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Honour for wartime codebreaker
Western Mail
|August 14, 2025
AT 18 years old, Edna Evans left west Wales for a posting with the Wrens near Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.
It was here she found herself working at the centre of code-breaking operations during World War II, which ultimately cracked the German Enigma codes and helped win the war.
Now a blue plaque to honour her work is being placed outside her former home in St Catherine Street, Carmarthen, by the town's civic society.
Edna passed away in February 2018, aged 95, and her family say they are proud that the plaque is being installed next month in her memory.
Her efforts and those of many others working around the clock to crack the Nazi codes were kept a strict secret for many years and were only declassified in the mid-1970s.
During the war, Germany's forces used a complicated cypher to encrypt their messages, called Enigma.
Plain German text was turned into a seemingly meaningless jumble of letters, thanks to the Enigma machine, which was similar to a typewriter.
This story is from the August 14, 2025 edition of Western Mail.
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