For Winston Churchill the men and women at Bletchley Park were ‘the geese the laid the golden eggs’, providing important intelligence that led to the Allied victory in the Second World War. At the peak of Bletchley’s success, a total of twelve thousand people worked there of whom more than eight thousand were women. These included a former ballerina who helped to crack the Enigma Code; a debutante working for the Admiralty with a direct line to Churchill; the convent girl who operated the Bombes, the top secret machines that tested Enigma settings; and the German literature student whose codebreaking saved countless lives at D-Day. All these women were essential cogs in a very large machine, yet their stories have been kept secret. In The Debs of Bletchley Park author Michael Smith, trustee of Bletchley Park and chair of the Trust’s Historical Advisory Committee, tells their tale. Through interviews with the women themselves and unique access to the Bletchley Park archives, Smith reveals how they came to be there, the lives they gave up to do ‘their bit’ for the war effort, and the part they played in the vital work of ‘Station X’. They are an incredible set of women, and this is their story.

'Turing writes on codebreaking with understandable authority and compelling panache.' - Michael Smith, bestselling author of Station X. At Bletchley Park, some of Britain's most talented mathematicians, linguists, and intellectuals were assembled to break Nazi codes. Kept secret for nearly thirty years, we have now come to realise the crucial role that these codebreakers played in the Allied victory in World War II. Written by Dermot Turing - the nephew of famous codebreaker Alan Turing - this illustrated account provides unique insight into the behind-the-scenes action at Bletchley Park. Discover how brilliant and eccentric individuals such as Dilly Knox, Alan Turing and Joan Clarke were recruited, the social life that grew up around the park, and how they dealt with the ever-present burden of secrecy. Including a foreword by Professor Christopher Andrew of Cambridge University, author of MI5's official history The Secret World, this book brings to life the stories of the men and women who toiled day and night to crack the seemingly unbreakable enigma code.

This book is a 'hidden' history of Bletchley Park during the Second World War, which explores the agency from a social and gendered perspective. It examines themes such as: the experience of wartime staff members; the town in which the agency was situated; and the cultural influences on the wartime evolution of the agency.

In Secrets at Bletchley Park by Margaret Dickinson, two young women from very different backgrounds meet in the Second World War and are plunged into a life where security and discretion are paramount. But both have secrets of their own to hide . . . In 1929, life for ten-year-old Mattie Price, born and raised in the back streets of Sheffield, is tough. With a petty thief for a father and a mother who turns to the bottle to cope with her husband’s brutish ways, it is left to the young girl and her brother, Joe, to feed and care for their three younger siblings. But Mattie has others rooting for her too. The Spencer family, who live at the top of the same street, and Mattie’s teachers recognize that the girl is clever beyond her years and they, and Joe, are determined that she shall have the opportunity in life she deserves. Victoria Hamilton, living in the opulence of London’s Kensington, has all the material possessions that a young girl could want. But her mother, Grace, a widow from the Great War, is cold and distant, making no secret of the fact that she never wanted a child. Grace lives her life in the social whirl of upper-class society, leaving Victoria in the care of her governess and the servants. At eleven years old, Victoria is sent to boarding school where, for the first time in her young life, she is able to make friends of her own age. Mattie and Victoria are both set on a path that will bring them together at Bletchley Park in May 1940. An unlikely friendship between the two young women is born and together they will face the rest of the war keeping the nation’s secrets and helping to win the fight. They can tell no one, not even their families, about their work or even where they are. But keeping secrets is second nature to both of them . . .

“Demonstrates that the intelligence division . . . had a more significant role in WWII . . . making indispensable contributions to the invasion at Normandy.” (Publishers Weekly) The untold story of Bletchley Park's key role in the success of the Normandy campaign Since the secret of Bletchley Park was revealed in the 1970s, the work of its codebreakers has become one of the most famous stories of the Second World War. But cracking the Nazis’ codes was only the start of the process. Thousands of secret intelligence workers were then involved in making crucial information available to the Allied leaders and commanders who desperately needed it. Using previously classified documents, David Kenyon casts the work of Bletchley Park in a new light, as not just a codebreaking establishment, but as a fully developed intelligence agency. He shows how preparations for the war’s turning point—the Normandy Landings in 1944—had started at Bletchley years earlier, in 1942, with the careful collation of information extracted from enemy signals traffic. This account reveals the true character of Bletchley's vital contribution to success in Normandy, and ultimately, Allied victory.

Late 1930s. When World War II was declared, Mavis Batey, previously studying German Romanticism, abandoned her studies to do her duty for her country. At Bletchley Park, Britain’s best kept secret, she became one of the first women codebreakers, a pioneer and a star, breaking codes vital to bringing peace. Mavis Batey, a unique biography, delves into the life of one of Britain’s best female codebreakers, taking the reader through the war and to the arrival of peace, when Mavis turned her attention from breaking codes to the conservation and preservation of gardens. Mavis became an important figure in conservation, becoming President of the Garden History Society, which, under her watch, became an academic society and campaigning force for the protection of landscapes, parks, and gardens of historic interest. She also lobbied Parliament, fighting threats of encroachment and misuse of land. Acts of Parliament were passed, English Heritage was established, and grants were introduced. Historic gardens became officially recognised as essential components of European culture and her National Register of Historic Gardens came to fruition. Mavis’s passion was writing and she wrote many books. Mavis was finally awarded the RHS Veitch Memorial Medal and the MBE for Services to the preservation and conservation of historic landscapes. Mavis never did retire: her final project was to inspire an American Garden Trail for Bletchley Park which she signed off just a few months before her death in November 2013.

A groundbreaking history of women in British intelligence, revealing their pivotal role across the first half of the twentieth century From the twentieth century onward, women took on an extraordinary range of roles in intelligence, defying the conventions of their time. Across both world wars, far from being a small part of covert operations, women ran spy networks and escape lines, parachuted behind enemy lines, and interrogated prisoners. And, back in Bletchley and Whitehall, women’s vital administrative work in MI offices kept the British war engine running. In this major, panoramic history, Helen Fry looks at the rich and varied work women undertook as civilians and in uniform. From spies in the Belgian network “La Dame Blanche,” knitting coded messages into jumpers, to those who interpreted aerial images and even ran entire sections, Fry shows just how crucial women were in the intelligence mission. Filled with hitherto unknown stories, Women in Intelligence places new research on record for the first time and showcases the inspirational contributions of these remarkable women.

Since the inception of the Secret Service Bureau back in 1909, women have worked at the very heart of British secret intelligence - yet their contributions have been all but written out of history. Now, drawing on private and previously-classified documents, leading historian Claire Hubbard-Hall brings their gripping true stories to life. From encoding orders and decrypting enemy messages to penning propaganda and infiltrating organisations, the women of British intelligence played a pivotal role in both the First and Second World Wars. Prepare to meet the true custodians of Britain's military secrets, from Kathleen Pettigrew, personal assistant to the Chief of MI6 Stewart Menzies, who late in life declared 'I was Miss Moneypenny, but with more power', to Jane Archer, the very first female MI5 officer who raised suspicions about the Soviet spy Kim Philby long before he was officially unmasked and Winifred Spink, the first female officer ever sent to Russia in 1916. In Her Secret Service, Hubbard-Hall rescues these silenced voices and those of many other fascinating women from obscurity to provide a definitive account of women's contributions to the history of the intelligence services.

The Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS) was created in 1917, re-formed in 1938 and maintained after 1945. This book determines for the first time the reasons for the expansion and contraction of the service and the impact key individuals had on it and in turn the influence it had on its members. Hannah Roberts offers new insights into a previously little studied British military institution, which celebrates its centenary in 2017. She shows how political and military decision-making within the fluctuating national security situation, coupled with a growing cultural acceptability of women taking on military roles, allowed for the growth of the service in World War II into realms never expected of women. Although it shared a similar pattern in its formation to the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) and had a similar ethos to its Air Force counterpart, the WAAF, the WRNS took on a wider-ranging role in the war, in part due to the latitude afforded to the service because of its uniquely independent origins. From 1941 onward the WRNS spread internationally and subverted the combat taboo by adopting semi-combatant roles. Using twenty-one new oral histories and a multitude of archived personal documents, this book demonstrates the pivotal importance of the Women's Royal Naval Service in both the world wars.

This edited collection brings together cutting-edge research on British masculinities and male culture, considering the myriad ways British men experienced, understood and remembered their exploits during the Second World War, as active combatants, prisoners and as civilian workers. It examines male identities, roles and representations in the armed forces, with particular focus on the RAF, army, volunteers for dangerous duties and prisoners of war, and on the home front, with case studies of reserved occupations and Bletchley Park, and examines the ways such roles have been remembered in post-war years in memoirs, film and memorials. As such this analysis of previously underexplored male experiences makes a major contribution to the historiography of Britain in the Second World War, as well as to socio-cultural history, cultural studies and gender studies.