A Bletchley Park veteran who helped crack enemy codes during World War Two has celebrated her 100th birthday. Pat Shepherd, from Ferndown in Dorset, worked on the Bombes – the complex code-breaking machines that helped decipher German, Italian and Japanese communications at the secret Buckinghamshire site.
Ms Shepherd joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service at the age of 18 and was posted to Bletchley Park, where her work became part of one of the most vital intelligence efforts of the war. “Once you’d got it set up on your wheels on these huge machines, push the button, they all started turning,” she recalled. “It would take about an hour, perhaps, per run, to try all the combinations of those letters you’ve been sent. And then if your machine stopped, it was either a fault or it might have been an answer they were looking for.”
Although her work played a part in saving countless lives, Ms Shepherd said she was never told whether her machine had made a specific breakthrough. She kept the details of her service secret for decades, only revealing the truth to her family in her 50s. “I’m incredibly proud of what we did,” she said.
Her son, Tim Shepherd, said he was “absolutely staggered” when his mother told him about her wartime role. “What was especially interesting for me was to actually go to Bletchley with Mum last year as an honoured visit,” he said. “I wasn’t aware that Bletchley had been so significant in allowing British Intelligence to actually redirect false information to send the Germans to the wrong area in France, which saved many, many lives in Normandy.”
He added that seeing the Bombes up close gave him a deeper appreciation for the skill and patience involved. “They had to clean the brushes on each of the dials with tweezers because the brushes got sort of bent out of shape. And it was very, very noisy apparently, when all the machines were running in there,” he said.
The work carried out at Bletchley Park, led by computing pioneer Alan Turing, was critical to the Allied war effort. Turing’s Bombes helped decode enemy messages, including those revealing the positions of U-boats that were devastating Allied convoys in the Atlantic. In August, Bletchley Park said only about 350 veterans of its wartime operations remain worldwide.
Family members from as far afield as Australia, South Africa and the United States have travelled to Dorset to celebrate Ms Shepherd’s centenary – a fitting tribute to a woman whose secret service helped shape history.
