Betty Webb, who has died aged 101, was recruited to Bletchley Park, the government’s wartime codebreaking centre in Buckinghamshire, as a teenager in 1941. Initially registering encrypted enemy communications, after two years she was promoted to transcriber and paraphraser of Japanese messages. Betty was posted to the US in 1945, as the only member of Britain’s female army, the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), to be selected to work in the Pentagon building after VE Day.
In 1940 Betty had given up her domestic science course in Shrewsbury and joined the ATS aged 18. At the Wrexham training camp her natural abilities as a soldier were quickly identified and rewarded with promotion to corporal. Betty believed it was her German language skills that led to her being recruited by Bletchley Park (Station X) as one of the few selected from the ATS by an organisation that prioritised recruits from the Women’s Royal Naval Service (the “Wrens”) and Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF).
Organised, disciplined and bright, Betty had by 1943 been transferred from her first humdrum job registering morse code enemy messages in Maj Ralph Tester’s military section to the Japanese section, where she enjoyed “more meaty work”, paraphrasing and transcribing communications concerning Japanese troop movements in Burma (now Myanmar). This meticulous and time-sensitive role involved rewriting enemy messages to disguise the fact they had been intercepted and decoded, before the intelligence was shared for use in the field.
With her imperturbable personality, Betty was singled out for transfer to the Pentagon in May 1945. She crossed the Atlantic in a Sunderland flying boat and worked in America’s enormous new military headquarters, where she witnessed Gen Dwight Eisenhower doing a victory lap in his tank and recalled that steaks were served on the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Betty’s work as a paraphraser ended when Japan surrendered in August and she was transferred back to Britain that October.
Betty was born in the village of Richard’s Castle, on the Herefordshire-Shropshire border; her father, Leslie Vine-Stevens, commuted to Lloyds Bank in Ludlow daily and her mother Charlotte (nee Harris) home-schooled the couple’s two daughters (a son, David, died in infancy). There was no electricity or running water, but aspiration abounded. Charlotte, both musical and a linguist, sent 14-year-old Betty on a foreign exchange near Dresden in Germany in 1937, and in later life Betty vividly recalled the disquiet of the modest Moravian host family over the tense political situation and compulsory youth camps on Sunday mornings. It was her father’s first world war service in the Royal West Kent Regiment that inspired Betty to sign up for the ATS.
Adjusting to postwar life in Britain proved an anticlimax, with reduced job prospects for women compounded in Betty’s case by the secrecy that shrouded her war work. A secretarial course eventually helped her land an office job at Ludlow grammar school before she returned to army life.
A Territorial Army officer throughout the 1960s, she led recruitment in the West Midlands and pushed internally for equal pay for servicewomen.
In 1970 she married Alfred Webb, a construction manager. When he died nine years later, she returned to work, at the Birmingham Law Society, a job she combined with her role as a Conservative parish councillor for 32 years in Wythall, Worcestershire.
It was in late retirement that Betty really came into her own. With the veil lifted in the 70s on Bletchley Park’s wartime role and attention finally focused on the female heft behind the codebreaking nexus in the 2000s, she was given an unexpected platform to shine, hosted events at Bletchley Park and the National Army Museum, presented Pick of the Week on Radio 4 and appeared as a “cover-girl” on National Geographic.
Betty readily admitted that Bletchley Park’s codebreaking was a “team effort”; the retrospective attention never went to her head, but took her on extraordinary adventures, including attending King Charles’s coronation and enjoying a 100th birthday party at Bletchley Park, followed by a Lancaster fly-by.
She and I first met in 2014 when I was writing The Bletchley Girls (2015), and Betty, then in her 90s, had just published her first book, Secret Postings (a second, No More Secrets: My Part in Codebreaking at Bletchley Park and the Pentagon, came out in 2023). When I asked her if the war was the most exciting time of her life, she stopped the car, pulled on the handbrake, and said: “Now is the best time of my life.”
Betty was made MBE in 2015, and in 2021 her wartime service was recognised by the French Légion d’honneur.
She is survived by a niece, Jane, and nephew, Michael.
• Betty (Charlotte Elizabeth) Webb, servicewoman, born 13 May 1923; died 31 March 2025
