Betty Webb, who as a young woman during World War II helped code breakers decipher enemy signals at Britain’s top-secret Bletchley Park, died on Monday. One of the last surviving members of that group, she was 101.
Her death was confirmed by the Women’s Royal Army Corps Association and by the Bletchley Park Trust.
Ms. Webb, whose given name was Charlotte, was 18 when she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British Army, and was assigned to work at its decryption base at Bletchley Park, a 19th-century mansion and estate in Buckinghamshire about 50 miles northwest of London. She helped in the decoding of German messages from 1941 to 1945 and also worked on Japanese signals.
In 2015, Ms. Webb was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire, and in 2021 she was awarded the Légion d’Honneur, France’s most prestigious honor.
She was one of a handful of young women working at Bletchley, where mathematicians, cryptographers and code breakers endeavored to crack encrypted messages and gather information about the Axis powers.
She had been studying domestic sciences at a local college, but as war swept across Europe, she dropped out. “Several of us decided that we ought to be serving our country rather than just making sausage rolls,” she recalled for an oral history in 2012.
With German submarines on the hunt for Allied vessels in the Atlantic Ocean, the work of the cryptologists at Bletchley Park was critical to the Allied war effort. With the enemy messages decoded, Allied ships could change course and avoid peril.
Like others working at the site, Ms. Webb was bound by Britain’s strict Official Secrets Act, meaning she could not discuss her work with family members, friends or even others working at Bletchley.
The level of secrecy was such, she said, that she knew only vaguely how her role fit into the greater scheme of intelligence gathering. She was unable to tie anything she saw to specific events during the war. It was not until much later that she understood her part in the bigger picture.
At war’s end, she began looking for another job, but was hampered by her inability to tell employers just what she had been doing for the past few years. By a stroke of good fortune, one of the people she interviewed with was the headmaster of Ludlow Grammar School, a fellow Bletchley Park alum.
“He gave me a job without questions,” Ms. Webb said, though the two never spoke to each other about their wartime efforts, she added. She worked at the school as a secretary.
In the mid-1970s, some of the work done at Bletchley Park began to be declassified, but Ms. Webb said she did not openly discuss her experience until the 1990s, when she was asked if she could give talks about it.
“I suddenly realized that, yes, I could, I’m free, I don’t have to worry any more,” she said in the oral history. “But I was never able to tell my parents, as they died before 1975, and my husband wasn’t particularly interested.”
She soon began increasing her efforts to record for posterity the work done by the code breakers, including publishing a book, “No More Secrets.”
In the book, Ms. Webb offers glimpses into her work and describes her upbringing, including the time she spent in Nazi Germany as a child before the war. She recounted a small act of defiance, in which, she said, she refused to give a verbal Nazi salute beside her classmates.
Charlotte Vine-Stevens was born on May 13, 1923, in Aston on Clun, in Shropshire, in the West Midlands. No information on survivors was available.
In a tribute on Tuesday, the Women’s Royal Army Corps Association said, “Betty inspired women in the Army for decades, and we will continue to take pride in her service during WWII and beyond, and as a champion of female veterans.”
