The work of the codebreakers at Bletchley Park during the Second World War was kept top secret by the Government for many years afterwards. While people may know the story of Alan Turing - who now proudly sits on the £50 note - not so many will know Joan Murray, who also helped break the Nazi Enigma code and lived in Oxford in her later years.
Joan Murray, née Clarke, was cryptanalyst and numismatist whose role in the Enigma project at Bletchley Park helped to shorten the war and save millions of lives. However, the sexism of the time and the long-time secrecy of the project mean her contributions and accomplishments will never be fully recognised.
Murray was born in West Norwood in London on June 24 1917. She was the youngest daughter of William Kemp Lowther Clarke, an Anglican clergyman, and his wife Dorothy.
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In 1936, she won a scholarship to attend Newnham College, Cambridge where she gained a double first degree in mathematics and was a Wrangler. A Wrangler is a student at Cambridge who gains first-class honours in the final year of the university's degree in mathematics
However, due to the fact that Murray was a women she was denied a full degree, as until 1948 Cambridge awarded these only to men.
In 1940, while still a student, she was recruited by Gordon Welchman for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. Welchman was one of the top mathematicians who were recruited the previous year to set up decoding operations at in Bletchley.
The work at Bletchley Park was concerned with cracking the Germany Enigma machine, which they used to encrypt their messages. The machine had an electromechanical rotor mechanism that scrambled the 26 letters of the alphabet into billions of combinations. Alongside this, the German’s changed the settings everyday for the machine. This meant that the chance of being able to decipher a message sent by the Enigma machine was around 150,000,000,000,000 to one.
The German’s believed their machine was unbreakable so did much of the rest of the world. The team at Bletchley Park, however, sought to break it, decode the messages and thereby intercept attacks U-Boat attacks on British ships in the Atlantic.
When Murray began her work at Bletchley in 1940 she joined a group of women called ‘The Girls’ who were involved in doing clerical and administrative work.
She quickly became the only female practitioner of Banburismus, a cryptanalytic process developed by Alan Turing and named after the long sheets of paper which were made in Banbury.
Murray’s first promotion was to Linguist Grade, even though she did not speak another language, this promotion allowed her to earn extra money and acknowledged her workload and contributions to the team at Bletchley.
During their time at Bletchley Park, Murray and Turing were engaged but they eventually separated due to Turing’s homosexuality. Murray remained with Turing for the rest of his life.
In 1941, breakthroughs came when trawlers were captured along with their cipher equipment and codes. Before this information was obtained the Wolf Packs (a term used to describe the mass attack tactics used against convoys by German U-boats), had sunk 282,000 tons of shipping a month. The work undertook by Murray and the team at Bletchley Park saw the figure dropped to 120,000 tons a month and then 62,000 tons.
She became deputy head of Hut 8 in 1944, however, Murray struggled to be promoted further after this due to the fact she was a woman.
The work that was undertaken at Bletchley Park during the war is estimated to have shortened World War II by two years and saved the lives of 14 million people.
For her work during the war Murray was appointed MBE in 1947.
After the war she worked at GCHQ until her marriage in 1952 to Lt Col Jock Murray, a retired army officer and colleague.
Murray returned to work at GCHQ in the 1960s and remained there until she retired in 1977, aged 60.
It was not until the 1970s that details of the codebreakers work became known to the wider public and people realised what was achieved at Bletchley Park.
After her husbands death, Murray moved to Headington, Oxford where she lived for the rest of her life.
In 2019, a blue plaque was enshrined on her house in Larkfields, Headington Quarry.
You can read more about the plaque here>>>
At the ceremony at the time, Robert Evans, chairman of Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board, said: “A lot of what happened [at Bletchley] will remain secret, and that’s part of the fascination about its history.
“I wonder whether she chose this residence precisely because it was rather private and quiet, and she wasn’t keen on making any sort of public impression in terms of her career.”
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