"Gwen Watkins, who has died aged 101, brought her talents to bear on the efforts to crack Luftwaffe codes at Bletchley Park, about which she published a memoir in 2006; but for much of her life she was known as the wife and soulmate of the acclaimed Welsh poet Vernon Watkins, whom she had met at Bletchley, and one of the last links with the circle of talent which blossomed in 1930s Swansea around Watkins, his fellow poet Dylan Thomas, the painter Fred Janes and the composer Dan Jones. Gwendoline Mary Davies was born on New Year’s Eve 1923 in West Bromwich, Staffordshire, to Alfred Davies, a “relieving [i.e. social welfare] officer” with the British Legion, and his wife Harriet, who had worked in a shop. She learnt to read when she was three and, after the family moved to Bournemouth, won a scholarship to Talbot Heath, a private girls’ boarding school in the resort town. She was not long out of school when she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in 1941. The following year, bored with filing work in Gloucester, she applied for a new posting: “One of my qualifications,” she told an interviewer in 1999, “was that I could not only speak and read German, I could read the old German schrift [writing]. In those days all the code books were printed in schrift. The handwriting, which was much more ornate, was even more difficult to read. But I had been trained by an old girl at Talbot Heath.” Gwen Watkins, codebreaker who met her husband, Welsh poet Vernon Watkins, at Bletchley Park
