Bletchley Park is remembered as a land of male intellectuals who were supported by a staff of women in menial roles.
Speaker
Sir Dermot Turing
Synopsis
Bletchley Park is remembered as a land of male intellectuals who were supported by a staff of women in menial roles, with figures such as Alan Turing, William Tutte and John Tiltman taking centre stage. These are the men who helped sway the course of the war in the Allies’ favour. But, as is often the case in the historical record, this is not the whole story.
Women were not just secretaries and assistants: they had serious, full-on codebreaking roles. Somehow, when the histories were written, these women were left out. Who were they? What did they achieve? How did they ‘vanish’?
In Misread Signals, codebreaking historian Dermot Turing turns his attention to these long-ignored women and puts their contributions back in the spotlight where they belong.
About the speaker
Sir Dermot Turing is the award-winning author of X, Y and Z – the real story of how Enigma was broken and Enigma Traitors, which reveals the failings of Allied cipher security during World War II.
His most recent book is Misread Signals – How History Overlooked Women Codebreakers, which was published in August 2025. He has written numerous other books relating to his famous uncle Alan Turing, codebreaking and computing history.
He began writing in 2014 after a career in law, principally at the international law firm Clifford Chance. As well as writing and speaking, Dermot is a trustee of the National Museum of Computing and a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford.
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