Women who worked together throughout war meet – some for the first time – to mark publication of new book featuring their memories

For years Betty Webb and Mary Every worked a few yards apart, often through the night, in Block F among the codebreakers of Bletchley Park. Now, both aged 92, they have met for the first time.

Although thousands of women worked there cheek by jowl throughout the war years, billeted among curious local families or sharing accommodation eight double bunks to a hut, absolute secrecy ruled. It was decades before the outside world learned anything of what went on in the warren of dilapidated huts surrounding the ugly Edwardian mansion in Buckinghamshire, but the bright young women recruited from secretarial colleges, the armed forces, or straight from school, scarcely knew any more.

Now seven veterans, with a collective age of 639, wearing the gold and blue brooches – not medals – they were finally awarded in 2009, have returned for the launch of a book about their lives there, The Debs of Bletchley Park by Michael Smith. Through its pages and their conversations many learned for the first time what the others had been up to.

The codebreaking work at Bletchley is estimated to have shortened the second world war by two years and saved thousands of lives. “You never knew what the person in the next-door office was doing, never mind the next block,” Every said.

She is the last of the small group who learned Japanese specially to work on intercepted messages from the Far East. Once they had been translated, Webb rewrote them into the blandest possible English before they were passed on, to disguise the fact that the intelligence came from intercepted and decoded messages. The two fell into animated conversation about their work, which would never have happened if they had met queuing at the tea urn in a break from a night shift. “We could talk to each other in the same language,” Every said. “It was like we were on the same railway track.”

Everyone who worked there signed the Official Secrets Act, and they stuck to it like glue. One day in 1974 Lady Marion Body’s husband, the MP Sir Richard Body, slapped down a book he had just bought. It was Frederick Winterbotham’s account of the Bletchley codebreakers, The Ultra Secret. “Now will you tell me what you did in the war?” he demanded. “No,” she said.

Jean Pitt-Lewis watched in astonishment a documentary that year, the first, presented by Ludovic Kennedy, and shouted at the screen: “No, no, no!” However, her mother phoned, ecstatic, to say: “Now at last I know what you were doing.”

Pitt-Lewis was one of “Dilly’s girls”, recruited straight from school by a legendary figure, the Greek classicist Dilly Knox. He had been working for the Admiralty as a cryptographer since 1914 and, disliking rowdy young men, got special permission to work with an all-female team.

Pitt-Lewis recalled the interview as “a bit of a farce”. Knox asked if she could speak German, she said no, and he said sadly that it might have been helpful if she had a few words.

That was it, she was in. Some of his girls were rather unusual, he warned her. One was “a very nice person, but a bit odd – she wears trousers and a bow tie, and she smokes a pipe”.

Marigold Mortimer became a Wren when she left school, and was told she might be going to “somewhere in the country – we can’t tell you where it is because we don’t know, and if you get the job you won’t be able to tell anyone and you won’t be able to go anywhere else until the war ends”.

“It sounded like a prison sentence,” she recalled.

It was not all grim. The women billeted in huts at Woburn Abbey envied the women closer to Bletchley who could join in the nightly concerts, lectures, dances and choirs at the manor.

The women at the manor in turn envied the ones at the abbey with the run of the beautiful park, and those who kept their own ponies in the stables and went hunting.

All lived for the leave days when they could run from their shifts to the station and hop on a train to be in London and its cinemas, theatres, dance halls and museums in an hour – “if the train was running”, Body said. Most had boyfriends, but not at Bletchley, where women outnumbered the men four to one: “We were playing away,” Webb recalled of her Canadian boyfriend – who never learned one word of what they were working on.

They were officially freed to speak in 1975, but few did. Block F, like many of the records, had been destroyed, and until the recent revival of interest and the restoration of the site as a museum, the stories of the women, overshadowed by the brilliant maverick men such as Alan Turing, seemed likely to go untold for ever. They are amazed now at shelves of books about their work, and the Oscar-nominated The Imitation Game – about which they had mixed opinions. “Over dramatised,” Body said. “And that’s putting it mildly.”

• This article was amended on Tuesday 20 January 2015. It originally stated that Bletchley Park was in Berkshire. It is, in fact, in Buckinghamshire. This has been corrected. It was further amended to include the name of the author of The Debs of Bletchley Park: Michael Smith.

