Woman played her part in top secret war mission
Thanks to the movie The Imitation Game most people have now heard of Bletchley Park, Britain’s top secret, all-important, wartime codebusting centre.
But while the film centred on the story of Alan Turing and the other Cambridge boffins, most people are still unaware most of the staff who worked there were not Oxbridge professors, but young servicemen and women, in fact mostly women.
Roma Davies, from Maidstone, was one of them.
Mrs Davies (nee Stenning) was keen to do her bit for the war effort and left her boarding school, Edgehill College in Bideford, to join the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) as soon as she was able – at 17.
She said: “I was determined to be a Wren, even though it was against my father’s wishes.”
She didn’t know she would soon be playing a part in the greatest wartime secret of all – the breaking of the Enigma code.
The Germans used a machine, called Enigma, to communicate wartime plans across different battle fronts. The device used a system of rotas to scramble words making them incomprehensible to anyone intercepting communications who didn’t have a key to unlock the code.
But academics and staff at Bletchley were looking at ways of deciphering the scrambled words.
Mrs Davies added: “We didn’t really have much idea what we were doing. We knew it was terribly important because we were immediately obliged to sign the Official Secrets Act.”
Throughout her time there, she was not allowed to tell her family where she was or anything about her work.
She said: “It’s remarkable really that we were able to keep the secret. Of course if it had ever once leaked out to the Germans, the whole thing would have been negated.
“It was a great responsibility, but we were many of us just teenagers. It’s difficult to imagine such a thing could be kept secret in the world of instant communication that teenagers enjoy today.”
She trained initially at Mill Hill in London, and then worked first at the intelligence centre at Eastcote, and then at Bletchley itself until September 1945, continuing in the Wrens until well after the war.
She said: “We saw the boffins at Bletchley, but we didn’t mix with them.
“The Wrens had their own quarters and there were lots of civilians and RAF personnel there too.
“No one talked much about their work even to others at Bletchley. It was all very hushhush.”
After the war, Mrs Davies married her husband Mike, a veteran of the Royal Navy’s Arctic convoys, and the couple moved to Maidstone in 1949 so he could take up a job as an engineer at the Tilling Stevens plant in the town.
Mrs Davies has lived in Bower Mount Road ever since.