Fwd: OBITUARY : Margaret Cooper, Wren at Bletchley Park

Tuesday 30 August 2016

OBITUARY : Margaret Cooper, Wren at Bletchley Park
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Margaret Cooper, who has died aged 98, played a small but significant
role at Bletchley Park in the defeat of German U-boats.

She joined the WRNS in September 1941 and undertook her training at
Westfield College, London which had been taken over by the Admiralty.
Two weeks into her training she was resigned to becoming a cook, but
late one night she and her class were called to the office of the senior
WRNS officer who pointed to a letter on her desk, which she said came
from Winston Churchill, asking for volunteers for work which was “very,
very secret”.

The officer knew no more except that the need for volunteers was urgent,
and Margaret Cooper and her companions were told to sleep on the offer
and decide in the morning. Eight of the 10 girls on the course
volunteered and the next day they were put in a bus. They were surprised
to be taken not to a seaport but into the country, and when they
alighted, they found themselves at Bletchley Park, the headquarters of
the Government’s Code and Cypher School.

At first Margaret Cooper worked in Hut 11 on the bombes – the decoding
machines which had been designed and built by Alan Turing, Gordon
Welchman and Harold Keen. She remembered broken windows, no heating,
round-the-clock working, and exhaustion, and by February 1942 she was
seriously ill with flu. She also remembered her pride later that year
when Montgomery’s army brought Rommel’s to a halt in the Western Desert
partly because British submarines, cued from Bletchley, had sunk so many
German supply ships in the Mediterranean.

In late 1942 Margaret Cooper moved to Stanmore where, as a precaution
against enemy bombing, new bombes were being set up to supplement the
efforts of the GC&CS.

Subsequently she was picked out to be executive assistant to Frank
Birch, the head of the naval section in Hut 4, known as the “U-boat
room”. She found herself liaising with the Admiralty’s Operational
Intelligence Centre in London. Promoted to petty officer, she shifted
her digs to Woburn Abbey.

After a short course at Greenwich, Margaret Cooper was commissioned as a
Third Officer, WRNS, and in April 1944 she was sent to Plymouth to work
in the underground headquarters at Mount Wise. Nominally she was on the
staff of the Chief of Staff, but in fact she was the liaison officer who
passed messages and queries regarding U-boats between Bletchley and
Plymouth.

Margaret Cooper guarded the secrecy of her work for three decades until
it was disclosed by Group Captain F W Winterbotham. “Nobody,” she
recalled, “talked of their work at all except in the room with the
people they worked with. You just didn’t even think of talking to
anybody about your work. I think security was absolutely complete. It
was incredible because not only in Bletchley but around the world, there
were thousands of people working and I don’t think there was ever a case
that I ever heard of, of this getting out.”....


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2016/08/30/margaret-cooper-wren-at-bletchley-park--obituary/

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/decoder-margaret-cooper-monitored-u-boats-during-war/article31265595/