Helene Aldwinckle

Helene Aldwinckle (née Helene Lovie Taylor) (26 October 1920 – 24 April 2020), was a Bletchley Park codebreaker during the Second World War.

Early life and family[]

Helene Lovie Taylor was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1920, to Alexander and Helen Taylor (née Trail).^[1] Her father was a salesman. She grew up in Footdee, and attended Ashley Road Primary School^[2] then Aberdeen Academy, and eventually won a scholarship to study French and English at the University of Aberdeen.^[1] Taylor married John Aldwinckle, an RAF flight lieutenant, in February 1945. They had four children: Richard, Linda, Pamela, and Lady Diana Browne. John Aldwinckle died in 2012.^[1]

Career[]

Helene joined Bletchley Park after completing a three year degree at Aberdeen University. She was recommended by Aberdeen University Principal William Hamilton Fyfe^[3][4] to the Foreign Office, in part because of her extraordinary memory and interest in languages.^[1][5] After two rounds of interviews with the Foreign Office in London and Aberdeen, Helene was selected by senior codebreaker Stuart Milner-Barry to become a permanent Foreign Office Civil Servant and was sent to live at Bletchley Park in the summer of 1942.^[3][5][6] During the first round of interviews, Aldwinckle was not aware of what she was being interviewed for, believing it to be a general civil service role.^[4]

Helene was initially based in Registration Room 1 (RR1), where she worked on encrypted signals.^[3] She became responsible for leading a training programme for American service personnel in 1943.^[3][7][6][4] When the programme was complete, Helene went to work in Quiet Room (QR) in Hut 6, the section of Bletchley Park tasked with deciphering Enigma codes.^[3][5][6] There she brought the knowledge and skills she developed training American personnel to longer term and more complicated encryption problems, including identifying Enigma radio networks and radio signals.^[3][5][6] After the Second World War ended, Helene stayed for a short time at Bletchley Park to help write the history of the work of Hut 6 but she had to leave the Foreign Office in 1945 due to a policy that said women could not stay employed after marriage.^[3][5]

Aldwinckle lived in Cologne and Berlin, accompanying her husband John in his role at MI6, moving initially in the 1950s.^[1] She worked for both the British Forces Network and Westdeutscher Rundfunk as a cultural events reporter.^[1] She continued her interest in amateur dramatics (having been involved in her youth in Aberdeen)^[4] joining the Berlin Amateur Dramatic Society.^[1] She accompanied John on subsequent postings to France, Germany and Britain, and they also lived in Rome, Brussels, and Mons.^[1]

Aldwinckle had a varied career post-Bletchley, becoming a translator for Thames and Hudson in 1967; and a gallerist at the Medici Gallery at the age of 54.^[1] She later worked at the Oxford Gallery, and in 1979 became the manager of the Medici.^[1]

Honours[]

Aldwinckle was awarded the Legion d’Honneur in 2019.^[7][5][1][6] Theresa May thanked her, in May's final Prime Minister's Questions. ^[1]

References[]