The “secretary” who worked at Bletchley
As far as her family and friends were concerned, Ann Mitchell had spent the War working as a secretary in the Foreign Office. Then in the 1970s, a book came out about Bletchley Park. Mitchell, who has died aged 97, was appalled. “I remember shouting: ‘He can’t write about that – we’ve all signed the Official Secrets Act!’” It was only then that she revealed to her husband of 30 years that she had been at Bletchley. Recruited in 1943, she spent 20 months working in Hut 6, converting “cribs” (segments of German text) into “menus” – complex diagrams that enabled the Wrens next door to set Alan Turing’s Bombe machines for that day’s messages. And it wasn’t until the early 2000s, following the release of the film Enigma, that she spoke publicly about her work, as one of an elite group of female codebreakers.
Born in 1922, she was brought up in Oxford, and aged seven won a scholarship to Headington school for girls. She excelled at maths, but when she decided to study it at university, her headmistress protested to her parents that it was “unladylike”. Fortunately, they supported her ambition, and in 1940 she became one of only five women admitted to Oxford University to study maths, at LMH. On graduation, she was recruited as a “temporary assistant to the Foreign Office”, on a salary of £150 a year. “I was terribly pleased when I got the job. I didn’t want to go into the Armed Forces and do drilling and wear a saggy uniform,” she told Tessa Dunlop, author of The Bletchley Girls. Six days a week, she cycled ten miles from her lodgings to Bletchley, where she’d spend eight hours at a trestle table in Hut 6, decoding messages with the other women (men were on separate shifts, for reasons of decency). It was hard work, and security was so tight, she had little idea of the significance of their work; she never heard the word Enigma (the German enciphering machine). But she loved the mental challenge, she said.
After the War, she married Angus Mitchell, a civil servant who had won the MC, and settled in Edinburgh. While he worked in the Scottish Office, she raised their four children before training as a marriage guidance counsellor. Later, she moved into research, and wrote several books about the impact of divorce on children. She was pleased to be able to talk about her work, from the 2000s; and finally to understand what it had all been about. “We never really imagined that with every code we cracked we could be saving thousands of British troops from death,” she reflected.