Stromness woman’s role in top secret Bletchley Park code-breaking
By Myles Hodnett
(From The Orcadian dated September 5th, 2002)

Brenda Robertson - then Brenda Webb - pictured in her Wren uniform during the war.

Like a scene out of some modern day spy movie, 18-year-old Brenda Webb walked into a railway station waiting room where she had been told to meet her contact.

It was 1943, the world was at war, and the young Wren had no idea of what her new role would be or why so much secrecy was involved.

But one thing was for sure – she wanted to do her utmost to help her country.

Little did she know it at the time, but she was about to enter the twilight world of World War Two intelligence.

She’d been singled out to work at Bletchley Park, Britain’s top secret intelligence headquarters, where she would become part of the team that cracked the infamous German Enigma codes.

The young Miss Webb is better known in Orkney today as former Stromness councillor Brenda Robertson.

Bletchley Park

But her past had to remain a secret until the Official Secrets Act ban on information about Bletchley was lifted in the 1970s.

Mrs Robertson’s wartime story began in earnest in 1943 when she received the shock news that her only brother had been killed in North Africa.

The Scarborough-born girl had just finished high school in the town and had plans to go to university.

“It seemed a bit self-indulgent to go ahead with this plan in the circumstances and after a lot of consideration, I thought I should do something more appropriate,” she said.

She joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service and after the railway station meeting, she was whisked away to Buckingham-shire where she was given her first insight into the job.

Secrecy at Bletchley was paramount and the young women working in the decoding huts weren’t even allowed to speak to other Foreign Office personnel in the building.

“We were told never ever to tell anyone about it, not your boyfriend, parents, anyone.”

It meant that on trips back home, she had to tell her family that she was engaged in a dull desk job.

Looking back at those momentous events today from her Stromness home, Mrs Robertson remains modest about her wartime role.

“Oh, lots of people did important things,” she said.

But at Bletchley Park, her job and the work of other decoders, helped turn the tide of the war.

Its importance was duly recognised by Churchill who, in typical manner, once dubbed the staff as “the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled.”

A German Enigma code machine - thought to be unbreakable due to the millions of different combinations.

The capture of a German Enigma machine by the Royal Navy in 1941 proved to be one of the most important maritime acts during the war. The codes were supposedly unbreakable, but in the hands of Britain’s top mathematicians and with a lot of ground work, the codes were cracked.

“With Enigma, any message could be easily translated into groups of five letters, transmitted in Morse code and then decoded by the machine using the same settings,” explained Mrs Robertson.

“The difficulty of the task facing us can be gauged from the number of settings for an Enigma machine – 150 million million million.

“Good intelligence work, educated guesses and mind-numbing thoroughness, combined with sloppy German operators, meant signals could be decrypted in days or hours.

“Much of it depended on the mathematical probability of a particular letter occurring, so machines were built enabling decryption that took days manually to be done in half an hour.

“In fact they developed the world’s first programmable computer, but like everything at Bletchley, it remained a secret and its designers, notably mathematician Alan Turing, never received credit for his work.”

Mrs Robertson was stationed at Woburn Abbey during her time at Bletchley and day-to-day life revolved around shift system which ensured someone was on the job 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

She was billeted in fairly basic accommodation at the end of the abbey, and had to endure the hazard of running across the grounds during a blackout without getting impaled on wild deer that roamed around the park.

Brenda Robertson reflects on her role at Bletchley Park, where she helped decode German messages during World War Two.

With the end of World War Two in 1945, she went back to Scarborough and then eventually to St Andrews to study, where she met her future husband John Robertson from Orkney.

Looking back, she reflects today that all she wanted to do at the time was something to help.

“Anybody in the circumstances I was in, having my only brother killed, would have wanted to do something useful. I told this woman interviewing me my reasons and she smiled and said, ‘I think you will find it useful’.”

Indeed, the contribution of Bletchley Park during World War Two has gone down in history. Some estimate that the decoding work shortened the war by as much as two years, therefore saving thousands of lives.