Girls break the Bletchley code

For many years, an Oxfordshire pensioner wasn't allowed to talk about what she did during World War II.

In fact, it was 30 years before Rozanne Colchester, 91, of Bloxham, near Banbury, found out how crucial the role of workers at Bletchley Park had been in bringing the war to an end.

And now her story has been included in a book about the women who worked there and the vital part they played.

"After years of shut down, because one could never talk about Bletchley, it was such a relief to be able to talk about it and it gives one great pleasure to be able to be honest and say what one was doing," says Rozanne.

Rozanne, arrived at Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire, when she was 19. She spoke Italian, as her father had been an air attache in Rome during the war - she had met Hitler when he visited the British Embassy there.

"Hitler was blonder than I thought. I always imagined he'd be a sort of Charlie Chaplin figure with a black moustache. But I do remember – when I shook hands with him – his eyes, which were rather strange, rather fanatical and wild."

Before arriving at Bletchley, she recalls: "I had a briefing and was told it was a terribly secret place, and went to work for the Italian section of the RAF there.

"We were told we had to do very secret work and must never breathe a word about it, or go into other people's rooms or other huts in the park, or talk about our work. We were told that if we were found gossiping about it, we were quite likely to be shot.

"It was isolated. You weren't allowed to tell anybody what you were doing, not even your friends who were on the same job."

With the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, and Oscar buzz surrounding The Imitation Game – the film charting the story of Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing and his one-time fiancee Joan Clarke – it's an apt time to bring out a book about Bletchley Park.

The movie tells how Turing deciphered messages encrypted by the German Enigma machine, which provided vital intelligence for the Allies. In 1952, however, he was prosecuted for homosexuality and accepted chemical castration rather than prison. He committed suicide in 1954, aged 41.

In the film, Oscar-nominee Benedict Cumberbatch portrays Turing – widely regarded as the father of the modern computer – as a socially-inept loner and genius mathematician, who believes he can single-handedly crack the Enigma code.

Rozanne knew Turing in passing: "He was very nice, very polite and always very busy and involved. He wasn't interested in girls. It wasn't known generally that he was a homosexual but we suspected, because he was always with men friends."

Within the confines of the park there was a sense of laissez-faire, Colchester recalls.

"At first, I was amazed that people were sleeping with each other and married people were having affairs. Nothing like that had ever happened before in my life. One grew up a lot there."

Rozanne, who went on to have five children and now has 15 grandchildren, was there from 1942-45.

At the end of the war, she worked in Cairo for MI6 and married an SAS parachutist.

"Life was quite exciting," she recalls, chuckling.

She didn't tell her children for years, and when she was allowed to talk about it, some 30 years later, she felt tremendous relief.

Other women in the book, The Bletchley Girls by Tessa Dunlop, include Lady Jean Fforde, who worked directly for Turing in Hut 8.

"He was an awfully nice man," she says, listing his personal idiosyncrasies as "shabby, knitting, nail-bitten, tieless, sometimes halting in speech and awkward of manner", a man famous for his gas masks and curious cycling habits.

His erstwhile fiancee Joan Clarke (played by Keira Knightley in the film), one of Bletchley's rare female cryptanalysts, worked with him.

"Everybody talked about their engagement," Lady Jean recalls. "They thought it was fantastic that Joan should be going around with him. She didn't know he was homosexual to begin with, and when she found out, she said, 'You knew what he was and you never told me!' She didn't know and she felt a fool."

Another of the Bletchley Girls Pamela Rose, left, with Rozanne Colchester, 72 years after they met, in Rozanne's garden in Oxfordshire

Doris Moss, 92, who fled Belgium with her sister to escape the Nazis during the war, settling with their uncle in Kent is another of the women who have their story told. Thanks to her uncle's connections, they both went to work at Bletchley.

She recalls: "We didn't have much time to do anything but our work, because we worked in shifts. I'd only been in England since 1942 and we didn't mix so well, because my sister and I were together.

"We didn't really know how important the work that we were doing was, except that we were deciphering naval messages in Italian.

"The hardest thing was the shifts. We worked evenings, nights and days - one after the other. It was exciting when you got the message out and you saw something about the Bismarck [Nazi battleships], even though you didn't understand what."

After Bletchley, Moss worked in a bank, which she admits seemed mundane in comparison. She eventually got married and had three children, and now helps out at charities, including Age Concern.

For some, leaving Bletchley proved an anticlimax, says Dunlop.

"In the Fifties, the message was to get women back into the home - there wasn't a big celebration of what women did in the war."

So, what long-term impact did Bletchley have on these women?

"For some, it's having its biggest impact now," adds Dunlop. "A lot of them didn't realise that what they were doing in the war was groundbreaking.

"There aren't many women in their 90s who have gone through their life being unrecognised, who suddenly find themselves catapulted into a modern world that cares about their past."

The Bletchley Girls by Tessa Dunlop is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £20. Available now

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