Bletchley : the women's story

Sunday 04 Jan 2015

Bletchley : the women's story
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Behind the great men at 'The Park' was an army of girls, and now their 
stories are told in a new book. By Sarah Rainey
			
By Sarah Rainey

The girl on the scarlet bicycle was a familiar sight to the residents of 
Fenny Stratford, Buckinghamshire, in the early Forties. Every day she 
would sail past the terraced houses on the high street. Her commute was 
tough – three miles, mostly uphill – but she was young, just 19, and 
everyone she passed remarked on her smile. She lodged with the Dickenses, 
a lorry driver and his wife, but she wasn’t from those parts. Was she a 
runaway, they wondered; perhaps a secretary with a job or a boyfriend in 
the next village ?

Rozanne Colchester was, in fact, a “Bletchleyette”. From 1942 to 1945, she 
was one of around 8,000 women drafted in from around the country to work 
at Bletchley Park, home of the Second World War codebreakers and training 
ground of Alan Turing, father of the modern computer. Colchester ( then 
Medhurst ) worked in one of Bletchley’s wooden huts, where she decoded 
messages sent between enemy fighter pilots. Like everyone at “The Park”, 
she was sworn to secrecy about her work. “You were told that if you talked 
about it, you could be shot,” she recalls. “It was all terribly exciting.”

The secrecy shrouding the activities at Bletchley lingered for years after 
the war. It wasn’t until the mid-Seventies that public discussion of the 
work there became possible – and not until 2009 that the British 
government awarded honours to its personnel. Recognition of their efforts 
has been unquestionably slow. Yet, for the Bletchleyettes, it remains 
almost non-existent.

Although women made up three quarters of the workforce at The Park by the 
end of the war, Bletchley is largely remembered as a male endeavour. Its 
heroes are men – Turing, Gordon Welchman, Alastair Denniston, Edward 
Travis, Hugh Alexander – and many of the great tributes to their work, 
including the recent film "The Imitation Game", starring Benedict 
Cumberbatch as Turing, portray codebreaking as a man’s game. It is only 
now, 70 years later, that the extraordinary contribution of women is 
finally being explored.

Tessa Dunlop, author of "The Bletchley Girls", documenting the lives of 15 
remarkable women who worked at The Park and are still alive to tell their 
stories, says they have been airbrushed from history for too long. “These 
women were born in an era when they did what they were told,” she 
explains. “They were second fiddles to men. They weren’t expected to have 
a career. And yet they found themselves in this job they couldn’t even 
talk about. The women of Bletchley weren’t the stars – they were the 
worker ants.”..../snip/

- "The Bletchley Girls"
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  Tessa Dunlop
  Hodder & Stoughton
  ISBN : 9781444795714
  Publication date : 08 Jan 2015
  Page count : 352
  £20


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/11323312/Bletchley-the-womens-story.html

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02328/bletchley_2328727b.jpg


http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/heritage/the-women-of-bletchley-park-tell-their-story-1-3650112

http://www.scotsman.com/webimage/1.3650108.1420302789!/image/4207107737.jpg_gen/derivatives/articleImgDeriv_628px/4207107737.jpg


http://www.express.co.uk/news/history/550026/Bletchley-Park-Girls-code-breakers-win-war-charity-work-others

http://images.dailyexpress.co.uk/img/dynamic/141/590x/secondary/Sisters-Georgette-and-Doris-in-1942-238255.jpg

http://images.dailyexpress.co.uk/img/dynamic/141/590x/secondary/Sisters-Georgette-left-and-Doris-today-238257.jpg

http://bcove.me/1h0ms7a3


http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/127175/the-bletchley-codebreakers-who-never-cracked

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https://www.hodder.co.uk/Books/detail.page?isbn=9781444795714

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http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Bletchley-Girls-Secrecy-Women/dp/1444795716

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Bletchley-Girls-secrecy-women-ebook/dp/B00N9AVK8E

http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/richmedia/images/cover.gif

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/913LFEw7-VL.jpg