Her amazing career spanned being a linguist, professor, code breaker and award winning musicologist who translated the private letters of Mozart and Beethoven. She was awarded the OBE for her work as a code breaker and the German Order of Merit for her work on Beethoven. Patricia Bartley who worked on breaking the Floradora code. Mavis Lever who broke the Italian Navy’s Enigma code. Joan Clarke who worked for Alan Turing and deciphered over one million German messages.
We weren’t the only ones in the dark. Work done after the war revealed that the Germans weren’t aware that Bletchley Park existed. Only one spy is known to have gained access to Bletchley’s inner sanctum, John Cairncross, a Russian agent who worked in hut 3 for 18 months. Thankfully, as the Russians were our allies it’s thought that the information he gleaned had little impact.