OBITUARY : Lilian Williams

22 Jan 2010

OBITUARY : Lilian Williams
--------------------------

Lilian Williams, who died on December 6 aged 92, was one of a team of 
linguists who played a vital role at the code-breaking centre Bletchley 
Park during the Second World War.
 
She was born on August 28 1917 in Aberystwyth, the second of the six 
children of Richard Williams and his wife Minnie. Her father had been 
denied secondary education himself - his parents needed him out working 
- and was a painter and decorator.

But he encouraged his children to make the most of their opportunities and 
four of them went to university. In 1936 Lilian won a state scholarship 
from Ardwyn county school to study German and French at University College 
London.
 
While working for the Welsh Board of Health in Cardiff in 1941, Lilian 
Williams thought her language skills might be useful to the Foreign 
Office.

"I was granted an interview in front of a panel of about six people, which 
terrified me a little," she recalled. But the panel was interested to 
learn that she liked to solve The Daily Telegraph crossword, and even more 
impressed that she always tackled the anagram clues first.

"I was a bit mystified as to why they were so interested in my liking 
cryptic crosswords. But when I got to Bletchley I understood why," she 
said. "The decodes had often been corrupted en route, with letters missing 
and very rarely a complete word. They came in groups of five letters and 
you had to connect them. All that anagram solving turned out to be very 
useful training."

Lilian Williams, who like all Bletchley staff was sworn to secrecy, said 
nothing about her work there until the first books about the centre 
appeared in the 1980s. Even then she spoke about it only 
reluctantly..../snip/


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/7045719/Lilian-Williams.html

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01563/lil_1563669f.jpg