Ruth Bourne, Jewish veteran of Bletchley Park who worked on Turing’s Bombe machines

Ruth Bourne, who has died aged 99, was one of the last remaining veterans of Bletchley Park and its outstations, where she operated Alan Turing’s giant Bombe machines.

Recruited straight from school into military service when the Allies were gearing up for the liberation of Western Europe in 1944, Ruth joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service aged 17, hopeful that she might meet a sailor.  

After basic training she was told: “You are going to P5. You are doing SDX. That is Special Duties X.” HMS Pembroke V was in fact the naval term for Bletchley Park, by 1944 a code-breaking factory which prioritised the classier voluntary recruits available in the Wrens. At her induction Ruth recalled being warned of anti-social hours, no prospect of promotion, and an oath of secrecy which, if broken, would result in prison “at the very least”.

Dispatched first to the outstation at Eastcote, and then at Stanmore, which between them housed nearly all of Britain’s 211 Bombe machines, Ruth joined an operation at its zenith. Bombe machines were enormous electronic testing devices with 100 rotating drums, 12 miles of wire and 1 million soldered connections. Hoping for a “stop” that would reveal the setting of the Enigma key for that day, Ruth was one of 1,676 Wrens who helped to harvest thousands of enemy messages daily from the Bombes.

Shift work took its toll. Ruth recalled a mercy visit from her “good Jewish mother with half a cooked chicken”, as well as the highs of adrenalin: “I knew we were cracking codes.” By the end of the war she had been selected for overseas work in Ceylon. “The day the atomic bomb dropped I was in the queue for jabs.”

Plans were abruptly halted, and instead Ruth spent the summer of 1945 unsoldering and dismantling the Bombe machines she would not see again for 60 years.

The elder of two sisters, she was born Ruth June Henry on June 2 1926 in Salford, to Dr Isaac Henry, formerly Isaacson, and Sarah née Pollecoff. The family later moved to Birmingham, where her father ran several GP practices.

Of Jewish descent on both sides of the family, with grandparents who had emigrated from Russia to Dublin and Liverpool in the late-19th century, a girl growing up in the 1930s Ruth was well versed in the horrors of Nazism long before it became common knowledge in Britain. “When I was nine or 10 I found The Brown Book of Hitler Terror in my father’s library, and I remember articles in the Jewish Chronicle,” she recalled.

Steeled for the worst, Ruth and her sister were evacuated to live with their grandparents in Colwyn Bay, the same year their father had a stroke (he never regained full health) and the family home in Birmingham was bombed and ransacked.

Boarding school on the Welsh coast equipped her well for barracks life. Ruth sacrificed her ambitions of reading languages at university, instead swapping a school uniform for the Wren’s navy blue.

In December 1946 she married Stephen Bentall (formerly Blumental), a Czech airman who had served in the RAF, and they had two sons. She ran a laundrette in north London, observing: “There I was sitting in front of 12 machines with the drums going around – it literally was a home from home.”

Intelligent and artistic, Ruth keenly felt the absence of a university education, and in the 1960s retrained as a special needs teacher and became an accredited member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.

When the codebreaking secrets were released in the 1970s, she was delighted to tell her husband about what she had done in the war. “He was very high up in the civil service so he knew lots of industrial secrets,” she recalled. “So I thought, well, I’ve got some secrets. My turn. ” To which he replied: “That’s nice, dear. What’s for tea?”

It was only much later, in the 1990s, that women were formally recognised for their service within the code-breaking operation, and by the 2000s they were finally given their time in the sun. This proved a transformative experience for Ruth, who called it her “resurrection”, and regularly returned to Bletchley to give vivid demonstr​atio​ns of how to plug up and operate a Bombe machine, including for the late Queen and Duke of Edinburgh.

In 2018 she was appointed to the Legion d’honneur.

As a gifted raconteur she became a valued contributor to radio and TV documentaries, books and literary festivals. “I have always been a show off,” she joked, but it was her empathy and acuity that made her stand out.

Life had not always been easy; particularly devastating was the loss of her son David, a Cambridge graduate, who died in a road accident in 1978. The experience informed Ruth’s capacity to reach others in their pain. Speaking in her 100th year, she explained that her war hero was Alan Turing, who “fought for our freedom only to discover he was not free”.

On Radio 4 in 2024 she observed: “Apart from Boudicea I never learnt about a war run by a woman…its always been men hasn’t it? It must be a genetic mistake somewhere… as you can see I am not a masculinist!”

Ruth took the surname Bourne when she and her husband separated. He predeceased her, and she is survived by her elder son John.

Ruth Bourne, born June 2 1926, died December 17 2025​

[Source: Daily Telegraph]