Plaque honour for wartime code breaker

AT 18 years old Edna Evans left West Wales for a posting with the Wrens near Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. It was here that she found herself working at the centre of code-breaking operations during the Second World War that ultimately cracked the German Enigma codes and helped win the war.

- IAN LEWIS Reporter

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 to have the plaque 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. It used rotating wheels, which changed every time a key was pressed, allowing a cypher to be created. It was estimated that the Enigma machine could encrypt words into as many as 15 billion possible combinations.

At Bletchley Park (code-named Station X) it was mathematician Alan Turing who developed the prototype computers to speed up the code-breaking process, revealing German troop movements plus the location of deadly U-Boats.