Misread Signals

Bletchley Park was—so we're told—staffed by a majority of women, who had menial roles while a handful of pipe-smoking male boffins did the brainy codebreaking stuff. As with many urban myths, it's not true: women as well as men had serious full-on codebreaking roles. And not just at Bletchley, but in codebreaking agencies in the US and even in Germany. Yet, when the histories were written, the codebreaker women somehow got left out.

Who were they? What did they achieve? How come they vanished? What happened to them after the war?

Misread Signals explores all these questions, uncovering the essential roles women played in the world of codebreaking during the war.

Author: Dermot Turing is the acclaimed author of Prof, a biography of his famous uncle, The Story of Computing, and most recently X, Y and Z—the real story of how Enigma was broken. He began writing in 2014 after a career in law and is a regular speaker at historical and other events. As well as writing and speaking, he is a trustee of The Turing Trust and a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford. Dermot is married with two sons and lives in Kippen in Stirlingshire.

This book features 25 b/w illustrations.