Recognising Bletchley Park's unsung heroines

During World War II, around 6,000 women worked at the highly secretive Bletchley Park and its outposts. Bletchley Park, or Station X as it was mysteriously known at the time, was the intelligence centre behind the country's efforts to decode Germany's encrypted wireless messages.

While newspapers and history books have devoted a lot of attention to high-profile codebreakers, including Alan Turing and Max Newman, who between them designed the two main codebreaking machines, Colossus (pictured) and Bombe, there has been little recognition of the work of the women of the time, even though they comprised two-thirds of the Bletchley Park workforce.

Women played a critical role in ensuring the smooth running of the two machines, which have been credited as instrumental in the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany. Finally, almost 63 years after the end of the war, the achievements of these women have been recognised by a project headed by the British Computer Society (BCS).

Credit: Bletchley Park