Fascinating interview with World War II codebreaker Rozanne Colchester

Last weekend the BBC ran a fascinating interview with Rozanne Colchester, who worked as a 'de-coder' during the second world war at the then-secret codebreaking centre Station X, at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.

She and her husband led interesting lives in the way that seems to have only been possible during the war ("the parishioners of a sleepy Oxfordshire village would have been surprised, I think, to learn that their vicar had spent the cold war serving in MI6 and that his wife had been a codebreaker at Bletchley Park").

In her biography on the Bletchley Park site she says:

My reason for being accepted by BP was because I spoke Italian, so I was put into the RAF section dealing with the Italian Air Forces. I became a de-coder, and I did this job for the next 3 years. It was hard work. We worked in ‘shifts', 8.30 -12, then till 6pm, 4 -midnight, midnight till 8am.

In the 10-minute interview, from the BBC's Saturday Live programme (11 December) the Revd Richard Coles asks her about her experiences: "We had to figure out what sort of messages the Italians were sending and pass them on to the man who was in charge of the section, who would then see that they got to the right place at the right time. The thing we wanted to get was a message about what was about to happen, so we could stop it through our air force intervening."

Asked whether she remembers any particularly big events, she says: "When I was on night shift a message came in. I worked on it for some time and suddenly things began to make sense. I remember giving it to the head of the section and he rushed into the next room with wild excitement because it was something that was going to take place in about an hour's time. The enemy aircraft were leaving north Africa for Sardinia and they thought it was the beginning of the retreat of the Italians from north Africa. And actually they were shot down, these aeroplanes, as a result - they got the message through in time to the night fighters and the Italians were shot down."

She also says, frankly, about that experience, that it was disconcerting to realise the consequences of what the codebreakers were doing: "It was rather disconcerting, but not till later. And then we discovered that a lot of the people on the aeroplanes had been families of the soldiers and the airmen who were leaving. And of course they all got shot down as well."

Leaving Bletchley, she followed her parents to Cairo after her brother had been killed, and in Cairo she met her husband. With masterly wartime restraint she says: "I remember seeing him and thinking he looked rather attractive. We got on quite well and before the voyage ended he said 'I think I'd like to marry you'."

Click to listen to the interview on the BBC iPlayer site