Codebreaker Ruth Bourne, who worked alongside Alan Turing to crack the Germans’ Enigma code, has passed away aged 99.
After joining the Wrens (Women’s Royal Naval Service), Ms Bourne, from High Barnet in north London, worked at locations around Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire as a Bombe machine operator and checker.
She was chosen to work at the secret location to decode intercepted Nazi messages.
In 2018, she was awarded the Legion d’honneur – France’s highest military honour – in honour of her service.
The Taxi Charity for Military Veterans wrote on Facebook: ‘Ruth’s contribution to the monumental task of breaking the Enigma cypher was truly historic.
‘Ruth was a remarkable woman with immense charm and charisma, and she will be dearly missed by all who had the privilege of knowing her.’
Millions of lives were saved during the war when codebreakers used the Bombe machine to crack the Nazis’ Enigma code, which was employed to encrypt messages.
Their work allowed British intelligence to move more quickly and act upon the data the Bletchley team gave them, contributing to a number of fundamental military successes during the war.
Additionally, it led to the industrialisation of codebreaking and paved the path for the earliest modern computers.
Having signed the Official Secrets Act, Ms Bourne, who was raised in a Jewish family from Birmingham, kept silent about her work for more than 35 years.
Ruth was just 17 years old when she was a trainee member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, when she was told that she would be joining the Women of Bletchley Park.
She had to sign a contract that bound her to endless hours of work, no social life and no way to leave once she had agreed.
Ruth was recruited to be a member of the team at HMS Pembroke V as part of the SDX special duties. Bletchley Park workers consisted of two different teams, the ‘y station’, who were the women responsible for picking up the German Enigma code, and the ‘x station’, who were responsible for bombe operation, like Ruth herself.
Most of the ladies hired were blind-sighted and had no prior experience with bombe operations.
The workers were only shown a few machines for training purposes for the recruitment of the job. They were told not to ask any questions.
The position itself included preparing the machines each day, turning the drums on the front and plugging up the boards at the back according to settings laid out in a menu.
While Ruth was a checker, she would be in charge of waiting for data to come through as ‘confirmed.’ When this occurred, she would then have to make a call to report the stop on the code menu, which would be checked by other members of Bletchley.
Ruth had little time for breaks because her job required her to be on her feet all day.
There was a term ‘mustard’, which meant that workers at Bletchley Park were told what they were going to do without any debate or choice of their own. From the very first day of her work as a bombe operator to when her time at Bletchley ended, Ruth did what she was told on request. Her work as a bombe operator started in early 1944 and continued until the end of the war in 1945.
In 1945, when World War II ended, all of the workers at Bletchley Park were informed that they must continue to keep their work there a secret. It was not until 1974 that the book ‘The Ultra Secret’ was published. It was then that she, along with other Bletchley Park workers, was able to tell their families about their involvement in bringing down Nazi Germany.
Ruth explained what it was like when the news eventually broke, saying that ‘you got so used to not talking to anyone’, and that even after they were permitted to reveal their positions, she would still not talk about her experience in depth.
On 18 December 2025, it was reported that Bourne had died at the age of 99.
It’s amusing how we hand out honours to tattooed footballers, TV presenters and singers, but not to people who helped save our country.
We should be sanctifying all those who were code breakers, because without them, the outcome of the war would have certainly been different. These people were the brains of the war. In fact, we will never actually know how many lives these people saved, and we owe them a world of debt and gratitude.
It also makes me wonder what she thought of what has become of the country that she helped save.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 