Bletchley Park has been credited with shortening the length of World War 2 by around two years. Much has been written about the brilliance of the code breakers like Turing, who used a combination of cunning, sheer mental ability and cutting-edge technology to break the secret codes of the Nazi Enigma machines, as well as the Italians and the Japanese armies cyphers. The museum has recently secured monies to revamp the visitor centres and is aiming to renovate and revamp the place to raise visitor numbers to 250,000 a year.

One aspect of the twelve thousand people that worked there has been overlooked somewhat, was that nine thousand of them were women. Originally these were debutantes from the aristocracy, hence the title, who were bought in because they could be trusted; but as the sheer amount of work grew exponentially they then drew women from all walks of life to help with the work load. They were not there just to fulfil administrative roles, but played a significant part in the running of the place, from the mathematical geniuses who worked as code breakers and who worked at the same level as Turing and Dilly, there are those that wrote strings of numbers down all day every day, to the essential positions of drivers and indexers.

Smith has brought together all these stories into one volume, weaving personal anecdotes and tales of their specific roles there with a wider narrative of how the war was progressing and their significant successes against the Nazis as the war progressed. He has written other books on the subject too, and occasionally this did feel like I was reading one of his earlier books. It is still a fascinating story though, and a fitting tribute to the essential work that these women did. ( )

Really enjoyed this. Very well researched with a good sense of narrative despite the huge amount of first-hand accounts and general historical detail. At first I struggled to keep track of all of the people but then I realised it didn't really matter if you remembered who was who! Hugely interesting and well executed. ( )

Between 1939 and 1945, the work done in extreme secrecy at Bletchley Park made a massive contribution to the Allied war effort. During the peak of the work, almost thee-quarters of the people working at Bletchley were women. In this book, Michael Smith shares the stories and realities of the women who worked tirelessly to help break encryptions, translate messages, and pass along intelligence. Using interviews with the women themselves, Smith provides an insightful picture into the highly varied work these women did and the important contribution they made to the war. Filled with historical context as well as the anecdotes from the women who spent years at Bletchley, the book is a fascinating read filled with moments of humour and pathos as the women share their experiences in their own words. ( )

When you hear of Bletchly Park you hear about the great men - Turing., Welchman, Dilly Knox, Tommy Flowers. This book brings to the fore some of th emany women who worked there - and despite its title they weren't all of privileged backgrounds. The work they did was very varied, from typex operators, to Bombe machine operators, to linguists, to intelligence analysts, to codebreakers, but the thing they had in common was they all worked extremely hard and were very proud of their contributions. It's great to see the women of Bletchly Park having threir roles fully acknowleged in this book. ( )