5 Mar 2015

The women of Bletchley Park: WW2 Codebreakers

From Nine To Noon, 10:08 am on 5 March 2015

Tessa Dunlop

The story of World War Two code breaker Alan Turing has just been told in the film The Imitation Game. But what the film misses, is the story of the thousands of women who also worked at Bletchley Park - the hub of Britain's most secret organisation, where German, Japanese and Italian encrypted messages were deciphered. Six thousand women worked at Bletchley Park during the war, many of them operating the code-cracking machines developed there. They were forbidden to talk about their war work, and many went for decades without speaking of it. Charlotte Webb was one of them. Now 91, she speaks with Kathryn Ryan about her years working at Bletchley Park, along with historian Tessa Dunlop, who's written a new book The Bletchley Girls. War, secrecy, love and loss: the women of Bletchley Park tell their story.