Royal visits newly restored huts at codebreaking centre and meets 90-year-old woman who worked with her relative
Duchess of Cambridge intercepts and decodes messages at Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park, home of the code-breakers, offered up some personal wartime history to the Duchess of Cambridge as she viewed the £8m restoration of its listening huts.
The royal retraced the steps of her late paternal grandmother Valerie Glassborow, who with twin sister Mary was a civilian worker at the government code and cypher school, working in Hut 16, now Hut 6.
Lady Marion Body, 90, who worked with the sisters, confessed their job was "tedious" and mostly administrative, checking that listening stations, which monitored Axis diplomatic messages, were targeting the right areas.
Surrounded by period furniture and effects in the restored Hut 6, the duchess told her: "When I was a young girl, I did ask granny about it." But her grandmother, who married Peter Middleton, did not speak much about her wartime duties.
Body recalled how she was working with Glassborow at the listening station near Milton Keynes when they were told by a senior officer about Japan's plan to surrender, discovered in intercepted diplomatic messages on 15 August 1945.
"We just sat there in complete silence nobody knew what to do or say and then he said: ' You just get on with your work' – he didn't know what to say either."
The duchess was shown around the restored huts by Sir Iain Lobban, director of GCHQ, and Sir John Scarlett, former head of MI6. For some veterans the restoration was not quite authentic enough. "I didn't recognise any of this, least of all the lights, we had proper lighting. We had great big lights hanging from the ceiling, then we had lights all around the wall. The floors were dirty and there were torn blinds," recalled Jane Fawcett, 93.
The fragile buildings were saved in the nick of time. Had work to restore them to their wartime glory started just one year later, the wind storms of early 2014 could easily have reduced them to piles of rubble.
Erected in haste early in the war to meet urgent operational needs, they were structurally similar to garden sheds.
In Hut 6, Enigma messages sent by the German army and air force were decrypted then passed to Hut 3 next door, via a wooden chute using a broom handle to push the tray along, where they were translated and analysed for intelligence.