Helene Aldwinckle obituary

Helene Aldwinckle, who has died aged 99, was one of the most senior female codebreakers working to break the German army and air force Enigma ciphers in Hut 6 at Bletchley Park.

She was recruited in August 1942 direct from university as a junior assistant principal – a relatively senior role – and took so quickly to the work in Hut 6 that when the American codebreakers began arriving only a year later, she was asked to take charge of their training.

Aldwinckle had just graduated in French and English at Aberdeen University, having also studied German at school, when the principal was asked to recommend female linguists and mathematicians for specialised work. At an interview in London, around 20 interviewers, all men, sat around a table asking the women various questions relating to mathematics, crosswords and languages, with no explanation of what work they would be doing.

Around a dozen women were selected for a second meeting, at the Caledonian Hotel in Aberdeen. This time the interviewers included Stuart Milner-Barry, the head of Hut 6. “It was obvious that theyhad already selected who they wanted,” she recalled. “These interviewers were from Bletchley Park and making final checks that we were the right sort of people for the job.”

A card came through the post telling her to catch a train to Bletchley on a certain day and to ring the number on the card when she arrived at the station. “I had to give my name and a description of myself and was told that someone with a limp would meet me.”

Once at Bletchley, she was asked to sign the Official Secrets Act and put to work in the Registry, where female graduates took down the details of the messages, carefully examining them to see if there was any intelligence that could be garnered before the codebreakers got to work.

It was important to sort out messages that could be linked together by the same callsigns or the length of the messages, which were sent in groups of five letters. Messages with the same number of groups might be re-encipherment of the same German text, which would help to break them.

A description of each message, containing the frequency and callsigns; the number; whether or not it was urgent; and the first two groups, was carefully logged on the so-called B-Lists. They were known colloquially as “Blists” and the women compiling them were dubbed the “Blisters”.

When the American codebreakers arrived in the summer of 1943, Aldwinckle was asked to take charge of a familiarisation course for them. “They were full of banter and used to flirt at every opportunity, for example trying to accompany me to lunch, but it was always in good jest and they were enormous fun and a breath of fresh air in a rather stuffy environment.”

Bill Bundy, later a senior adviser to presidents John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson, was in charge of the US Army codebreakers. He was full of praise for the way in which Aldwinckle’s course dealt with the British concerns that the Americans might be less security conscious than their British counterparts. “It was dealt with brilliantly,” he said. “No stern lectures, just quietly saying how important it was not to let a bit of this come out.”

Aldwinckle then returned to Hut 6, working in the Quiet Room on Enigma ciphers that could not immediately be dealt with by the Watch, the main codebreaking section. “We would work on longer term problems and look for unusual trends, standing back a bit from what was going on day to day,” she said.

Born in Aberdeen, Helene was the daughter of Alexander Taylor, a salesman, and his wife, Helen (nee Trail). From the Central school, later Aberdeen academy, she went on to the university.

She met her future husband, John Aldwinckle, an RAF pilot, when he took a short course there. He spent much of the second world war in Algiers and then Italy, dropping Special Operations Executive agents into occupied southern Europe to work alongside the resistance.

They married in February 1945, and after the war John worked in RAF intelligence and with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in a number of locations across Europe, including at the MI6 station Berlin where one of his colleagues was George Blake, who betrayed large numbers of British agents inside East Germany to the Russians, including those run by John.

Helene accompanied him on all his postings, to Rome, Brussels, Mons, Paris and Cologne, where she took up work as a broadcaster, reporting on major concerts and art exhibitions for the British Forces Network, which was based in the city, and for the German radio station Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), for whom she wrote and produced a number of programmes.

When they returned to the UK in 1973, she worked initially as a German-to-English translator, on a biography of the Russian artist and designer El Lissitzky written by his widow, Sophie Lissitzky-Kueppers: El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts (1968) and The Renaissance in Italy by Heinrich Decker (1969).

In 1975 she embarked on a new career in the art world, initially as deputy manager of the Medici gallery in London. She then spent two years at the Oxford gallery, before returning to the Medici as its manager in 1979. Over the next seven years, she revitalised the gallery, curating a series of exhibitions featuring contemporary artists and ceramicists includin Robert King, Pamela Kay and Mary Rich.

In 2019 she was made chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur for her role at Bletchley, an honour which led to her being thanked personally by the then prime minister, Theresa May, in the House of Commons.

John died in 2012. She is survived by their four children, Diana, Richard, Linda and Pamela.

• Helene Lovie Aldwinckle, codebreaker, broadcaster and gallerist, born 26 October 1920; died 24 April 2020