Kay's secret war helped break Hitler's codes.

Mrs Kay Staddon was a member of the War Office Y Group, which was the "ears" for the now-famous Station X at Bletchley Park.

“We couldn’t even tell our own mothers what we were doing. My mother thought there was something very funny about a job you couldn’t tell your mother about,” she was to recall.

And for many years whenever she was asked what she had done during the war, she simply said she had served in the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service).

But when the shackles of the Official Secrets Act were finally removed, she spoke to a variety of local groups about her experiences with a talk titled One Woman’s War – Enigma and All That.

Mrs Staddon, who had formerly lived at Trimpley Court in Ellesmere, died at the Woodland Residential Home at Morda, near Oswestry, on January 12. The funeral is at St Mary's Church, Ellesmere, at 11am on February 10.

Kay Metcalfe, as she was before marriage, hailed from Fife, Scotland, and was destined to become a nurse in the family tradition, but instead answered her country’s call and joined the ATS at the age of 18.

Trained as a teleprinter operator, she was sent to the War Office.

“It was not until years afterwards that it dawned on me that where we were under Whitehall was all part of Churchill’s wartime bunker," she recalled in a 2000 interview.

“After I had been there some time three girls were killed by a bomb near Chatham, the first ATS casualties in the war. They were teleprinter operators. They asked for three volunteers to replace them – and stressed they must be volunteers. It was hush-hush and we had to be cleared by MI5 and sign the Official Secrets Act.

“I put my hand up, and that’s how I joined the Y Service which nobody had ever heard of and of which we were not allowed to speak.

“The Y Service were the people who were intercepting the messages that emanated from Nazi Germany in five-letter code. We were the unknown other half of Bletchley Park. We were the people who provided them with the stuff to decode.”

It was at Chatham that she met her future husband Fred Staddon.

“It was far too dangerous for us to stay at Hellfire Corner, as it was known, and we were evacuated to Chicksands Priory in Bedfordshire, where we stayed for about eight months, and then were told the ‘promised land’ was ready for us, and found ourselves in Beaumanor Park.

“They talk about Bletchley Park being the war’s best-kept secret. But it was not. Beaumanor Park was.

“The intercepted Morse Code messages from Nazi Germany would be rushed to us in our teleprinter room and we would have to teleprint them to Bletchley Park – Station X. We were never allowed to mention the words Bletchley Park.

“They came in five-letter blocks. Our transmission had to be absolutely accurate, otherwise we would throw everything out of gear. If it had a red cross on, it was priority. If there was a double red cross, it was top priority.”

The base at Beaumanor Park in Leicestershire grew to a huge operation.

So secret was its role in listening in to the orders and messages being transmitted by Hitler’s Germany that clever disguises were used for the buildings in the hall’s grounds.

“For the teleprinter operators they built us a cricket pavilion complete with verandah and railings and a tiny clock tower on top, and that was our teleprinter room."

And the canteen was made to look like a greenhouse.

Her own part was to type in the unintelligible jumble of letters which comprised the German messages so that the Bletchley Park codebreakers could get to work.

The staff knew the importance of their work, but had to keep their mouths tightly shut.

“We have since been told that what we all did shortened the war from anything from one to two years. That was music to our ears.

“Sometimes, of course, it was dead boring. Perhaps it might be a bit slack. At other times we would be working our socks off.”

Fred was working in the compilation, records and reports unit, which extracted intelligence details.

Of course, Mrs Staddon had no idea what the coded messages said, but occasionally at times of great pressure a message might be sent uncoded.

“The one we all enjoyed at the end of the war was the one that came through in plain language which said ‘Der Fuhrer ist kaput’. We all cheered.”

After the war, the gag on speaking about her wartime work was no hardship for her and her husband.

“You just closed it off. All most of us wanted to do was get back to normality after five years of shortages, blackouts and service life.”