Crypto secrecy
I was looking through the TYPEX booklet again, there is a picture of a room full of TYPEX machine. We have all read about the strict secrecy about Bletchley Park and anything to do with 'Crypto'.
Did the operators know the name of the TYPEX machine or was that secret?
I wondered if when the Bletchley Park secret started to become known, might some of these TYPEX operators think they had been decoding ENIGMA traffic?
I have a book by a lady from Inverness, her family had many close links to the Cameron Highlanders so she seems to have joined the ATS though they writes that she joined the Camerons.
She initially was doing mundane work assisting a man planning pillboxes in the North of Scotland so asked for a transfer to something more active. She was sent to the War Office and appears to have worked in a COMCENTRE decoding incoming signals from British forces. They were told to not wear any badges but being a rebellious sort, she always wore her Cameron skirt - she did think that knowledge of a girl from Camerons working in London would be of any use to the enemy.
She said the signals often got garbled in transmission so some nights she worked at a position where they tried to decode these signals using a 'Cheat List' of letters often confused (presumably in Morse). She enjoyed this because she liked crosswords.
One morning, the other girls said what an exciting night it had been. She had no idea what they meant because she had been so engrossed in her own work - it was D-Day and they had been receiving lots of signals from the Normandy landings.
Intriguingly, at one point during the night she thought she heard bagpipes but it down the ventilation system in their room but in the following days she found she heard bagpipes at the time that Lord Lovat (who she knew) went ashore with his piper.
Easily brushed aside but there are lots of stories of people from the Western Isles (like her family) having 'Second Sight'.