Betty Webb, Who Helped Bletchley Park Code Breakers, Dies at 101

Charlotte Webb, who as a young woman helped code breakers decipher enemy signals at Britain’s top-secret Bletchley Park, died on Monday. She was 101.

Her death was confirmed by the Women’s Royal Army Corps Association and by the Bletchley Park Trust.

Ms. Webb, known as Betty, was 18 when she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British Army, and was assigned to work at the base in Buckinghamshire where Bletchley Park was located. From 1941 to 1945, she helped in the decryption of German messages, and also worked on Japanese signals.

In 2015, Ms. Webb was appointed as Member of the Order of the British Empire and in 2021 she was awarded the Légion d’Honneur, France’s most prestigious honor. She was one of the last surviving members of the storied Bletchley Park code breaking team.

Ms. Webb was one of a handful of young women working at Bletchley, where mathematicians, cryptographers and code breakers endeavored to crack encrypted messages and gather information about the Axis powers.

She had been studying domestic sciences at a local college, but as war swept across Europe, she dropped out. “Several of us decided that we ought to be serving our country rather than just making sausage rolls,” she recalled for an oral history in 2012.

With German submarines on the hunt for Allied vessels in the Atlantic Ocean, the work of the cryptologists at Bletchley Park was critical to the Allied war effort. With the enemy messages decoded, Allied ships could change course and avoid peril.