- The Duchess' paternal grandmother Valerie Glassborow was one of the 9,000 people who worked at Bletchley Park
- Miss Glassborow and her twin sister worked in the famous Hut 16 where the German Enigma code was cracked
- The Duchess was reopening Bletchley Park following a year-long renovation that cost £8 million to complete
- Miss Glassborow, who died in 2006, left GCHQ after the war and married Peter Francis Middleton in 1946
As bombs
fell on London and the Wehrmacht rampaged across France, a young woman
named Valerie Glassborow was among the civilians working around the
clock at Bletchley Park, feeding false trails to German High Command as
D-Day approached.
70
years on, Miss Glassborow's granddaughter, the Duchess of Cambridge,
was back at Bletchley to see the results of a year-long £8m restoration
programme and meet one of her grandmother's former colleagues.
Lady
Marion Body, who worked with Miss Glassborow and her twin sister Mary
in Hut 16, was part of the team of crack codebreakers who unlocked the
secrets of the German Enigma machine - ultimately helping to win the war
for Britain.
That's how it's done! Clarence House tweeted
this photo of the Duchess of Cambridge learning how to use Morse Code
during her visit to Bletchley Park
Chats: The Duchess of Cambridge talks with
Bletchley veteran Lady Marion Body, who knew her grandmother, during a
visit to Bletchley Park to mark the completion of a year-long
restoration project
Enjoying the day: The Duchess of Cambridge
enjoys a joke with a local police officer as she arrives to reopen
Bletchley Park where her grandmother once worked
The
Duchess herself was on typically fashionable form, elegant in a navy
skirt by Alexander McQueen teamed with a neat white blouse by the same
label and navy court shoes, as she toured the newly renovated buildings
with Lady Body and was given a potted history of Bletchley Park - the
birthplace of GCHQ.
During
her tour, she was also shown a vintage Morse Code machine and gleefully
set about learning how to use it, before being taken to see the new
visitor centre which occupies what was once Block C.
Many
of those who employed there were women like Miss Glassborow - ordinary
middle-class ladies whose work, kept secret for almost half a century,
helped to change the course of the war.
'Women
played a variety of roles from lowly clerks to operating machines and
breaking into ciphers and codes - the highest level of work you could do
at Bletchley Park,' explains author and historian Michael Smith.
Among
the women working at the highest level was Mavis Batey, a Londoner who
arrived at Bletchley Park aged just 19 years old, and who died last
November at the age of 92.
'She
was one of the top codebreakers at Bletchley,' adds Smith. 'She's
frequently described as one of the leading female codebreakers but I
don't think that's fair – she was one of the leading codebreakers full
stop.'
Looking
good: The Duchess of Cambridge arrives at Bletchley Park in a neat
Alexander McQueen pencil skirt and a chic sailor-inspired blouse, last
worn in 2011
Pleased to meet you: The Duchess meets members
of the Bletchley Park Trust as she arrives in Milton Keynes to reopen
the house which has had an £8m makeover
Brave:
Valerie Glassborow (pictured centre right at her 1946 wedding to Peter
Middleton) is the Duchess of Cambridge's grandmother and worked at
Bletchley Park
Meeting: The Duchess also met Lady Marion Body
who worked with Valerie Glassborow and her twin sister Mary in the
famous Hut 16 at Bletchley Park
But
her greatest triumph came in December 1941 when she deciphered a
message sent from Belgrade to Berlin that allowed Knox and his team to
decrypt the output of the Abwehr [German secret service] Enigma machine.
Thanks
to Batey and Knox, British intelligence was able to monitor Abwehr
activities and even plant false information – something that would later
prove critical to the success of D-Day.
It
could even, as Smith points out, have helped prevent nuclear war in
Europe. 'The key thing in all of this is that [decrypting Enigma]
allowed D-Day to go ahead,' he reveals.
'Without
them, it [D-Day] might well have been put back two years. Bear in mind,
this was at a time when the UK and USA were developing the atomic bomb
which was later used on Japan. It's not at all clear they wouldn't have
used it on Germany if they thought it necessary.'
Despite
the heroic efforts of Miss Glassborow, Ms Batey and fellow code
breakers such as Rozanne Colchester and Gwendoline Page, the work of
female code breakers wasn't always given the recognition it deserved at
the time.
Restoration: Bletchley Park has undergone an £8m makeover which took a year to complete
The tour: The Duchess is shown around the complex where her grandmother once worked
Meet and greet: The Duchess chats to well-wishers as she arrives at Bletchley Park
Looking good: The Duchess, who was given a tour
of the renovated Bletchley Park Museum, accessorised her Alexander
McQueen with a pair of sapphire drop earrings
Thrilled: The Duchess was met by a group of
officials from the Bletchley Park Trust and Milton Keynes Council who
worked together on the restoration
Contribution: The Duchess' paternal grandmother
Valerie Glassborow was one of the 9,000 women who worked at Bletchley
Park during the Second World War
Although
there was what Smith describes as a 'collegiate atmosphere' and women
were free to challenge their male colleagues as they saw fit, they were
paid a third less than the men and after the war ended, many melted back
into ordinary life.
Indeed,
of the 9,000 people who worked at Bletchley Park during World War II,
just 600 women went on to join the fledgling GCHQ or other branches of
the secret services.
'Unless
they went on into GCHQ, most of the women went back into ordinary
life,' explains Smith. 'It became a brief thing that didn't reflect
their ordinary lives. It meant most of them had more life experience,
cultural interests and so on than they might have done. In the 1940s and
50s, ordinary life meant getting married, having children but never
again having the sort of life they had at Bletchley.'
Among
those to leave the service for a life of domesticity was Miss
Glassborow who married Peter Francis Middleton in 1946 in the village of
Adel in Yorkshire and went on to have four sons, Michael, Richard,
Simon and Nicholas in quick succession.
Michael,
the eldest, is the father of the Duchess of Cambridge and is known to
have been close to his mother who died in 2006, without ever speaking
publicly of her wartime service.
Today,
after more than 70 years, the incredible wartime work done by Valerie
and Mary Glassborow, and others like them, is finally getting the
recognition it deserves.
Stylish: The ever stylish Duchess of Cambridge
was on typically fashionable form but almost fell foul of a gust of wind
which played havoc with her long loose locks
THE MAGNIFICENT MANOR THAT WAS ONCE BRITAIN'S BEST KEPT SECRET: INSIDE BLETCHLEY PARK
Until
relatively recently, the work of the men and women who worked at
Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire was a well-kept secret. But thanks to
the declassification of wartime documents, the exploits of the code
breakers – and the magnificent contribution they made – have finally
been made public.
The story of Bletchley Park began 76 years ago in late 1938 when a group of MI6 operatives decamped to the house for a shooting party. Among them were men from an organisation called the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) whose job it was to assess the Georgian building's suitability for becoming the headquarters of a secret group of top level code breakers.
It was deemed ideal and by September 1939, GC&CS, the forerunner of GCHQ - still in charge of codebreaking and signals intelligence - returned to start their work in earnest.
By the end of 1940, 12,000 people worked at Bletchley and its sub-camps, whether as cooks and support staff or as code breakers decrypting the military codes and ciphers that secured German, Japanese, and other Axis nation's communications.
Others operated the incredibly sophisticated machines that were the forerunners of modern computers, including the Turing/Welchman Bombe, and the groundbreaking Colossus machine.
By the end of the war, GC&CS' code breaking expertise had become a key part of intelligence operations and had helped bring World War II to a close.
But post-war, the magnificent 17th century Bletchley Park mansion and the assorted outbuildings were deemed surplus to requirements, with intelligence operations moved to Cheltenham.
Abandoned by GCHQ, the house and gardens passed through several owners, including BT, but by the 1990s, was practically derelict and at risk of demolition.
Happily, help was at hand and the site was declared a conservation area by Milton Keynes council in 1992 before being taken over by the Bletchley Park Trust.
Now a museum dedicated to the exploits of the men and women who helped break the Enigma code, Bletchley Park has undergone an £8m renovation aimed at preserving the huts where so many worked so hard to save the UK and its allies during World War II.
The story of Bletchley Park began 76 years ago in late 1938 when a group of MI6 operatives decamped to the house for a shooting party. Among them were men from an organisation called the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) whose job it was to assess the Georgian building's suitability for becoming the headquarters of a secret group of top level code breakers.
It was deemed ideal and by September 1939, GC&CS, the forerunner of GCHQ - still in charge of codebreaking and signals intelligence - returned to start their work in earnest.
By the end of 1940, 12,000 people worked at Bletchley and its sub-camps, whether as cooks and support staff or as code breakers decrypting the military codes and ciphers that secured German, Japanese, and other Axis nation's communications.
Others operated the incredibly sophisticated machines that were the forerunners of modern computers, including the Turing/Welchman Bombe, and the groundbreaking Colossus machine.
By the end of the war, GC&CS' code breaking expertise had become a key part of intelligence operations and had helped bring World War II to a close.
But post-war, the magnificent 17th century Bletchley Park mansion and the assorted outbuildings were deemed surplus to requirements, with intelligence operations moved to Cheltenham.
Abandoned by GCHQ, the house and gardens passed through several owners, including BT, but by the 1990s, was practically derelict and at risk of demolition.
Happily, help was at hand and the site was declared a conservation area by Milton Keynes council in 1992 before being taken over by the Bletchley Park Trust.
Now a museum dedicated to the exploits of the men and women who helped break the Enigma code, Bletchley Park has undergone an £8m renovation aimed at preserving the huts where so many worked so hard to save the UK and its allies during World War II.
Advanced: Among the achievements of those
working at Bletchley Park was creating one of the world's earliest
computers which was used to decode Nazi messages
Important work: It was at Bletchley Park in 1944
that the German Enigma code was finally cracked - paving the way for
D-Day and victory for Britain and its allies
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