Betty Webb, who has died aged 101, was recruited to Bletchley Park, the government’s wartime codebreaking centre in Buckinghamshire, as a teenager in 1941. Initially registering encrypted enemy communications, after two years she was promoted to transcriber and paraphraser of Japanese messages. Betty was posted to the US in 1945, as the only member of Britain’s female army, the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), to be selected to work in the Pentagon building after VE Day.
In 1940 Betty had given up her domestic science course in Shrewsbury and joined the ATS aged 18. At the Wrexham training camp her natural abilities as a soldier were quickly identified and rewarded with promotion to corporal. Betty believed it was her German language skills that led to her being recruited by Bletchley Park (Station X) as one of the few selected from the ATS by an organisation that prioritised recruits from the Women’s Royal Naval Service (the “Wrens”) and Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF).
