Former wren revisits secret code-cracking site
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By Hayley Robinson
A former Wren who helped decode German military codes
during the Second World War has revisited the site of her secret
work.
Doris Nicholls, of Barkers Court, Sittingbourne, got the chance
to visit Bletchley Park, near Milton
Keynes, thanks to councillors Roger Truelove, Ghlin Whelan and MP
Derek Wyatt, who organised the visit.
During the tour, Mrs Nicholls was given the privileged
opportunity of firing up the Bombe Rebuild machine.
The fully-operational machine, which has taken 14 years to
rebuild, is an electro-mechanical device designed to speed up the
process of breaking into the Enigma machine which the Germans used
to encipher their communications.
For the first time ever Mrs Nicholls also set eyes on the Enigma
machine whose codes she had spent three years helping to break
without ever having seen one.
The 86-year-old, who recently received a medal and a certificate
for the work she carried out during the war, said: “It was
superb. I had a lovely day and it brought back some old
memories.
“I had a wonderful time and I have been invited to a reunion in
September, which I am considering attending.”
Mrs Nicholls received training at Headingley in Leeds, before
being sent to an outpost station for supporting the decoding Enigma
machine at Bletchley Park.
Security around the Enigma project was so great that the Wrens
would arrive for work in the presence of guards with loaded
pistols.
There were about 400 Wrens working on the project, all of whom
worked in pairs and in shifts, so the information was fed to
Bletchley 24 hours a day via a teleprinter.
Mrs Nicholls worked on the Bombe from 1942 until the end of the
war when all the machines were destroyed to preserve the secret
that Bletchley Park had systematically been breaking the Engima
code.
Mrs Nicholls kept quiet about her top secret work - only telling
her husband about it some 30 years later when the ban on talking
about it was lifted.
Monday, March 15 2010
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