Topic summary
Mavis Lever
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Mavis Batey.
Codebreaking
Mavis Lever (as she was then) was recruited to work for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). At first, she was employed by the London section to check the personal columns of The Times for coded spy messages. In May 1940, aged 19 and untrained in cryptography, she was recruited to work as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park. She worked as an assistant to Dilly Knox, a classical scholar and papyrologist from King's College, Cambridge, an eccentric who, in 1920, forgot to invite two of his brothers to his wedding. Knox had an innocent preference for recruiting women and his group was sometimes referred to as "Knox and his girls" or even "Dilly and his fillies".