Patricia Bartley facts for kids

Patricia Marjorie Bartley, also known as Mrs. Brown, was a British codebreaker during World War II. She was born on May 1, 1917, in Dacca, British India, and passed away on February 26, 2021, in Ely, Cambridgeshire. She worked at Bletchley Park, a secret center where codes were broken, and was also part of British intelligence in Mayfair, London. One of her most important achievements was helping to break the German diplomatic code called Floradora. She even led a team that worked on this difficult task.

Early Life and Education

Patricia Bartley was the oldest of four children. Her father, Sir Charles Bartley, was a judge and worked for the government in Bengal. When she was 10, Patricia went to a boarding school in England, but she didn't enjoy it much. Later, her mother and siblings moved to France, and Patricia joined them in Saint-Jacut-de-la-Mer. Living there helped her become very good at speaking German and French. After some time, her family settled in Buckinghamshire, England.

In 1936, Patricia began studying at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University. She was studying philosophy, politics and economics. However, she had to leave after two years because she became ill. When World War II began, she was recruited by a famous codebreaker named Emily Anderson. Patricia's brother, Tony Bartley, joined the Royal Air Force. He became a skilled pilot and was later married to the actress Deborah Kerr, who was also Patricia's flatmate for a while in London.

Breaking Secret Codes

Patricia Bartley first worked on secret codes used by the Italian military and navy. She was very sharp and once noticed that an Italian operator had accidentally sent the secret keys for the next month's messages instead of the message itself! This was a big help.

In the summer of 1941, she was given a new, very challenging assignment: to work on the German diplomatic code, known to the British as "Floradora." People thought this code was impossible to break. Patricia started working on it by herself in Nigel de Grey's office.

The Floradora Code Challenge

By the autumn of 1941, Patricia's team grew to four people. They moved to the Diplomatic Section at Elmers School. By the spring of 1942, a photo shows 12 people working in the section. That spring, the Diplomatic Section moved again, this time to new offices in Berkeley Street in London.

The team had copies of the German diplomatic codebook. This book contained 100,000 different number groups. These copies were found in different ways: one was taken from the German Consulate in Iceland in 1940, another was possibly stolen from a German spy's luggage in the Panama Canal, and a third was found in Asia under mysterious circumstances.

The real difficulty was how these codebooks were made secret. The Germans used a special table that was 10,000 lines long. This made for 25,000,000 different ways to hide each code group! To make it even harder, they didn't use just one line from the table. They combined two different lines, and these two lines changed every two days. The Germans started using this system after World War I because the British had successfully broken their codes before. This new system was thought to be unbreakable.

Patricia's Key Insight

Patricia Bartley made a very important discovery. She realized that the second half of the secret table (the last 5,000 lines) was like a mirror image or "reciprocal" of the first half. This made the table much easier to use and also easier to break into. Another codebreaker, Nigel de Grey, had the same idea independently.

The British also had the first fifty lines of the secret table. These lines were captured from the German consulate in Reykjavik before they could be completely burned. This, combined with a lazy German code clerk in Buenos Aires who always used lines from the part the British already had, meant that the first simple messages were finally decoded in August 1942. This was about 14 months after Patricia started working on the code.

By this time, 36 people were working for Patricia in the German diplomatic section. Among them were Dorothy Hyson, an American film actress, and Ernst Fetterlein, who had been the top codebreaker for the Russian Tsar before 1917.

American Collaboration

Even with these early successes, breaking more of the code needed huge computing power. The Americans had many large calculating machines called IBM/Hollerith punch card machines. They were the ones who finally put together the complete secret table. This was finished on February 15, 1943.

Patricia Bartley was in charge of working with the Americans on intelligence matters. The Americans often preferred to work with her than with other British intelligence officers. They were thankful for her ideas about the Floradora code and for her ability to spot mistakes made by the Germans.

An American intelligence officer, William Friedman, wrote in his diary that Patricia had accidentally found out about the "reciprocal nature" of the German codebook. This was then proven by another member at Bletchley Park, De Grey.

In the summer of 1943, Patricia became very tired from overwork and had a breakdown. William Filby took over her role as head of the German Diplomatic Section. After the war, she rejoined GCCS (Government Code and Cypher School). There, she wrote two official histories about the work she had been involved in. These histories are still secret under the Official Secrets Act.

In 1951, instead of moving with GCHQ (the new name for GCCS) to Cheltenham, she moved to a public part of the Foreign Office. She might have worked in a section called the Information Research Department. During this time, she met Denys Brown, and they got married in 1954.

Later Life and Family

Patricia Bartley joined her husband, Denys Brown, when he was sent to the Suez Canal as a diplomat. During the Suez Crisis in 1956, when Israel invaded the canal area, they had to quickly leave. Denys Brown was later posted to Yugoslavia, Sweden, and West Germany. Patricia found that being a diplomat's wife was a full-time job, which meant she had less time for her own intellectual interests.

However, she did write two chapters for a history of the GCHQ, describing her section's work. She also wrote newspaper reviews about books related to codebreaking.

The Browns had two children, Andrew, who became a writer, and Iona. After Denys Brown retired, he and Patricia Bartley lived in Godalming, Surrey. Denys Brown passed away in 1997. Patricia Bartley later moved to Saffron Walden and then to Ely. She died on February 26, 2021, at the age of 103.