The public fascination with Britain s wartime codebreakers shows no sign of abating, as reflected in the success of numerous books and newspaper articles, and television programmes like The Bletchley Circle. The Bletchley Park Trust has embarked on a plan to transform the previously ramshackle and poorly organised site, restoring the historic huts and creating a multi-million pound visitors centre which will open in June. One hundred and fifty thousand people visit Bletchley Park every year and it is estimated that the new museum will increase this number to a quarter of a million.
Amid all this enthusiasm and interest, one major area of Bletchley Park has so far received less focus than it deserves. At the peak of Bletchley s success, a total of twelve thousand people worked there of whom nine thousand were women. Their roles ranged from some of the leading codebreakers, cracking German messages that others could not break, through the debutantes who chauffeured the codebreakers to and from work or, like Baroness Trumpington, were employed as filing clerks, to the mass of girls from ordinary working families who operated machines or listed endless streams of figures, largely unaware of the major impact their work was having on the war.
The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories will tell the stories of these women, how they came to be there, the lives they gave up to do 'their bit' for the war effort, and the part they played in the vital work of 'Station X'. The central protagonists are the Debutante who was an indexer in the Naval Section alongside Baroness Trumpington; the Student of German literature who broke off her studies at the age of nineteen to go to Bletchley and went on to became one of Britain s leading code breakers; the Foreign Office Clerk who was the personal assistant to the head of Bletchley Park; the Wren who worked on the 'Bombes', the incredible machine designed by Alan Turing which helped break the Enigma ciphers; the Stripper, one of the women who worked on the Japanese codes, writing out endless streams of numbers to assist in stripping off the ciphers; and the Teleprinter Operator who has never seen her work as being as important as that of the real people who worked at 'Station X', even though like all these women she was an essential cog in a very large machine and without her and her colleagues the code breakers intelligence would never have reached the commanders who used it to help to win the war.
They are an incredible set of women, and this is their story.
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'Pacey and easy to read ... a fascinating account of how the war changed life for women in all strata of society’
‘Brisk and readable story of the women of Bletchley ... Smith is good on what the women actually did’
‘If you are looking for a riveting, un-put-downable read to curl up with on a Siberian January night – look no further than Michael Smith’s marvellous book – The Debs of Bletchley Park’
'Comprehensive...movingly portrayed ... Smith provides a useful corrective to the many accounts that see Turing as the lone central figure at Bletchley.’
‘If you are looking for a riveting, un-put-downable read to curl up with on a Siberian January night – look no further than Michael Smith’s marvellous book – The Debs of Bletchley Park’
'colourful and engaging social history'
‘Brisk and readable story of the women of Bletchley ... Smith is good on what the women actually did’
'Pacey and easy to read ... a fascinating account of how the war changed life for women in all strata of society’
MICHAEL SMITH is the author of a number of bestselling books on spies, special forces and codebreaking including the Sunday Times number one bestseller Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park; Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews; The Spying Game and Killer Elite: The Inside Story of America s Most Secret Special Operations Team. Smith worked for the BBC, the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times before becoming a full-time author. He studied creative writing at Oxford University and has an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing (The Novel) from Brunel University. Michael lives in Hertfordshire.
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