Rozanne Colchester (née Medhurst)
Bletchley Park 1942 – 1945. Italian and Japanese Air Sections.
In 1942 I was 19 and waiting to be called up by the WAAF. I had heard of Bletchley
Park from my father, who was then Air Vice Marshal Medhurst RAF, Head of RAF
Intelligence at the Air Ministry. I had no idea where Bletchley Park was until the day I
arrived.
I was delivered to my billet at mid-day. The owners were Bert and Molly Dickens, who
had two boys, Richard 3 and Tom 9. They lived in a council house and there I too was
to live for the next three years. We all became lifelong friends. Bert drove a lorry
everyday from London and Molly was a farmer’s daughter and a housewife. They were
so kind to me, and never seemed to mind that their home had been invaded by me!
Then my father drove me from my billet with the Dickens family to Bletchley Park. My
reason for being accepted by BP was because I spoke Italian, so I was put into the RAF
section (deadly, like the Italian Air Forces). I became a de-coder, and I did this job for
the next 3 years. It was hard work. We worked in ‘shifts’, 8.30 - 12, then till 6pm, 4 –
midnight, midnight till 8am.
Transport to and from the Park, day and night, was organised by a man known then as
Mr Simpson. Dozens of busses would appear before each of the three shifts began,
drop and pick up their human load, and disappear in a roar of noise and glimmer of
partially blacked-out headlights. These noisy phantoms of the night (and day) would
then drive away and vanish until the time of the next shift (I was not part of this as
every day or night I always came from Fenny Stratford on my scarlet-painted bicycle). In
the night, the appearance of the busses would be followed by the patter of thousands
of footsteps as the workers made their way to their huts, invisible in the dark, save for
patches of torchlight in the otherwise total ‘black-out’. For me this remains a prominent
memory when anyone says “Bletchley Parkâ€. I have
