Jean Valentine

Model of a bomb machine in Bletchley Park

Bletchley Park mansion. This house was the headquarters for British code breakers during World War II. The manor is a Grade II listed building in England

Jean Valentine (* 1924 in Perth , Scotland ; † May 17, 2019 in Henley-on-Thames , England ) was a British cryptanalyst who deciphered radio messages encrypted with the Enigma and one of the women in Bletchley Park and a member of the "Wrens" ( Women's Royal Naval Service, WRNS) was.

life and work

Valentine grew up as an only child and joined the Women's Royal Naval Service in 1943 because she couldn't have driven large army trucks with the Women's Auxiliary Air Force because of her size. She was sent to Bletchley Park to work on the Turing bomb , the famous Enigma decoding machine. The machine was so big that it couldn't reach the top row of rotors. So a small platform was built for her so that she could operate the machine. After she had to sign the Official Secrets Act, she remained silent about her war work until the mid-1970s. She was one of the women in Bletchley Park and worked eight hours a day in Bletchley Park in Barrack 11. From April 1944 to 1945 she was transferred to Sri Lanka after training in Japanese codes and ciphers . Their task was to decipher the Japanese weather reports and to forward the results to various naval reconnaissance units in the Pacific . Here she met a Royal Navy pilot whom she married in Colombo and with whom she had a daughter and a son in London .

From 1995 to 2006 the Turing bomb was reconstructed with her help in "The Turing Bomb Rebuild Project" and she demonstrated the reconstructed bomb on guided tours until shortly before her death in the Bletchley Park Museum. In 2009 the British Foreign Minister at the time, David Miliband, presented her and a number of other veterans with a special GCHQ medal in recognition of their military service. She took part in the BBC Antiques Roadshow with Fiona Bruce in 2010 and in the 2012 edition of Celebrity MasterChef from Bletchley, where the three finalists had to prepare a dinner in honor of the code breakers who worked there during the war. In 2011 she had the honor of demonstrating the bomb to the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh at a special ceremony. In 2012 she spoke about her war experiences in Bletchley Park at a Turing's Worlds event to mark Alan Turing's 100th birthday , which was co-organized by Rewley House of the Department for Continuing Education at Oxford University . She has conducted many radio interviews over the years and has spoken at meetings of the Women's Institutes, the Association of Wrens and the Royal British Legion . She worked closely with author Sinclair McKay on background information for his books, including The Secret Life of Bletchley Park, and accompanied him on stage to a question-and-answer session at the Henley Literary Festival. On D-Day 2004, the islands of St. Vincent and Grenadines issued a stamp with her picture. She was also featured in the Alan Turing episode of Absolute Genius with Dick and Dom on CBBC .

Web links

• Honor side
• Operating the bomb: Jean Valentine's story
• A Virtual Tour of Bletchley Park
• Jean Rooke (née Valentine), wartime codebreaker
• Women Were Key to WWII Code-Breaking at Bletchley Park