Man who helped crack Hitler’s code turns 100
Claude was sent on top secret mission ahead of D-day
A MAN who undertook a top secret wartime mission to help crack Adolf Hitler’s communications code has turned 100.
Claude Bell was part of a team which built the Colossus machine – often regarded as as the world’s first programmable, electronic, digital computer.
The set of computers unscrambled messages from Lorenz machines – used by Hitler and his generals to communicate – and was instrumental in helping to deceive the Germans in the run-up to D-day.
Secrecy was so high that their existence was not acknowledged publicly until the 1970s.
Claude, who grew up in Burslem and later moved to Porthill and Wolstanton, said he joined the team because his work at the telephone exchange in Hanley meant he had the right expertise.
Claude, who attended Moorland Road Central Elementary School and then Hanley High School, said: “I was 18 in 1942 but I wasn’t called up to war because I’d been an apprentice telephone engineer.
“One day a man said to me to go to the London headquarters and report there, so I went down and found I was joining a little team run by a man named Tommy Flowers, and I was working on a top secret job – so secret they wouldn’t even tell me what it was.
“It was building a machine to crack a machine that Hitler was using. This allowed them to put a teleprinter on his wireless link and decoded the
Lorenz code over the air and deciphered it back onto a teleprinter.
“It was called the first computer. We didn’t have transistors so it was over 1,000 valves – it would fill my room it was so big.
“The machine had to be ready for D-day as Winston Churchill was very interested in it, and it worked.
“We built a model village near Dover with a field full of rubber tanks to deceive Hitler and we were told he believed it. The real leaving point for the Normandy beaches was down the coast.
“The machine was fitted in Bletchley Park. They wanted me to fit a maintenance machine but I refused and came back to Stoke and joined the army in the Royal Corps of Signals.”
Claude, who now lives at Beechwood Residential Home, May Bank, later accepted Army posts in Delhi and Singapore – where he once again got to work on a telephone exchange. He left the Army in 1946 and returned to the telephone exchange in Hanley.
He said: “I met my wife as she was a telephone operator upstairs.
“My wife’s name was Elizabeth – ‘Betty’. We met in 1950 and were married in 1951 at St John’s Church in Burslem. We had two children, a daughter called Elizabeth after my wife, and a son called Andrew.”
Claude joked: “We got the names before the Royals.”
He went on to have lots of memorable family holidays in Wales, and also bred prize-winning German shorthaired pointers named Donna and Blitzen. He celebrated his birthday on April 15 and received a letter from King Charles.