Hi everybody, welcome to Dance Noise History. I've just got out of the car, I've parked up because I'm coming to a very special party.

It's the 100th birthday party of Betty Webb, but she was born on the 13th of May 1923.

Betty is a national treasure. She has deservedly become very famous in recent decades.

In fact, so famous that she was invited to the King Charles III's coronation, because she is one of the last surviving code breakers from

the Letchley Park. She served during the Second World War at Blechley and then because she was so talented in Washington, D.C. for the remainder of the war against Japan in 1945.

She worked on Interceptive German and Japanese messages at Blechley. She had joined as a teenager against her mother's wishes.

She ran away from school, as you'll hear, deliberately to join up because she wanted to do more to contribute to the fight against fascism,

then just make sausage rolls and serve cups of warm tea.

She's been decorated by the British and French governments for a wartime service. She is having a magnificent 100th birthday party thrown for her today, and I'm very privileged indeed to have been invited.

And to mark this very special centenarian. This is an episode of the podcast. I recorded three or four years ago, and I went to visit her house in Birmingham.

She sat me down, she gave me a slice of cake, the size of an anchor, and she told me all about her childhood wartime experiences and what it was like working at Blechley Park. Enjoy!

She might have been here.

The Tommy found, dropped off, you know she saw the King.

No black, white, unity, till they were sparse and black, unity. Never had to go to war with one another in a game.

And looked off, and then subtle has cleared the tower.

Let's talk about your childhood, because it's quite a long time ago now, and it's a bit different to how children might be brought up these days.

Oh, absolutely. I was brought up in the country. I was a Lopian, actually. And we lived in British Castle, which is on the borders of Heravature and Tropia.

The days when one didn't have telephones. And I never went to school. My mother taught me what I know.

And apart from a few months in Germany in 1937, I spent three months with a family in a little village called Hermhutins-Uxen near Dresden.

That was 37. Yes, when the Hitler regime was just beginning to boil up, and the family was whom I was living, very religious people.

And they were obviously very anxious about it all. But they're two daughters aged, I think, were at 11 and 12.

Had to attend the Hittor thing called the BDM medals, which was a Hitler regime gathering every Sunday morning.

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