Breaking the Code	Upstairs at the Gatehouse, Highgate Village N6 4BD Thursday 4 - Sat 6th December 2008 at 8pm Sunday matinee 4pm - phone bookings 0208 340-3488.
	“Breaking the Code” tells the absorbing story of Alan Turing, a brilliant mathematician, who devised the means of cracking the German Enigma code. For his significant contribution to the outcome of WWII, he was awarded the OBE by Winston Churchill. Alan Turing also “broke the code” by being unapologetically homosexual at a time when this made him, in the eyes of British law, a criminal. Breaking the Code was first presented in London at the Haymarket Theatre (and subsequently in New York, Paris,& Tokyo, with Sir Derek Jacobi playing the part of Alan Turing. Upstairs at the Gatehouse, Highgate Village N6 4BD

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HUT 6 - BLETCHLEY PARK -  A personal memory by Jean Neal

 In the summer of 1943 things were going  well in Hut 6 at Bletchley Park. Codes were being cracked daily and so extra staff were needed. Two senior, physically attractive men, one from administration, one from Hut 6, came to Cambridge trawling for young women. They came just before I took my finals. They were incredibly good at their job. They couldn't give us the faintest hint of what we'd be doing but  made us realise that it would be top-secret, vital to the war effort.   So, I and several others found ourselves feeling noble and saying "I Will". A few weeks later, my degree exams over, I was sent a travel pass and told to report to Bletchley Park,

I was billeted in Wolverton, an extremely unappetising small town dominated by the railway works, about 12 miles away and next morning I reported for duty in Hut 6 at what was officially Station X but known to all as BP.  I signed the Official Secrets Act - never for the rest of my life to divulge a single detail of anything I  knew - and went to school to learn about Enigma. I was in the first of that summer's batches but every week 20 or more young women arrived in Hut 6 fresh from various universities and were absorbed into the great machine.

I worked in RR2, the Army Registration Room.. We received thousands of messages that poured in night and day and entered the  details - receiving station, time, frequencies, call signs and the first six letters of the message - on a large form called a Blist, short for B List. We were known as Blisters. One of the most important things was to look out for 'dupes' - duplicate messages. Some messages were corrupt so the more versions you had the better. Shift leaders had to go round all the time looking at Blists, trying to spot dupes. This was quite a job - there were about six tables, each with six of us blisting away all the time. I became a shift-leader in due course and it often occurs to me that I had more responsibility then, aged 22, than I've ever had since.

The code breakers were in the next room, called the Watch. The messages went through to them and they worked on cracking the codes. The men and women in the Watch were brilliant but they couldn't have got far without the Bombe.- Bombe with an "e", called after the ice-cream or so they say which tried out millions and millions of alternatives in minutes, and with luck something would come out which looked like German. That went through to Hut 3 where they turned it into English and ensured that appropriate action was taken.. I saw the Bombe only once, during my schooling. It filled rooms, a terrifying sight. It was operated, I believe, by eight Wrens; by the end of the war there were 1626 of them. A terrible, boring, sweaty job. They were heroines.  The Watch were breaking a lot of the codes almost effortlessly and would sometimes crack the first one of the day soon after midnight and would look in to tell us. Messages often fame in several parts, called teile, German for parts, and the Watch would be desperate for a missing teil and we would be desperate to spot it the minute it came in. I remember, not long after D Day there was a 17-teile message in a highly important code called Duck 2 - all the army codes were named after birds The Watch had cracked it and it contained absolutely vital information about German army positions and intentions in Normandy.

Churchill came down once to tell us how important we were. He looked at the rag-tag collection of oddly-dressed weirdos, notably Alan Turing in his dirty long black overcoat, and said "I know I told you to leave no stone unturned but I didn't expect you to take me literally".

There were about 200 women in the Hut and about 20 men so we didn't get much social give-and-take between the sexes. If you had close friends of either sex you were liable to be on different shifts and billeted miles apart. . We had one day off a week and could go to the cinema in Bletchley or to Northampton, where there was a good theatre or hitch-hike to London.  I did that several times; the lorry drivers were very nice and none of us came to any harm..

As far as Hut 6 was concerned the war ended not with a bang but with a whimper. The Germans were demoralised; messages no longer came in a flood but in a trickle.  There was nothing for us to do. We were told we could do what we liked, a few remaining to mind the shop. It seems an awful thing to say, but I can't actually remember VE Day

It really was the best-kept secret of the war.  We all promised never to divulge any detail of what we did or knew. But, one day in, I think, 1970, I opened The Times and saw a full-page article about BP telling all. I was deeply shocked, but it was good to be able, at last, to tell Tim what I did in the war. My parents never knew.

I never met Alan Turing at BP though I saw him around, but a year or two later I was librarian at the National Physical Laboratory. He was working there on his great computer and quite often came into the library. He was not conversable and I doubt if he ever said anything to me except  'Thank you'.. My memory of him is of a lot of untidy hair and the aforementioned dirty long black overcoat.