The Debs of Bletchley Park

Top Author Michael Smith will talk about his new book The Debs of Bletchley Park and about an incredible set of women and their story. 

Tickets:

Standard Ticket - £25 per person (includes day entry to Bletchley Park)

Season Ticket Holder Ticket - £20 per person


Lady Marion Body, from Stanford Dingley in Berkshire, was a Foreign Office civilian working on Japanese encoded messages alongside HRH The Duchess of Cambridge’s grandmother and great-aunt. She recently briefed the Duchess on what her grandmother and great-aunt did at Bletchley.

 

Jean Pitt-Lewis, from Monmouth in Gwent, was a Foreign Office civilian and member of the legendary Dilly’s Girls, a group of young women who worked alongside the great Bletchley Codebreaker Dilly Knox breaking Italian and German secret service Enigma messages. The secret service messages were vital to the Double Cross deception which ensured the success of the D-Day landings.

 

Betty Webb, from Wythall in Worcestershire, was a member of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). She worked on German police messages in the Mansion at Bletchley Park. These messages revealed the beginning of the Holocaust with the massacres of thousands of Jews on the eastern front. Betty then moved to Block F to write intelligence reports based on Japanese Army messages decoded at Bletchley.

 

Marigold Freeman-Attwood, from Haddenham in Buckinghamshire, was a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, the Wrens. She worked on Colossus, the world’s first digital electronic computer, which was developed at Bletchley but the existence of which was kept secret for decades.

 

Margaret Mortimer, from Bramble Edge in Dorset, was a Wren working in the Newmanry Registration Room receiving German messages from the intercept site at Knockholt, near Sevenoaks in Kent on punched paper teleprinter tapes, preparing them for running through Colossus and logging the results.

 

Jean Tocher, from Poole in Dorset, was a Wren in the Bletchley Park Naval Section working on the ‘Allied Plot’. This was a chart of the world covering all four walls of one room on which a number of Wrens plotted the movement of all the allied ships and their German, Italian and Japanese opposite numbers.