BETTY WEBB MBE is a veteran of Bletchley Park. She was part of a small team working on Japanese and other coded messages, working in Block F, a concrete hut called the Burma Road.
Today, Betty is a highly experienced speaker on cryptology in World War II, and on other 
matters involving working with state secrets. At Celebrating Bletchley Park, she will tell the story of how she and her colleagues held an important and often underplayed position in breaking Japanese codes and cyphers, whose understanding was so vital to winning the war in the Far East.
On this topic, Louise Ridley in the Huffington Post writes:
She worked to register messages as they were received from the German police forces – some of the first intelligence that revealed the massacres of Jews on the Eastern front, which we now understand as the Holocaust.
But she had no idea that she handled that information until 30 years later, when the Bletchley story could be made public.
“I wasn’t aware of it at the time. The only people who would have done would be a handful of very senior people such as Dilly Knox, and Turing of course. To me, the messages would have looked like any others. There would be no indication at that stage as to the content.”
When I ask her what it means to know she helped the Allies discover the historic atrocities, she looks embarrassed: “Well… obviously it’s very gratifying.”
Later, she served in the Army until 1969. Betty Webb is also the author of Secret Postings: Bletchley Park to The Pentagon.
Read more about Betty Webb MBE
- A filmed interview with Betty Webb and her colleague Mary Every
- Article on Betty Webb’s appointment as MBE in The Queen’s Birthday Honours, 2015
- Report including interview with Betty Webb during the launch of Michael Smith‘s book The Debs Of Bletchley Park
- A major interview in the Huffington Post with Betty Webb and other Bletchley Park female veterans.
- A BBC Television interview with Betty Webb and fellow veteran Ruth Bourne