Charlotte Webb, who as a young woman helped code breakers decipher enemy signals at Britain’s top-secret Bletchley Park, died on Monday. She was 101.
Her death was confirmed by the Women’s Royal Army Corps Association and by the Bletchley Park Trust.
Ms. Webb, known as Betty, was 18 when she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British Army, and was assigned to work at the base in Buckinghamshire where Bletchley Park was located. From 1941 to 1945, she helped in the decryption of German messages, and also worked on Japanese signals.
In 2015, Ms. Webb was appointed as 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 the last surviving members of the storied Bletchley Park code breaking team.
Ms. Webb 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 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 share 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 later. The two never spoke about the place, she said. 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 talk about her experience until the 1990s, when she was asked if she could give talks.
“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.”
Over time, she increased her efforts to record for posterity the work done by the code breakers, publishing a book: “No More Secrets.”
In it, Ms. Webb offered glimpses into her work and described her upbringing — including the time she spent in Nazi Germany as a child before the war broke out. She recounted a small act of defiance, in which, she said, she had 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 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.”
