Jean Valentine (en)

This is a blog post by Hannah Dee, for International Women’s Day 2022. You can find the Welsh version here.

Dyma blog gan Hannah Dee, ar gyfer Diwrnod Rhyngwladol Y Menywod 2022. Cewch ffindio’r fersiwn Cymraeg yma.

In World War Two, the British codebreaking effort was centred around Bletchley Park, in Buckinghamshire. Lots has been written about the men who worked there, including famous codebreakers like Alan Turing. What might not be obvious from the big names (or from films like The Imitation Game) is that over three quarters of the staff at Bletchley were women.

Some years later, when Bletchley was first being opened as a museum, I went on a tour there and was shown around by a fiercely intelligent (and very short) woman called Jean Valentine. Jean had worked at Bletchley during the war; at the time of our tour she was in her 80s, and she was absolutely the best guide a group could have hoped for.

I’ve chosen to write about Jean this International Women’s Day because I met her; she’s one of over 8000 women who worked at Bletchley though, and I am sure there are thousands of other stories to be told. These women were selected for intelligence work through family connections, trusted contacts, Royal Navy recruitment and even crossword contests.

During the war Jean had been a bombe operator, working the large mechanical decoder that helped crack each day’s Enigma settings. This had involved detailed computational work, but each operator only knew part of the story. She worked 8 hour shifts in hut 11, where women worked around the clock searching for possible combinations of settings using a bombe machine, passing this information down the telephone when they were done. It was decades later that she learned the phone led to another hut just across the site where it was translated. Everything was compartmentalised: the workers knew that what they were doing was important, but they didn’t know what it meant. It must have been a strange world to work in.

Jean kept quiet about the role she played until the 1970s. I remember hearing her describe seeing Bletchley on television and then telling her family that she’d worked there. She returned to her wartime haunt once it reopened, working at Bletchley Park and the National Museum of Computing, and gained some fame as a guide demonstrating the Bombe to illustrious visitors, including the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Jean died in 2019, aged 94, and her funeral service included a poem by her grandson “From Crib to Crypt” rendered in code.

It is remarkable how much of a role women played at the start of UK computing, and I think it’s important we don’t forget this.