Veteran code-breaker ‘haunted by lives lost' through her work

Telegraph

08-05-2025

A veteran code-breaker has told how she is still 'haunted by the lives lost' because of her work.
Dorothy Walsh, 98, spent the year before VE Day monitoring the Bombe machines used to decipher German Enigma-coded secret messages at Stanmore, an outstation of Bletchley Park.
She described work on Enigma as a 'constant pressure', and upon the German surrender on May 8 1945, she celebrated in front of Buckingham Palace and did the conga with American soldiers.
Her cousin later messaged her from Germany to say that her joyful antics had been published in a newspaper – but she has never found out which one.
'I was having a great time,' she said. 'I had never seen anything like it. I was standing in front of the Queen Victoria statue when the Royal family came out onto the balcony.'
Mrs Walsh said that as an 18-year-old during the war she would have happily fired on the enemy and even parachuted into France.
But as the decades passed, she eventually became haunted by her wartime work.
She said: 'You feel these things emotionally when you're much older.
'I often think about the German lives that were lost because of us. I couldn't go to Germany.'
'Noisy, hot and intense'
During the war, Mrs Walsh worked with the Women's Royal Naval Service, undergoing eight-hour shifts in silence to break the Enigma codes before they changed every 24 hours.
She said: 'It was noisy, hot, and intense – no windows. You wouldn't be allowed to work in those conditions today. The Bombes worked 24 hours a day and never stopped. I spent my 18th birthday working there.'
Mrs Walsh, who lives in Waterlooville, Hampshire, said Alan Turing would occasionally visit to check that the machines were functioning properly.
'I just knew him as a nice, quiet person with a slight speech impediment – I think his brain was quicker than his speech. He made us giggle. We knew that he was responsible for the Bombe.'
Mrs Walsh signed the Official Secrets Act and was not allowed to talk to her colleagues about what they did outside the building.
She added: 'We thought we would never be able to speak about it. If people asked what I was doing, I'd say I was a confidential writer.'
Mrs Walsh was frequently reminded of how vital their input was and sometimes informed of the breakthroughs which occurred as a result.
Her team had been previously told that they had been pivotal in sinking the prized Nazi battleship Bismarck three years before.
She said: 'No one knew how the Bismarck had been sunk, but we knew it was because of our work, the intelligence that meant they knew where to find her.'
Glitches with the Bombes were fixed by RAF technicians, who naturally weren't allowed to know what the machines they were mending were used for.
Mrs Walsh kept her classified war work a secret from her family until they were watching a television programme about Bletchley Park together, and only recently told her story to the Royal Navy and Royal Marines Charity.
She recalled knowing the end of the war was imminent because the Enigma messages requiring decoding had dried up, but being unable to tell her childhood friend, Ronald Walsh, when they met up a week before VE Day.
When it was later declared she helped to demolish the machines.
Mrs Walsh and Ronald eventually married, moved to Portsmouth and raised sons, Morris and Colin, while she worked as a pharmaceutical dispenser for two doctors.
On Thursday, Mrs Walsh visited shore establishment HMS Collingwood, in Fareham, to mark the VE Day anniversary with the Royal Navy.