God, I love these kind of memories! "A wartime codebreaker has revealed she and her co-workers at Bletchley Park dried their bras and knickers on Hitler's Enigma machine during night shifts at the cypher school. Elizabeth 'Betty' Balfour, 88, joined the Wrens when she was 17 and was handpicked to work on the top secret team under code genius Alan Turing. She said women at the chilly school would dry their damp underpants on the huge computers linked to the seized Enigma machine as they were the only source of heat at night. Her saucy secret comes days before the November 14 general release of the Imitation Game film, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing. Mrs Balfour said: 'One thing I remember was that during night shifts the Enigma machine was the only warm thing about, so we used to wash our smalls and hang them around it to dry. 'It used to be festooned with bras and pants all through our night duty. Back then it must have looked a real sight.' Her father had to give his permission for her join the Wrens in 1944 because she was under 18. She spent six weeks training in London before being assigned to 'Special Duties X' and posted to the secret facility near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. She spent up to 10 hours a day sifting through reams of code and said they were never told where their work had actually succeeded. The women were even forbidden from talking to each other about their individuals parts of the puzzle. Mrs Balfour said: 'We were given long strips of paper tape made by the Enigma machine and told to divide everything into fives. 'We used to get codes for the day, one I can remember is YO-SE-RO, a Japanese code for man. There were so many of them I can't remember, but I've always remembered that one. 'None of us knew everything that we were working on. We each knew a bit, our own part of the puzzle, so if you were caught, you couldn't tell them everything, even if they tortured you. 'We were told never to discuss with anyone else what we were doing. 'We never knew anything. We never knew what we had done, or if we had helped to actually crack the codes. 'I never even told my parents because we signed the Official Secrets Act, so they died without ever finding out what I was doing.'" http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2831806/Wartime-codebreaker-tells-workers-Bletchley-Park-used-dry-damp-bras-pants-Enigma-machine.html#ixzz3IuP3VELg
