Code breaker, 95, tries to crack German cypher hidden in house
A COUPLE who found Second World War coded signals under their floor had the ideal neighbour to help crack them – a 95-year-old code breaker.
John and Val Campbell discovered an occupying German soldier had hidden cigarette packets, a shampoo sachet, pastilles and brothel passes when billeted in their Guernsey home. But there was also an envelope addressed to Ernst Buchtela with mice-chewed paper covered in code.
Helping them try to read it is Marj Dodsworth, part of the Bletchley Park team of Allied code-breakers led by early computer genius Alan Turing.
Having kept quiet about her role for more than 70 years, she examined the Campbells’ find – the first time since the war she has seen such messages – but decided she would need one of the wartime machines. She worked on Turing’s Bombe device which broke Germany’s Enigma code. Turing and his team are credited with shortening the war by several years.
Marj said: “I thought there’s no way without a machine. The machines were big, noisy, oily, dirty and so large
I could barely touch the top.” She joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service, or Wrens, in 1943 aged 18.
She said: “I was told I’d be doing something very secret and I signed the Official Secrets Act.”
Marj, who lives in a residential home, worked in Eastcote, a London outpost of Bletchley Park.
She added: “There were 800 of us where I was.What we did was passed on to Bletchley by teleprinter.
“My parents died never knowing what I did. My husband, Bert, worked in the Navy and only found out a few years before he died.”
John said: “We took the floorboards up in one of our top rooms. We put [the discoveries] in a box. During lockdown I remembered the sheet of coding and thought before I die I should find out what it’s all about. Whoever could decipher it must be rather specialist.”