Wartime code-breaking veteran became pathologist, silversmith and windsurfer
Rosemary Bamforth, who has died aged 93, worked on the bombe codebreaking machines at Bletchley Park during World War II, and later led a varied and adventurous life as a distinguished hospital pathologist, a silversmith and a keen windsurfer, having taken up the sport in her 60s.
She was born Rosemary Margaret Warren Ince in Glasgow, to Douglas, a director of a Glasgow firm that supplied explosives for civil engineering, and his wife Isobel.
The pair had met during World War I when he, a major in the Durham Light Infantry, was badly injured on the Somme and she was the ‘‘chaufferette’’
(war ambulance driver) who transported him from the railway station to hospital in northern France.
Douglas and two of his three brothers each won the Military Cross in the conflict.
After education at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, where she excelled at lacrosse and cricket, Rosemary Ince put off going to university to contribute to the war effort, joining the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) in 1941.
After initial training at Balloch, Loch Lomond, she was posted to an outstation of Bletchley Park, the government code and cipher school in Buckinghamshire, northwest of London, to learn teleprinting, then to another London outstation, before joining the staff of Hut 11 at the park itself.
Hut 11 housed the Turing-Welchman Bombe machines – electro-mechanical devices designed to discover some of the daily settings of the Enigma machines on the various German military networks. The hut was known to the women who worked the machines as the Hell-Hole, due to the hot, noisy conditions.
Until the story of Bletchley was declassified in the 1970s, Rosemary, like others who worked there, maintained strict secrecy about her wartime role and later recalled that, during the conflict, the security rules were so tight that when her airman brother David was posted to a nearby airfield, neither of them realised they were so close until a Wren colleague came in one night talking excitedly about her new airman boyfriend – who turned out to be David. (He would win a Distinguised Flying Cross as a pilot with RAF Hawker Typhoon ground-attack squadrons harrying Nazi factories, trains, traffic and retreating armies across northwest Europe.)
Rosemary recalled the Wrens being warned that, if kidnapped by a German agent, they might be threatened with an ice-cold shower, so they were advised to get accustomed to cold baths. As a result, she adopted a lifelong habit of swimming in very low temperatures at any opportunity, often breaking the ice on a pool in winter.
Her time at Bletchley made such an impression on her that, on a return visit in 2011, she was hauled out of the crowd of visitors by a museum guide who could not remember how to work the bombe machine. Despite the passage of nearly 70 years, she operated it again faultlessly.
After Bletchley, Rosemary Ince studied medicine at the University of Glasgow, and in the mid-1950s she became engaged to a fellow doctor, the Arctic explorer Rainer Goldsmith. During their engagement, Goldsmith left on a trip to the Arctic and she went to work at Meadowbrook Hospital in Long Island, New York, where she cut a dash driving around New York City in a white Studebaker convertible.
They had agreed to meet again in Alaska, but a skiing accident in Canada and a fracture to her leg required a long hospitalisation, causing her to miss their rendezvous. Returning to England, she discovered that Goldsmith had joined the Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1957 as the medical officer. Her decision to become a pathologist was inspired by a childhood experience of seeing a rabbit being gutted after being shot by an uncle, and over the years she held many pathology posts in hospitals on both sides of the Atlantic.
After her marriage, in 1960, to John Bamforth, whom she had met in the doctors’ mess in Southampton General Hospital on New Year’s Eve 1959, she decided not to pursue a consultant post so that she could both work and bring up her family.
Her husband would become a respected consultant physician in gastroenterology at Southampton. During the 1960s, when she, too, was working at the hospital as a senior registrar, she noticed that a number of ship workers were dying of mesothelioma and, at a time when the causes of the disease were not fully understood, she delivered a paper to Southampton doctors suggesting that it might be linked to asbestos exposure on ships.
As well as taking up windsurfing, she trained as a silversmith in her 70s, becoming proficient enough to register her own hallmark. She was also an accomplished cook and gardener.
Her husband John died in March this year. She is survived by their son and two daughters.
Staff were warned that, if kidnapped by a German agent, they might be threatened with an ice-cold shower, so they were advised to get accustomed to cold baths.