They worked day and night during World War II, deciphering Nazi messages, cracking the Enigma code, and analyzing top-secret military documents. But until now, it was unknown how many of the brave female codebreakers who worked at Bletchley Park studied there, forming a hidden network of scholars who secretly changed the course of history. There wasn’t.
The names of the 77 graduates of Newnham College, a women’s only college part of the University of Cambridge, who were employed during the war to intercept, decipher and translate military messages destined for Bletchley Park have been revealed for the first time. university exhibits and roll of honor.
It took university researchers five years to piece together clues about the former students’ roles and identities. They believe that, as well as the 77 women who uncovered the masks, some 20 other Newnham students and graduates who held apparently innocuous positions during the war were also secretly working for British intelligence. I doubt it.
Many of those first honored by their alma maters took the secrets of the war effort with them to their graves. One of our graduates, Jane Monroe, was a mathematician who worked as a code breaker in Hut 6 at Bletchley Park, deciphering coded messages sent to the German Enigma machine around the clock. When asked if he was doing so, he always answered: Oh, I made some tea. ”
“The problem we had was that the nature of Bletchley Park was that you couldn’t know anything about it. And they signed the Official Secrets Act, so the idea was that they shouldn’t talk about it. It was instilled in most women,” said Dr Sally Waugh, who researched the hidden lives of women with Newnham historian Dr Gillian Sutherland and university archivist Frida Midgely. and Bletchley Park staff.
In many cases, Waugh said, codebreakers were secretly recruited by “powerful women” within the university who had ties to men working at Bletchley Park.
Among them was headmaster Pernell Strachey, sister of Oliver Strachey, who worked as a cryptographer for British military intelligence. Oliver’s wife, Ray Costello, a suffragette who studied mathematics at Newnham, also worked with Stuart Milner-Barry, who was in charge of Hut No. 6 and happened to be Alda Milner’s brother, to find and recruit 77 women. I cooperated with the. Barry is a former deputy headteacher at Newnham.
On display for the first time is a letter written by Pernell Strachey in January 1939 to Alastair Denniston, commander of Bletchley Park, who had already begun recruiting Oxbridge scientists such as math genius Alan Turing. This is what Midjury discovered. The letter confirms that Mr Strachey will provide six modern linguists “in case of emergency”.
Sutherland said Denniston created a women’s college for these linguists because modern languages were considered “women’s subjects” and mastery of them was seen as an achievement for Victorian women. He turned his attention to him. In contrast, “relatively few men” were studying German, Spanish, or French, preferring instead classical languages such as Latin or ancient Greek.
German speakers can make educated guesses that can help crack the Enigma code by searching for language patterns and known phrases such as “Heil Hitler” in encrypted Nazi messages. Masu.
Mr Sutherland said: “Very early codebreaking required the creation of codebooks from collected materials, which required language skills. It was only when the possibility of using machines to break codes emerged that mathematics People also start to get interested.”
Another letter from the National Archives purports to contain a list of “suitable professor-type individuals” who could be employed in intelligence operations at Bletchley Park. There’s also a subtle appearance by Fiona Ede, a Newnham graduate who read mathematics and modern languages at Cambridge University. Although her name is on the Bletchley Park roll of honors, little is known about her wartime contributions and she was referred to as a “temporary civil servant,” Mr Waugh said.
Mr Sutherland said: “We learned that ‘temporary clerk of the Foreign Office, Grade II,’ is something to be pursued in records. Women’s war records are also confused between married and maiden names. This is a well-known phenomenon.”
