The

The From the home of the co-breakers and the birthplace of modern computing, this is the Bletchley Park podcast.

Mavis Beatty, one of Bletchley Park's leading female co-breakers, died this week at the age of 92.

Mavis's work on Enigma was crucial to the Royal Navy's victory at Matapan in 1941 and the success of the D-Day landings in 1944.

She was part of Dilley Knox's team, working on as yet unbroken codes

and ciphers. In this Bletchley Park podcast extra, we can hear her chatting with Bletchley

Park historian and author Michael Smith.

So you were Mavis Lever when you arrived at Bletchley Park, wouldn't you? Oh yes, that's right, yes, I was only 19. I hadn't got married then.

How did you come to be selected for Bletchley Park?

Well, I was studying German literature at University College, London, and I was hoping to embark on a thesis on the German Romantics.

And I was all booked in to go to Tübingen University, which was right in the centre of all.

I would be absolutely besotted with German Romanticism.

But Munich came, and so they cancelled my

tubing and term and so I went to Syrac University instead and so I stayed

there till actually the war was looking very imminent and by the time I got home

the Siegfried line was being manned so I just got back in time to UCL and found they

were evacuating to Averiswit. So I really thought, well, I don't know, I ought to do something

better for the war effort than reading German poetry in Wales, especially as I then found out

that Dr. Goebbels had got his doctorate on German romanticism,

so I thought, well, there must be something wrong with the German Romantics. So I said,

I trained to be a nurse, and they said, oh, no, you don't use your German. So go and see what

the Foreign Office can do with you. So off I went and, oh dear, we were all interviewed by a formidable Miss Moore,

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