ALDWINCKLE, Helene 1920-2012. WW2 codebreaker, broadcaster and gallerist. When Helene Aldwinckle, moved to 76 Farquhar Road, SE19, with her husband John in 1979, her wartime work as one of Bletchley Park’s senior female codebreakers was probably the last thing on her mind. At the time she was about to become, at the age of 58, the new manager of the Medici Gallery, a large and well-established Mayfair art gallery, but her working life had begun during wartime, as a senior codebreaker at Bletchley Park.
The secret of how Britain cracked the German Enigma codes, said to have shortened the war by at least two years, was revealed for the first time in 1974 in a book called The Ultra Secret. It would not be until several years later that the Government allowed those who had worked there to speak about it, and a further 20 years before public interest in the codebreakers of Bletchley Park was raised by the release of the film Enigma (2001) and, more recently, The Imitation Game (2014).
Born Helene Lovie Taylor, in Aberdeen in 1920, Helene won a scholarship to Aberdeen University in 1939, where she studied English and French. In early 1942, the University’s Principal was asked to recommend female linguists and mathematicians for specialised work with the Foreign Office. After interviews in London and Aberdeen, at which she was intrigued to be asked questions about crosswords and puzzle-solving, she was appointed an Assistant Principal, one of only a handful of women at this level at that time, and told to report to Bletchley Park. On arrival she was asked to sign the Official Secrets Act and billeted with an elderly couple in a nearby town.
She was an intrepid young woman to leave Aberdeen on a troop train during the blackout, aged 21, only the second time she had been out of Scotland, to travel to a place she did not know, to do a job she couldn’t be told about, and to live in a house with complete strangers.
She was assigned to Hut 6, the heart of the codebreaking operation, where German army and air force codes were broken. German forces were provided with Enigma cipher machines, through which all communications between headquarters and units on land, sea and air were encoded. The machines had a series of rotors enabling them to produce 159 billion, billion, billion settings, and different services used different keys. To make communications even more secure, all units were required to change the settings for every key every day at midnight. Unsurprisingly, the Germans believed their codes were unbreakable, so secrecy among Bletchley Park employees had to be absolute.
Initially Helene worked in the Registration Room, where coded messages delivered by motorbike from radio listening stations were studied to see if any intelligence could be gleaned before being passed to the codebreakers, who were known as ‘The Watch’. In May 1943, the intelligence-sharing BRUSA Agreement was signed between Britain and the United States, after a difficult period of strained relations between the two intelligence communities over the UK’s unwillingness to share how Enigma codes were being broken. When the first contingent of 50 US service personnel arrived at Bletchley in August that year, Helene was asked to organise the Americans’ induction and training programme, playing a small but important role at the start of what was to become known as ‘the special relationship’.
It was a shrewd choice. Unlike some of her more blue-stockinged or upper-class contemporaries, Helene had an easy manner, a vivacious personality and a quick wit. She immediately bonded with the Americans and soon put them at their ease. Their most senior officer, Captain Bill Bundy, who later became foreign policy adviser to presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, praised the way Helene’s course handled British concerns that the Americans might be less security conscious. “It was dealt with brilliantly,” he wrote. “No stern lectures, just quietly saying how important it was not to let a bit of this come out”.
After running what she referred to as “the School” for two intakes of US personnel, Helene returned to codebreaking duties in late 1943, working for the rest of the war in what was known as the Quiet Watch or Qwatch (a play on the German word ‘quatsch’, meaning nonsense). This was a small team of codebreakers who, to paraphrase a 1970s Heineken advertisement, cracked the codes other codebreakers could not crack, and handled some of the most difficult keys, including one only used by high-ranking generals.
At the end of the war she stayed on to co-write the official history of Hut 6, deemed so sensitive that it was only declassified in 2006 and published in 2014. In 1945 she married John Aldwinckle, a flight lieutenant in the RAF she had met as an officer cadet in Aberdeen, and had to leave the Foreign Office, as all women who married were then required to do, a bar only lifted in 1972. After the war she had four children and accompanied her husband, who worked for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and military intelligence, on his postings to Berlin, Cologne, Paris, Brussels, Rome and Mons, as well as in the UK.
In Cologne and Berlin in the 1950s and 1960s she became a reporter for the British Forces Network (BFN) and a broadcaster for West German radio station Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), for whom she wrote, produced and presented programmes about British theatre and an English programme for schools. She also played leading roles in a string of amateur theatre productions, such as As You Like It, The Millionairess and The Deep Blue Sea.
In Paris in the early 1960s she taught languages, teaching French to English officers’ wives, English to local French women, and French in German to German officers’ wives. Later on she became a German-to-English translator for art publishers Thames and Hudson, including the definitive biography of the Futurist Russian artist El Lissitzky (1968) by his widow, and The Renaissance in Italy, by Heinrich Decker (1969).
In 1975 Helene began a new career in the art world, initially at the Medici Gallery in Grafton Street, then at the Oxford Gallery for a few years, before returning to the Medici as its manager in 1979. With her usual verve and energy, she set about transforming it from a rather old-fashioned establishment into a thriving modern gallery, curating a series of exhibitions featuring contemporary artists and ceramicists, such as Robert King, Pamela Kay and Mary Rich. She recruited young artists as staff and encouraged them in their work, including the internationally renowned light installation artist, Bruce Munro, who credits her for giving him the confidence he needed to pursue his stellar career. She retired in 1986.
Helene was one of life’s enthusiasts. She had boundless energy, a razor-sharp mind and was a superb raconteur and mimic. Dulwich friends and neighbours recall the many dinner parties she and John gave in Farquhar Road, and the fascinating stories and anecdotes she would tell. Still active well into her nineties, she attended the royal opening of the restored Hut 6 at Bletchley Park in 2014, before moving into a care home in Wallington for the last six years of her life.
In 2019, aged 98, she was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest civilian and military honour, for the role she played at Bletchley Park in the liberation of France, and was personally thanked for her wartime work by the then Prime Minister, Theresa May, at her last-ever Prime Minister’s Questions. Helene died in April 2020 and is buried in Beckenham Cemetery, Elmer's End. Her husband John, who was active in Dulwich community life as chairman of the Dulwich Residents’ Association in the 1990s, died in 2012.
Richard Aldwinckle