Gwen Davies never heard of Enigma in all the time she worked at Bletchley. Cora Jarman worked to identify the settings of the Germans’ Lorenz machine, which was even more sophisticated than the Enigma – but she had no idea what she was doing at the time. The tales in this book are mostly far less glamorous, though no less fascinating. And she had shaken hands with Hitler, too, before the war, in Italy, when her father was there on a diplomatic mission.

Not long afterwards, she fell under the spell of a Czechoslovakian airman and planned to marry him – until her father discovered that he had a wife already. In September 1944, when it looked as though the Allies might be coming out on top of things, she learned that her brother, Dick, was missing, his plane shot down during “Operation Market Garden”, in which Field Marshal Montgomery attempted to force an entry into Germany across the Lower Rhine.

Science and Technical Research and Development.

Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.

Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.

Information and Communications Technology.

HR, Training and Organisational Development.

Health - Medical and Nursing Management.

Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.

Their work, which helped win the war, was largely unsung and unheralded and not just because it was top secret.

There are 15 women in this book, their life stories ranging across the English social spectrum women who worked behind the scenes, often with little idea of what it was exactly that they were doing. The youngest of her interviewees, Muriel Dindol, was 86 she was 14 when she went to work at Bletchley Pamela Rose was 96, the oldest of the women Dunlop found to meet.

But those women are all dead now and Dunlop was determined to write a book full of living voices: an important task when we are, as far as the Second World War is concerned, approaching the limit of living memory. This isn’t a book about the female cryptanalysts at Bletchley – and there were some, though the names of Hugh Alexander, Gordon Welchman, Harry Hinsley and Alan Turing have always eclipsed those of Joan Clarke (played by a skittery Keira Knightley in the dismal travesty that was The Imitation Game), Ruth Briggs, Margaret Rock and Mavis Lever.

The Bletchley Girls by Tessa Dunlop