Amid all this enthusiasm and interest, one major area of Bletchley Park has so far received less focus than it deserves. At the peak of Bletchley's success, a total of twelve thousand people worked there of whom nine thousand were women. Their roles ranged from some of the leading codebreakers, cracking German messages that others could not break, through the debutantes who chauffeured the codebreakers to and from work or, like Baroness Trumpington, were employed as filing clerks, to the mass of girls from ordinary working families who operated machines or listed endless streams of figures, largely unaware of the major impact their work was having on the war.
The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories will tell the stories of these women, how they came to be there, the lives they gave up to do 'their bit' for the war effort, and the part they played in the vital work of 'Station X'. The central protagonists are the debutante who was an indexer in the Naval Section alongside Baroness Trumpington; the student of German literature who broke off her studies at the age of nineteen to go to Bletchley and went on to became one of Britain's leading codebreakers; the Foreign Office clerk who was the personal assistant to the head of Bletchley Park; the wren who worked on the 'Bombes', the incredible machine designed by Alan Turing which helped break the Enigma ciphers; the 'stripper', one of the women who worked on the Japanese codes, writing out endless streams of numbers to assist in stripping off the ciphers; and the teleprinter operator who has never seen her work as being as important as that of the 'real people' who worked at Station 'X', even though like all these women she was an essential cog in a very large machine and without her and her colleagues the code breakers' intelligence would never have reached the commanders who used it to help to win the war.
