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Keeping secrets: Victorian worked with wartime hero Alan Turing

Marcia Williams laughs when she looks at the playing-card-sized computers most people carry around in their pockets — the kind that serve as a phone, camera and video recorder.
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Marcia Williams was a code-breaker during the Second World War in England and worked on the first devices invented by computing pioneer Alan Turing.

Marcia Williams laughs when she looks at the playing-card-sized computers most people carry around in their pockets — the kind that serve as a phone, camera and video recorder.

“The ones we worked on were three times as big as that shelf,” she said, pointing to the floor-to-ceiling bookcase in her Fairfield apartment that’s about 3 1/2 metres long.

“They were the grandfathers of modern computers,” Williams said.

The 90-year-old Victoria resident worked as a code-breaker on one of mathematician Alan Turing’s machines in England in the early 1940s during the Second World War. Turing’s machines are often heralded as the first computers and a basic prototype of a central processing unit.

British prime minister Winston Churchill credited Turing’s code-breaking wartime project as the single biggest contributor to a timely Allied victory. The device was able to unlock the secret codes created by the Nazis’ encryption machines.

Turing is the subject of a feature film, The Imitation Game, set to hit Canadian theatres Dec. 25 and starring British actor Benedict Cumberbatch. The plot revolves around Turing’s time leading code-breaking efforts at Bletchley Park.

Williams said she can’t wait to see the film. She was 17 and had just returned to England after completing school in Ireland when she decided to enlist in the war effort, volunteering for the women’s Royal Naval Service.

“For reasons unknown to me, I was considered suitable for doing highly confidential work with codes,” said Williams, the daughter of a British Army officer who served in India.

After decades of secrecy, she is still shy to speak of her war work.

“The philosophy of the government then was the less we knew the better. … We were told to say we were writers, the naval term for a secretary,” Williams said. “They said we’d be standing the whole time, that it was noisy and quite a bit of responsibility.”

Williams was assigned to a Bletchley substation outside London, not the famous mansion compound where Turing tweaked what would become his machine. He would visit the substation regularly to check on the machines.

“He’d come in and say good morning. … He was the most self-effacing, modest man,” said Williams, noting that as a teenager and “lowest of the low,” she didn’t interact with him much. She said he didn’t stand out among the other “boffins” — British slang for a technical scientist or engineer.

“He’d wander about and ask you if there were any problems,” she said.

Williams was one of 10,000 code-breakers to work on the Bletchley Park project. The majority — nearly 75 per cent — were women recruited out of school.

“Nearly all the men were away at war, especially in our age group,” Williams said.

The women codebreakers’ contribution to the war effort was kept mum under the Official Secrets Act until former soldiers started speaking out in the 1970s and Bletchley reunions began to pop up in the 1990s.

But Williams said after keeping a vow of silence about the experience for so long, it wasn’t easy to talk about it.

“Years later, I met some [fellow code-breakers] here. But when you’re not allowed to talk about stuff, you get in the habit of not talking about it,” she said. Victoria’s Olive Bailey was also a code-breaker in the war and has spoken at local libraries and groups about her time at Bletchley Park.

Williams said the work demanded a combination of accuracy and monitoring. They didn’t know exactly what they were working on, but wondered, “If I made a mistake, who would I be putting at risk?”

She said it was easy to figure out that the codebreakers played a role in the Battle of the Atlantic because of the sheer amount of work that came through at the time.

Williams worked at the substation from 1943 to 1945 and left just before the end of the war, nearly nine months’ pregnant with her first son.

Married to an engineer from Quebec, she later moved to Montreal. They had four sons and Williams worked in a mental-health hospital as rehabilitation therapy was being explored.

In the early 1980s, Williams and her husband separated and she moved to Victoria, where she soon got involved in community advocacy.

“All my life, I’ve been involved in the community. I always felt it was my duty as a human being to do anything I could,” she said, recalling knitting socks for the poor in Ireland as a young girl, putting on variety shows in military hospitals during the war and starting a mentorship group in Victoria.

Her most recent endeavour was to help facilitate a public forum at a downtown church in early November to discuss the legal and human-rights implications of the temporary foreign worker program in Canada.

Though Williams has watched the evolution of computers — from the machine she had to stand on her tip-toes to reach to the rise of personal computers — it hasn’t sparked a lifelong interest.

“I just use email,” said Williams, who leaves the high-tech stuff to her great-grandchildren.

What does pique her interest is the level of online sharing in today’s world.

“I’m shocked at the breaches of private information that are so prevalent now,” she said. “I can’t help but think if anything like [a world war] happened again, how would the government keep any secrets?”

spetrescu@timescolonist.com