Margaret Betts Obituary, Death Cause – A woman who worked at Bletchley Park during World War II to assist decrypt enemy communications has passed away at the age of 99. She was one of the last female codebreakers to survive from the facility. As a result of her strong academic performance, “men from the ministry” began looking for Margaret Betts when she was just 19 years old, according to her son Jonathan Betts, who is now 68 years old. Margaret Betts is from Ipswich, Suffolk. He reported that she consented to his request for assistance and provided the following explanation: “She had recently lost her brother because his ship had been sunk by a German U-boat.” It was a terrible tragedy, and he had only been married for a few short weeks before it. His entire family was in a state of severe shock, and everyone wanted to do something, anything, to help.
This motivated her, and she responded by saying, “absolutely, in any way I can help, I will.” She was told it would be extremely secret work and that ultimately she would be informed what it was, but in the meantime she was to pack her bags and head to a clearing house in north London. She wasn’t told what it was; she was just told that it would be highly secret work. According to him, she was the target of a headhunt in 1942. Following an evaluation and selection process, she began her work deciphering codes in the summer of 1943 and continued doing so up until the day when the Allies declared victory over Japan in 1945.
Betts, who lives in the outskirts of Salisbury in Wiltshire, commented that “like the majority of them did, she always played down her role.” She responded by saying, “Yes, I am aware that our part in it was extremely important, and I am aware that it was highly secret; however, I would ask that you not walk away with the idea that we are all Alan Turings because we are not.” We were there running the machines, we were following directions, we were using logic to do what we were supposed to do, and we were doing so in a way that was both efficient and clever, but we weren’t the ones who designed the machines for decoding. She explained that in order to decipher encrypted text, they used devices that they termed bombes and then coded them.
