Betty Webb MBE was a remarkable woman. When she died in March, aged 101, the outpouring of affection was testimony to a life well lived. She was wise, kind and a passionate storyteller. And hers was a story worth telling. In 1941, aged 18, she threw the towelin at Shrewsbury domestic science college and signed up for the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). At the training camp she stood out and was promoted to corporal and earmarked for a secret mission.
“I didn’t realise what Station X was at the time,” she recalled. “Only much later, after the war, did I discover the important role Bletchley Park played.” Tasked with the registering of Enigma-encrypted German messages, by 1943 Betty had been promoted to the “more meaty” work of paraphrasing Japanese communications in Block F.
Meticulous and diligent, when everyone else was celebrating VE Day, Betty was preparing to fly to America as the only ATS member selected to serve in the new Pentagon building. There she continued to paraphrase messages relating to the war in the Pacific. “It is rather extraordinary when I think about it now,” she said modestly.
In her latter years, Betty became famous for talking about her extraordinary war. When we first met, she had just given a lecture at the age of 92. I asked if the Second World War was the most exciting time of her life, and she replied: “No, now is the most exciting time of my life.” For Betty, being applauded in old age for the work she did as a young woman was transformative.
So where did Betty go to remember the war that changed both ends of her life?
At home in Wythall, Worcs, she patiently sifted through a mountain of 100th birthday cards and handed me one featuring a stone figure. “This is my favourite wartime statue,” she told me. The modest sculpture of a servicewoman sits in a neat uniform, legs coyly tucked to one side, hair rolled beneath a cap. Dedicated in 2005 at the Staffordshire National Memorial Arboretum, the statue was erected to honour the ATS. And there is an uncanny resemblance between the memorial and Betty when she was photographed in 1945, with freshly permed hair and a lightweight khaki uniform.
The image is of a confident girl who has grown into adulthood through military service. She is freshly spruced for her posting to Washington DC. It was the ATS which recognised Betty’s talents and Betty recognised herself in the statue. “You know, it is rather nice to have a statue that looks how you once looked.”
How veterans remember the war remains highly personal – some prefer to forget it. “We’ve got war all wrong,” Philip Jarman shakes his head. “It’s awful, really it is.”
Philip should know. He’s 101 and unlike the British men and women who join the military today, Philip had no choice. “Well, I would’ve been conscripted at 19 so I thought I may as well volunteer at 18.” He followed his older brother John into the army. “It was 1936. He was six years my senior and I remember how magnificent he looked – much taller than me, 6ft 3in and in uniform. He was a second lieutenant newly commissioned from Sandhurst. He went into the Indian army.”
Philip pauses. “I never saw him again.” A gentle soul who now lives in Hampshire and has spent a lifetime trying to move on from what happened, Philip tells his story somewhat reluctantly.
John served in the 2nd Punjab regiment and was posted to Malaysia shortly after the outbreak of war. By Christmas 1941, a small tenacious Japanese force smashed through Britain’s south-east Asian empire and Britain’s nume-rically superior army fell back to Singapore, John’s regiment included. It was a farce.
Touted as the foremost military base in south-east Asia, Singapore capitulated in a week with the British signing what has been described as the most humiliating surrender in their history. John was among 13,500 prisoners of war, at least so his family thought: “It was not until the war’s end that we knew for certain John was dead.”
Emotional displays were kept to a minimum at home, but a persistent lack of clarity over John’s death gnawed at his parents. Returning from Burma in 1946, it was Philip who had to tell them John had been beheaded. But the story does not end there. Philip gets up and pads down the corridor. He is looking for a photograph.
John is the bridegroom, a sweet-looking man and his wife is pocket-sized in large spectacles and a simple white dress. “They married in India, in 1940. Diana was the daughter of John’s colonel.”
Within months of John going missing, Diana left for Britain. “She was on a passenger vessel, City of Cairo, and they were completing their last leg from Durban to the UK when it was struck by a torpedo.” Diana’s lifeboat held approximately 50 survivors. After 35 days at sea, four were still alive, including Diana, the only surviving woman. “They had been tipping bodies overboard for weeks. A German blockade runner found them off the South African coast. The German doctor asked the two or three English men for permission to operate on Diana – her throat was closed. She didn’t survive the anaesthetic.”
I am writing a book about war memorials but Philip thinks they’re “useless”. In the 1940s it was more important to build back bombed Britain. However, in the 1960s, when he lived in Surrey, Philip did like to sit under abundant blossoms in Cobham’s Remembrance Avenue planted by the Women’s Institute after the war, and think about what might have been had John and Diana survived.
The cherry trees have just been replanted. “That they’ve redone it is proof they were a jolly good idea in the first place. Much better than any other monument,” he sighs.
Ruth Bourne, 98, a liberal-minded woman from north London, is applying her standard perspicacity to the question of war memorials. “There are very few good outcomes of war. At the moment war seems to be a total disaster that doesn’t appear to benefit anybody,” she tells me. But Ruth is not one to be deterred. “It would have to be someone who left some lasting legacy, because of conflict. I am thinking of things which were invented that wouldn’t have been invented had there not been a war.”
That is how she arrived at the commemoration of Alan Turing, the father of computer science. “I believe nowadays he is even remembered on the £50 note, with what looks like a Bombe machine behind him.”
It is unsurprising Ruth has plumped for Turing, given her entire adult life she was indirectly connected to his wartime legacy. In 1944, aged 18, she swapped her school uniform for a Wren uniform and was selected to serve as a Bombe operative in an outstation attached to Station X, Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire.
“Of course, I had no idea of the significance of the machine I was using. The only thing we were told was that we were ‘breaking German codes’,” she recalls. “I didn’t know that my Bombe was in fact helping to crack Enigma codes – I had never heard the word Enigma.”
Nor had she heard of Turing, the lead cryptologist at Bletchley Park, whose genius included the development of the Bombe, an enormous electromechanical machine that facilitated the rapid decoding of Enigma-encrypted German messages. But Ruth has learnt a lot since 1945. “We’ve been up the mountain and down the mountain. In that time the world I knew has changed into another world.”
She is alluding not just to Turing’s life but also his death. She is trying to make sense of the country she and Turing fought for, both then and now, the same country that criminalised Turing for his homosexuality, an indictment which led to his suicide. “My father was a doctor, he was a pretty open-minded man, but he would talk about homosexuality as an abomination.
“At the time I didn’t know what gay was, but you got the gist.” Turing’s confession to the police of a consensual sexual relationship with another man led to charges of “gross indecency”. These resulted in compulsory hormone treatment, the removal of his security clearance and the end of his cryptographic work for GCHQ. He was found dead in his flat in 1954, a half-eaten apple laced with cyanide next to his body.
It is a statue of Turing unveiled in Manchester that Ruth selects as her monument to war. The cryptologist sits on a bench in Sackville Gardens, flanked on one side by the university buildings in which he once worked and Canal Street on the other – home to Manchester’s gay village. I travel north to sit beside him, send him Ruth’s good wishes and take a photograph of the apple that came to symbolise his death on my Apple phone. In memory of Alan Turing, a man who saved countless lives with his genius, who fought tirelessly for the freedom of others, but discovered at war’s end he was not free.
