By Hayley Robinson

A former Wren who helped decode German military codes during the Second World War has revisited the site of her secret work.

Doris Nicholls, of Barkers Court, Sittingbourne, got the chance to visit Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes, thanks to councillors Roger Truelove, Ghlin Whelan and MP Derek Wyatt who organised the visit.

During the tour, Mrs Nicholls was given the privileged opportunity of firing up the Bombe Rebuild machine.

The fully-operational machine, which has taken 14 years to rebuild, is an electro-mechanical device designed to speed up the process of breaking into the Enigma machine which the Germans used to encipher their communications.

For the first time ever Mrs Nicholls also set eyes on the Enigma machine whose codes she had spent three years helping to break without ever having seen one.

The 86-year-old, who recently received a medal and a certificate for the work she carried out during the war, said: “It was superb. I had a lovely day and it brought back some old memories.

“I had a wonderful time and I have been invited to a reunion in September which I am considering attending.”

Mrs Nicholls received training at Headingley in Leeds, before being sent to an outpost station for supporting the decoding Enigma machine at Bletchley Park.
Security around the Enigma project was so great that the Wrens would arrive for work in the presence of guards with loaded pistols.

There were about 400 Wrens working on the project, all of whom worked in pairs and in shifts, so the information was fed to Bletchley 24 hours a day via a teleprinter.

Mrs Nicholls worked on the Bombe from 1942 until the end of the war when all the machines were destroyed to preserve the secret that Bletchley Park had systematically been breaking the Engima code.

Mrs Nicholls kept quiet about her top secret work only telling her husband about it some 30 years later when the ban on talking about it was lifted.