A group of codebreakers who helped to defeat Hitler were reunited at Bletchley Park yesterday with one saying that it was not right to call them heroes.
More than 100 gathered at the Buckinghamshire site where the German Enigma cipher was cracked. They met on the 78th anniversary of Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of war.
Arthur Maddocks, 95, remembered being given lines of code by “clever boys next door” that would then be fed through a machine. “If it had been worked out correctly, out would come a stream of beautiful clear German text,” he said. “It was absolutely sensational, a revelation. I thought to myself, ‘the war’s over, the Germans can’t possibly win’.”
Mr Maddocks added: “It’s rather an exaggeration to be called heroes. The