Secrets of Bletchley Park

For decades, Pat Davies kept her wartime secrets to herself, not sharing her experiences even with her own family. In the Second World War, she was assigned to one of the war’s most important operations: the ambitious attempt by Bletchley Park, centre of British intelligence, to crack the German Enigma code.

Before she had anything to do with Station X – the codebreaking HQ had its own codename, of course – Pat had heard of the Victorian mansion in leafy Buckinghamshire. Her godmother, married to a chap in the foreign office, wrote to Pat’s mother with news: some of the secretaries, a “crowd of jolly girls”, were going to work at a nice place called Bletchley Park and wouldn’t it be good if Pat went too? But it didn’t