Another of the greatest generation falls

[LVSteve]

Betty Webb passed yesterday at 101. She was part of the code breaking team at Bletchley Park during WWII. After VE-Day she was sent to the US to assist with decoded Japanese traffic. RIP, and thank you.

Bletchley Park code breaker Betty Webb dies aged 101

 

[Rustyt1953]

Thanks be to all those who served at Bletchley Park as the world owes them much gratitude.

Sadly this puts me in mind of the despicable, unforgivable treatment my former countrymen gave Alan Turing.

 

[lihpster]

She may have not stormed the beaches or flew a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain, but she's a hero in my book. R.I.P. Betty Webb and thank you for your service.

 

[Rudi]

Bless her. She saved so many lives, un-countable. RIP.

 

[oldbrownhat]

LV Steve beat me to posting this

Back when my gf was in "her previous life" as a professional singer in London, she worked part-time at a specialist music shop called Travis and Emery.

The "Travis" in the shop's name is from Valerie Travis who founded Travis & Emery in 1960, and from whom the current owner, Giles inherited it after her death in the 1990s...

...His grandfather, Sir Edward Travis, was the director of the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, the famous Wartime codebreaking centre, and then at GCHQ. His daughter and Giles’s aunt, Valérie Travis, worked at Bletchley too before going into the book trade.

She worked in Cecil Court for Alec Clunes – father of television actor Martin Clunes – but when she married the organist and Bach scholar Walter Emery, the name for her own business was born. ‘She had managed to get a typewriter from a U-Boat, which her husband then used to type up his musicology notes’, Giles adds...

 

[rwsmith]

RIP Betty Webb

I just finished a book about William and Elizabeth Friedman who were two of the very few codebreakers in the US before WWII. After the war Elizabeth tracked Nazis in South America. She worked mosly for the Coast Guard (smuggling during Prohibition) before the Nazi hunt. J. Edgar Hoover took all the credit for it and ruined the operation several times by revealing that the codes had been broken, sending the codebreakers back to square one.

I have to include this because it is RICH! They got into codebreaking by working for an eccentric millionaire that was out to prove that all of Shakespeare's works were by someone other than Shakespeare (Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and others) by looking for ciphers and clues in his writings.

If anybody wants to read THE definitive book on codebreaking, "The Codebreakers" is a great read.