Gwen Watkins, who has died aged 101, deciphered German air force codes at Bletchley Park during the second world war, helping RAF and US Army air force fighter aircraft to combat Luftwaffe bombers, and allied reconnaissance aircraft and bombers to evade German air defences.
Watkins joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in 1941 and in May the following year was sent to Bletchley Park, the allied codebreaking centre in Buckinghamshire, as a result of her fluency in German. She was put to work in the air section, unravelling the Luftwaffe’s three-letter and three-figure enciphered codes, initially in Hut 10 and then, from early 1943, in Block F, one of a number of new concrete units that replaced the old huts.
The way in which the cipher was stripped off and the codes decoded was well established by the time Watkins joined the section. She worked on low-level messages that were designed for air crew to swiftly encode and decode, rather than the higher level communications that were protected by Enigma grade encryption. Nonetheless, thanks to the pencil and paper codebreaking techniques that she and her colleagues used, the section was able to build up a picture of how the German pilots and air defences operated.
Bill Bonsall, who headed the German sub-section in which Watkins worked, recalled that at the end of the war, commenting on the number of enemy aircraft destroyed as a result of Bletchley’s intelligence, allied air chiefs described the figures as “impressive” but said that by far the most important contribution the codebreakers made was “the saving of allied pilots’ lives which resulted from constant awareness and frequent foreknowledge of the enemy’s activities”.
Watkins was born in West Bromwich in the West Midlands. Her father, Alfred Davies, worked for the British Legion, and her mother, Harriet (also nee Davies), was a housewife.
After a family move to Bournemouth, she went to Talbot Heath school, where one of her teachers insisted she learn a fresh poem every week. “Soon I found that I could repeat hundreds of poems and hymns, as well as long speeches from Shakespeare,” she recalled. She also showed a natural affinity with the German language, reaching a high standard very quickly, reading Goethe and Schiller extensively, learning Schumann’s Dichterliebe by heart and consigning a large repertoire of German songs to memory.
She was 20 when she went to Bletchley Park. She recalled that as a result of the tight security around the centre, she was told to report to the RAF signals base at Chicksands Priory in Bedfordshire, unaware of her real destination. On arrival at Chicksands, she was surprised to be told that she would not be working there. “The sergeant asked a driver, ‘Are you going to blindfold her, or take her in the covered van?’,” she recalled. It was not, as she initially imagined, a joke. “I sat in the back of the van, separated from the driver by a sheet of hardboard and with the windows blacked out.”
When they eventually got to Bletchley Park, she showed her papers to the guard on the gate, who tried to turn her away. “I was by this time hungry, thirsty and very annoyed. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.’ ‘[You’ve] come to the right place, then,’ said the guard, ‘most of them here look as if they don’t know where they are, and God knows what they’re doing.’”
While at Bletchley Gwen fell in love with one of her colleagues, the Welsh poet Vernon Watkins, and they were married in 1944.
After the war they moved to a bungalow on the cliffs of the Gower peninsula where Vernon had been raised, and where they were regularly visited by TS Eliot, Philip Larkin and Dylan Thomas. Thomas was supposed to have been best man at their wedding but failed to turn up.
Vernon worked at Lloyds Bank in Swansea by day and wrote poetry at night, and over the next 20 years the couple had five children. It was an idyllic life; one that was captured in a 1966 BBC documentary, Under a Bright Heaven.
In 1964 Vernon took up a visiting professorship in poetry at the University of Washington in Seattle. But in 1967, at a time when he was being cited as a potential poet laureate, he died of a heart attack while playing tennis.
Such was Gwen’s knowledge of poetry that she was able to take over his teaching duties for the remainder of the Washington university term. But she then returned to the UK, where she took a degree course in English literature at the University of Reading and moved back to the Gower.
Subsequently she wrote a number of books on literary figures, including Portrait of a Friend (1983), which examined Vernon’s collaborations with Thomas, and Dickens in Search of Himself (1987), which looked at the recurrent psychological themes in his novels. She was also co-author, with Ruth Pryor and Gordon Claridge, of Sounds from the Bell Jar – Ten Psychotic Authors (1990), an exploration of the association between creativity and psychosis viewed through the works of writers such as Margery Kempe, Thomas Hoccleve, Virginia Woolf, Antonia White and Sylvia Plath.
Watkins had met Pryor, an Englishwoman and lecturer in old English, at the University of Washington. Not long after Vernon’s death they began a long friendship and working collaboration that led to the posthumous publication of some of Vernon’s poetry, including Elegy for the Latest Dead (1977).
In 2006 Watkins published Cracking the Luftwaffe Codes: The Secrets of Bletchley Park. “To work in Bletchley Park had been an unforgettable experience,” she wrote. “Words cannot express the combined brilliance. Perhaps if all its personnel had been kept together after the war to consider the problems of world peace and universal prosperity, they might have cracked those problems too.”
She is survived by three sons, Gareth, Dylan and Conrad. Another son, Tristran, died in 1992, and a daughter, Rhiannon, 10 days before her.
• Gwendoline Mary Watkins, codebreaker and author, born 31 December 1923; died 14 January 2025
