‘It was quite extraordinary relief mixed with sadness
Spine-tingling memories of the code-breaker given time off to join the nation’s party
“I DON’T know exactly how many people were there but it was so many that you did not have to consciously walk, you were just carried along by the crowd,” says Betty Webb.
This is her most prominent memory of celebrating Victory in Europe Day on the banks of the Thames in London 75 years ago on Friday.
Betty was a codebreaker at the topsecret Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire during the Second World War but was allowed a day out in the capital to enjoyve Day.
She says: “I got to London by train from Bletchley and met up with a friend there to join the hundreds of thousands of people who were celebrating down by the Thames.
“I can’t remember exactly where we were, as there were so many people, but I know we were by the river.
“I remember it was a pleasant, sunny day, thank goodness. There was dancing and drinking, and people were waving flags.
“We were singing the Dame Vera Lynn song We’ll Meet Again and songs by Glenn Miller, who was very popular at the time.”
Betty, now 96, adds: “My main memory was being carried along by the tide of people, having no control over where we were going and just being incredibly happy.
“It was really quite extraordinary and without being there it is quite difficult to explain, but it was a feeling of tremendous relief mixed with great sadness at the loss of loved ones.”
The friend she met, Dorothea Schiffer, had escaped from Germany in 1938 and stayed with Betty’s family before becoming a nurse in London. Her mother’s church had helped Miss Schiffer, whose father was Jewish, escape Nazi persecution and she became a British citizen before dying in 1964.
Betty says: “On VE Day she was with me and it felt poignant that I was with someone who had escaped from the Nazi regime.”
As she was working in the Japanese section at Bletchley, she had to return to Buckinghamshire later that day to be ready for work as normal the next morning.
Betty Vinestevens, as she was then, volunteered for the Auxillary Territorial Services (ATS) in 1941, aged 18.
After basic training she was ordered to go to an office in Piccadilly where she was interviewed by “a very pleasant, twinklyeyed Army Major from the Intelligence Corps”.
From there she was ordered to take a train to Bletchley, without being told why.
The mystery only deepened as her first duty was to sign the Official Secrets Act, and to listen to an Army captain telling her and the other girls how severely they would be punished if they breached it.
Betty believes she was sent to the sprawlingvictorian mansion as she spoke German, having had German and Swiss au pairs.
She did not help with work on decoding the Enigma cipher, which allowed British intelligence to read Nazi messages and is credited with shortening the war by years.
This breakthrough by Alan Turing was immortalised in the Hollywood movie The Imitation
Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the maths genius.
Betty’s first job at Bletchley was to catalogue messages between the SS and the Gestapo which revealed the beginning of the Holocaust, with massacres of thousands of Jews on the eastern front. She moved to Block F at “The Park”, as it was known among its 8,000-strong workforce, which was two-thirds women, at the end of 1943.
While there she wrote intelligence reports based on Japanese Army messages decoded and translated at Bletchley, which she then transmitted to British commanders in Burma, rising to the rank of staff sergeant by the end of the war.
Betty says: “It was a fantastic experience, in retrospect, as at the time we did not know the extent of our impact due to the Official Secrets Act.
“It was not until many years afterwards by reading books about it and attending reunions that I realised the import of it all.”
After the war she was a secretary at a grammar school before joining the territorial army and working for the Women’s Royal Army Corps (WRAC) in Birmingham as a recruiter.
She married husband Alfred but he died seven years later.
Betty, who has been selfisolating at her bungalow in Wythall, Worcestershire, since the start of the pandemic, is looking