acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

ACM Careers

I Was A Teenage Code-Breaker at Bletchley Park


View as: Print Mobile App Share:
Helen Andrews

"We were all young people so we had fun, we enjoyed it," Helen Andrews says of her experience at Bletchley Park. "And we knew that it was important."

Helen Andrews was one of the youngest of nearly 10,000 workers at Bletchley Park when she returned to the U.K. from South America in 1940.

She travelled on a lightly guarded Atlantic convoy of ships which took almost four weeks. Three ships in the convoy were sunk by U-boats. "If you've every heard groups of children crying and drowning in the middle of the night, you never forget it," says Andrews. "And it was that really that spurred me on, and I was glad that I was doing something to retaliate."

Andrews had signed a vow of secrecy at Bletchley Park. "For 70 years, I haven't said a work to anybody," she says. Now over 90, she has only recently started talking about her experiences.

From BBC
View Full Article


 

No entries found

Sign In for Full Access
» Forgot Password? » Create an ACM Web Account