 I'm Jamie McCall. I'm from PLB. I'm delighted Rebecca and the His Fest team have invited us again to be involved in this amazing festival and to sponsor this event, Army Girls and the Women that Went to War. PLB is a creative heritage consultancy. We design and deliver interpretation to engage and enthuse visitors with our shared history. We work with museums, galleries and historic houses and we're currently working at Bamberg Castle in Northumberland, Chatsworth House in the Dalbyshire Dales and the real star of Bridgeton which is number one Royal Crescent in Bath. We're particularly proud to be able to sponsor this and to introduce our speakers here as we've recently worked with Bletchley Park and we delivered their award-winning immersive experience which was called D-Day in Northumberland. D-Day Interception Intelligence Invasion in the Original Teleprinter Hall, telling the human story of the amazing work that took place there. So I would like to introduce you to our speakers Dr Tessa Dunlop, Duncan Barrett and virtually to Betty Webb MBE. So if I can tell you a little bit about them, Tessa is a historian and a broadcaster who has written three oral history books, The Best Seller, Bletchley Girls, Sunday Times Best Seller, Century Girls and most recently to commemorate the 80th anniversary of conscription for women, Army Girls. Along the way she's become something of a specialist in extreme old age and the Queen and she's who is actually younger than all of the women in the Army Girls. Duncan is a writer and an editor specialising in biography and memoir. He grew up in London and studied English at Jesus College in Cambridge. In 2010 he edited the first World War memoirs of the pacifist Saboteur Ronald Scurth published as The Reluctant Tommy. He is co-author of a trio of Sunday Times top 10 best sellers, The Sugar Girls which was ranked second in the history best sellers of 2012, GI Brides which was also a New York Times best seller in America and The Girls who went to war. And last but not least, Betty. So Betty was born on the 13th of May 1923. She was born in a remote village in Shropshire and a family moved to another remote village near Ludlow in 1926. She was brought up in a household with no car and no telephone and she was home schooled. But in 1937 she went to Germany on an exchange visit with a German family who were very concerned about the impending Nazi regime. She went on to join the ATS in 1941 and was posted to Bletchley Park, the Government Code and Cipher School, where she signed the Official Secrets Act which actually meant her parents didn't know where she was or what she was doing. And sadly they both died before she was at liberty to tell them. Betty still gives talks about Bletchley Park and its function and her biography Secret Postings by Charlotte Webb gives her life story in the much more detail and is available from all good bookstores. So now I'll pass you over and we look forward to hearing what you have to say. Thank you. I'm just amazed, Tessa, that you managed to get Zoom working for these things. I mean I've spent the last ten years interviewing very elderly women but I've never dared to try to do it with technology involved. So we're just, you know, a lot of the time when I talk about Bletchley Park I sort of say, well, the women most of them weren't actually really code breaking. Here we have a genuine 21st century or 99 next month code breaker. How many here have a grandmother or some kind of person who could begin to do this under pressure? Betty, just tell us, it was taken an hour and the wonderful thing about you, Betty, is you never give up. How did you suddenly finally appear on the screen? What was the secret? What do you mean this morning? Yes, this morning. Well, I don't know, it was very frustrating. I think I ought to go back and have some lessons. Can I just tell you, as I left the top box we'd given up. Ten minutes, the interview is starting, Rebecca, I mean, who's normally pretty chilled, a gauwz of perspiration on her forehead. And I was like, what can we do? Now the wonderful thing is, Betty, you're a great member of so many different organisations and the most reliable is the WRAC Association, the Women's, what is it? The Women's, Royal Army, Calls. Army Association. So I ring up Babs, who's 15 minutes away from you, and I think she fought in Northern Ireland, served in the gulf. I'm like, Babs, are you in active service? Well, I'm 15 minutes away. She had got in her car, Betty, and was about to hot foot it to you with her smartphone, and I called her off. We called off the paratrooper because Betty managed to manage it on her own. Anyway. I would like to add here that Babs was somebody I enlisted into the army in the 1960s. After Betty's stint in the Second World War, you went back into the Territorial Army, didn't you? And you fought for equal pay. Tell us a bit about that. Well, I don't know about the equal pay. I can't remember the figures, but I know I wrote a very strong letter to the War Office about the fact that I was doing exactly the same job as my male counterpart, and they were getting more money than I was. I didn't like it very much. Anyway, Duncan was the inspiration with Sugar Girls. I don't know if you can see us. Can you actually see us, Betty? We can see you. Can you see us? Yes, I can see you. OK, because we've got this very young, new-bile writer, Duncan. He's a bit of a stunner. The reason I ever met Betty was the first book I wrote with Gletcher to Girls, and then she's also in my last one. But it was because Duncan wrote such a successful oral history book called Sugar Girls, which is why we've always had to have this blasted word girls in our books. It's your fault. Sorry. I didn't even... That book was called Sugar and Spice when I wrote it, but the publishers said it had to have the word girls in it. Yeah, because we've got a very progressive history festival here. It's amazing we've been allowed in. Yeah, yeah. I wonder, Duncan, Betty, when I chat to you and Betty even told me, you know, we talked about the secrets of Bletchley Park, and finally you talked about the difficulties having your period. I don't know. You talked about the secrets of Bletchley Park, and finally you talked about the difficulties having your periods in the army, didn't you? In my last book you shared with me the terrible problems you had put on a charge because you had such bad period pains. Do you remember you told me that? Yes, I did. Yes, yes. That was a bit of a one-off, but it just showed how difficult things could be. Because the people outside Bletchley didn't understand that we couldn't talk about things, and it made it extremely difficult. It did, but the reason I was building to how Duncan manages, it's quite easy as women, I think. You sort of chat about all these inner workings, which the army was terrified of me, and all the manuals, his difficulty of putting women in uniform. What are we going to do if they menstruate and lose a day's work? I wonder how you negotiate that as an interviewer, Duncan, because it's a bit different. You've been interviewed by a man before, haven't you, Betty? Oh, yes. Do you tell them as many things? I'm sorry, could you burst the question again? It wasn't really one. I trailed off, because I wanted Duncan to pick up on it. I think Tessa's asking whether you find it difficult being interviewed by a man about these kind of questions. Not really, no. I would have done years ago, but I think one is a little bit more open these days. Duncan, do you find it difficult? Do I find it difficult? Yes. I have to say, because we were talking about this in the green room, I'm very fortunate that when I do these oral history books, I work with my partner, Nula, and we sort of strategically arranged them, so we have a kind of plan for the interview, what we're going to cover when. When I know a certain topic is coming up, we've done the wedding and we're getting on to the honeymoon, then I say, oh, I just need to go and make a phone call or I need to use the toilet or something, disappear for 20 minutes and then come back and she's done all of that side of things and I can find out when I get home and listen to the tape. Oh, really? That's interesting. It's quite strategic. We're less strategic, aren't we, Betty? I don't think I quite understand that side of it. Sorry. But also, there are the pitfalls of oral history. Betty's Cool is a Cucumber because you've written your own book and she never asks to check what I've written. People share things in their fitting room, tell you about their first wedding night or their indiscretions all the time they got put in a charge and then when they see it written in black and white, it's going to go out into the world, they suddenly change their mind and you're sort of a month away from publication. You're upset and your commercial publisher's losing his cool and it's quite a different response. You have to suddenly make alterations as a tension, if you like, between the subject you're writing on, the person you're writing on, the human, the most important part of the whole process and this commercial publisher. I wonder how you manage that bit. It's a bit of a grey area as well because I think some people sort of assume they have approval over what you write. Some people don't. The publishers don't even seem to have an answer to that. The books I tend to write, if I write substantially about anyone, if I write a couple of pages about someone, I don't worry about it too much. If I'm writing chapters and chapters about them, I would always show it to them partly because it's useful to... You'll find there are misunderstandings that creep in, you've kind of put two and two together and made five, so they'll pick up on those things but also because I don't like the idea of people picking up the book and being really unhappy about it but it does then mean that you've got that kind of negotiation to deal with and it varies. I mean with the Sugar Girls, for example, one of the women in that, we wrote all about kinds of elements of her life, sent it to her, she read it, she said, yeah, that's about right, that's fine, that'll do. Another one, we went round and she literally had the manuscript and almost every line had red pen on it and she said, right. We were there for about three hours going through it, waiting every last detail. I had that Betty with Ruth Bourne. Do you know Ruth Bourne, one of your famous fellow Bletchley veterans? Yes, I know Ruth. A bomb operator. She actually fully rewrote two pages of my book. Wow. It was to be fair. Was it better or worse? Who knows? OK, yeah. Actually, I couldn't manage, I found it a bit stressful so I handed her over to my publisher because I think that was... Sometimes a third party can help a bit. Yeah. Yeah, because it's often the way somebody interprets your life is... I wonder, Betty, you've been in a lot of books. Are there any that you've disagreed with or have you felt that you haven't enjoyed being represented in them? No, I've been very happy and very privileged to have been mentioned in a number of books along the line. And no, I don't have any criticism of what was said, no. I wonder if we may now go from Superstar Betty, which is basically what you've become. She was the cover girl, by the way, for National Geographic. I feel if you could be in the Ukraine working on their computer systems at the moment you would be, Betty. And here you are. We're going to come to Bletchley in your journey in a minute. But if we may just go to pre-war Germany... That was when I was in Germany, that photograph. Yeah, if you could talk us through... In 1937. Talk us through what was going on then. Well, in 1937 there was quite a movement towards the Nazi takeover and the family with whom I was living were very religious people and they were extremely worried even as far back as that. And there was a certain amount of food rationing even in 1937. I was too young to understand fully what was going on but it was clearly a very worrying time for them. I was always quite interested in that part of Betty's story where you had this very human relationship, friendship with a German family and then once the war starts, especially the way we've subsequently remembered the war and I'm reminded of this at the moment with the Ukraine-Russia conflict, you know, one side of the goodies and the other side of the baddies. It's never as simple as that on the ground actually. Those impacted are human beings. With relationships, you were aware of the tension, weren't you, in their family? Oh, very much so, yes. Particularly as the two girls whom you've just seen, they were aged I think 11 and 13, something like that. And every Sunday morning they had to attend a gathering which was called Eidemedels, Wundtdeutermedels and what went on there, I had no idea because they never spoke about it when they came home. But I suppose they were being indoctrinated into the Nazi thoughts. So Hitler Youth, I think, wasn't it? Hitler Youth, yes. It's interesting, when I was writing my book about the women's forces, one of the ATS women that I spoke to ended up in Hamburg after the war. So the women would serve. She was an Akhac girl originally. She was serving on the anti-aircraft guns in England and then after D-Day got sort of moved over to the continent and then after the war was over it was in a store's depot. They didn't need anti-aircraft guns obviously anymore because the war was finished. She had volunteered for anti-aircraft duty. She was very patriotic. She was very anti-German. Her husband had been killed during the war. She just loved the fact that she was involved in bringing these German planes out of the sky. But when she was in this depot, she was working with German civilian women and it was a real eye-opener for her having seen them as this sort of implacable enemy and she was working with this woman who she noticed had a wedding ring on her finger and she ended up asking her. They were talking in sort of broken, a combination of broken English and German, what her story was. And it turned out this woman had also lost her husband in the war and he'd been a pilot and had been shot down by the anti-aircraft guns over Britain. So for Jesse I think it was this real moment of kind of... It was a sort of epiphany I suppose in a way that she and this woman actually had had the same experience essentially on the two sides of the war and these people who she had thought of as this kind of totally monstrous, you know, black and white evil enemy. Actually here was someone who was kind of in the same situation she was. I wonder Betty about your feelings towards Germany during the war. You'd had this very personal relationship being welcomed by a family, looked after by them and then suddenly they're the enemy you're fighting. How did you manage that? I think to an extent I accepted it because I was so busy working that I didn't really have time to worry about it too much. Unfortunately we couldn't continue to communicate with the family. And sadly I lost track of them and wasn't able to get in touch with them after the war. That probably doesn't answer the question. Sorry to say again, Jess. No, but there aren't always black and white answers to the questions. And I wonder now at the moment with so much on our television screens with Ukraine and people talking about this old fashioned form of invasion Russia's doing to what extent it brings back any memories for you, any difficulties or what your response is really to what's going on at the moment. Emotionally is anything. Apart from being absolutely horrified and totally unable to do anything about it, it is, it sounds a little bit like history repeating itself on a much worse scale. Only of course we can't do what we did then I suppose, can we? Well at the moment no, but Betty, there's something about, I don't know for me, I always take great inspiration and I know that whenever I've spoken to all the women I've ever spoken to there is something hugely comforting about action of any sort on any level. And I think that's why so many of the women I've spoken to who'd served in the war it was about being part of something it removed that feeling of impotence which I think so many of us at the moment feel. I found myself doing a sort of sponsored marathon and I couldn't then get out of the bed for a week. I thought well it's because I couldn't join the ATS. Literally there wasn't some kind of equivalent I know you felt a bit the same, it's interesting. That was one of your great motivators for signing up wasn't it? You were at some cookery school and rather bored and thought to heck with this. That's absolutely right. The atmosphere at the time was similar I suppose to any pre-war thing and there were quite a lot of us and felt that we ought to be doing something more positive than domestic science which was perhaps a silly argument but that's how we came to leave the domestic science college and join up. I've joined the ATS, the others were in the WAF and the Wrens and so on. Now let's just if we may talk about the ATS because I know Duncan has thoughts on this. Why the ATS? It was seen really as the sort of scaffee service. It was the Cinderella service wasn't it Betty? Let's be honest. Yes it was and I applied to join the Wrens but there weren't any vacancies at the time. It was a question of backing out altogether or joining the ATS and of course I didn't know at that time anything about the conditions under which we would be trained which were pretty awful really. Very rough physical conditions and rather a rough crowd if I may say so but they did a good job so you know. Why worry about that? Sorry Betty. Having had a very sheltered life I found her for instance table manners some of them just horrified me. I told them so and which remark I think earned me a strike. Having got a strike I had to help the officers looking for nits and I'd never had a nits because something totally new to me was not a very pleasant experience I could tell you. I think for a lot of people though there was a real in the forces particularly in the ATS I guess because as you say it was the kind of broadest probably. The Wrens was the senior service the kind of generally where the poshest girls went I mean not exclusively but that was typically they had the designer uniforms which everyone wanted these kind of streamlined uniforms but in the ATS there was probably more of a mixture but a lot of people I spoke to said that it was a real revelation for them one woman said she said gosh this is like a revolution I'm sleeping in the same room as a parlor made and I'm practically an aristocrat people got to know people from other walks of life in ways that they wouldn't have done before. If I may interject there were I think something like 300 if not more but an awful lot of them were university members who had to postpone their course and they ended up with Bletchley. Yes but we know Bletchley which we'll come on to in a minute was another sort of form of rareification you got very cleverly skimmed off the top anyone that they thought had special services or uses an education of course most of your smart set could speak a continental language none of the cabinet at the outbreak of war could speak German but quite a lot of posh girls who'd gone on a sort of year a finishing year off to Munich could so I think yours wasn't quite some of the Bletchley girls I spoke to had sort of passed out in front of the queen and so forth and they had gone to Munich and sort of grandiose times with aristocrats yours was a more humble affair you were back in border actually your pen friend that you went to stay with you weren't quite as top draw as some of them were you betty it would be fair to say. Well no I don't consider myself top draw at all but it makes me very interesting because I spoke German but not sufficiently technical German to use it at Bletchley and I talk in those sort of slightly crude terms but actually when you broke down a lot of the ways especially in the early part of war before they got their testing up and running before they had recognised they had to embrace the idea of actually using women recruiting and then conscripting women they did use the class system as a form of recruitment that there's no two ways about it and that's why it was sort of a bit of a closed shop to an extent there ends it was also much smaller service so they could afford to be pickier the ATS was very big it had about 300,000 girls didn't it Betty by the end? Yes that's right yes and so before you get to Bletchley Park you have this uniform just talk us through the uniform Well it was khaki and consisted of a battledress top it was very rough material very uncomfortable in a way but on the other hand we were issued with everything we needed including your underwear? including the underwear which was quite something else I wish I kept some now to show you it was very well it was flat there was no pattern to it at all and the shoes of course were very sensible shoes and reasonably comfortable the stockings were awful very thick and horrible never mind it was enough to keep us warm and comfortable passion killers they were called? Yes they were but my mother rather liked them because she used them after the war when she was working with the animals that we had and they were khaki silk but they were all one size and you had to either put them up under your armpits or down below your knees either way they were quite amusing so again you didn't get you see in the Wrens they had black silk stockings and this was a source of controversy because some people felt this was a waste of money basically that they were giving them these fancy stockings and they were justifying it and his response which I think was not very helpful in the context of something we might come on to talk about which is public perceptions of the women in the services his response was well the Wrens liked the feel of them and so do my sailors kind of gives you an idea of some of the innuendo that surrounded the women's forces I don't know Betty whether you were familiar with any of that kind of gybing, that kind of teasing and sort of prejudices to some level about women in the forces that there were certain ideas around that a lot of men seemed to hold well I knew quite a lot of the Wrens it just so happened that a great friend of mine went into the Wrens and was with all the other Wrens at Wobyn Abbey and because I was friendly with one of them I often went to Wobyn Abbey with her for weekends and I got to know quite a lot of them I think because we were all doing the same job in different sections of course but doing the same job at Lesley we didn't feel uncomfortable in any way There was with the last book I did the Armigos book that I found that we remember things that we generally, unless it's deeply traumatic and we've put it somewhere and it's stark a lot of what we choose to remember and reflect on and relive are the happier, more positive experiences and it was only when I read people's letters, women's letters especially girls writing to their own peers less so to their parents although not this occasion he crept into letters back to parents that they would manage the advances of men and it was something that did preoccupy a lot of the girls that it was, oh gosh it was a nuisance last night I had to sort of, you know, because there was this terror of getting pregnant I mean you immediately disbanded, there was no form of contraception it was just an absolute no-go area and there was a huge for-raw in the public as well that the ATS was the wrong sort of girl and there was the Markham Inquiry which actually sent Parliamentary Committee to investigate the services and the way they proved that service girls were the right sort was they did a tally and they said there are fewer illegitimate pregnancies in the services than out of them that was the benchmark which meant it was much easier to be a lesbian because pregnancy wasn't possible, literally they had much less discipline about lesbian promiscuity than they did, it was just very very interesting it was all about actually how the public perceived the services because if mum and dad didn't want you to go into that service it was much harder to recruit the right sort of girl but Betty, of course, your experience was very different because you weren't serving alongside that many men you were outnumbering the men at Bletchley Park, weren't you? Absolutely, oh yes It was a totally different set-up Three to one I think it was My partner Nula's grandfather worked at Bletchley Park during the war he was an Italian translator and he loved it There were all these girls there all these Wrens and ATS girls and so on I think for the men who were working there it was a bit of a picnic in a way in some ways Betty, we've got a picture of you up there now in your uniform I think that's a bit later on in the war when you've been promoted but let's just talk about that step from your training where you're given a stripe, you're able to discipline your peers to how you end up with your German in Bletchley Park Well I didn't use it actually because Major Tester who was a brilliant German linguist gave me a test and while I could cope with a normal conversation I couldn't cope with any technical words so I never used my German but eventually and I don't know why but I ended up in the Japanese department where I had to paraphrase translated and translated Japanese messages and that's what took me to Washington DC to work in the Pentagon and the uniform you've just seen me in was the oh yes you've got an example there This is an example of your work isn't it paraphrasing messaging That's right yes So you were basically disguising the communications that were used so that the enemy couldn't guess you'd broken their messages In the hope that if the Japs did pick up the translated messages they wouldn't realise that we had in fact broken their code and had their foot gone I wonder if we can just talk about the way in which we revere Bletchley Park and the way it's become such an important part of our national historic narrative No partly that's Hollywood but it's also bigger than that it's this idea that we outsmarted the enemy in a clean, clever way and now I've just been really interested where the intelligence told us Putin was probably going to invade and then America and British intelligence said oh there's going to be an invasion and there was Macron still flirting with Putin and everyone I knew in Eastern Europe going oh it's American propaganda it's almost like we don't believe intelligence hasn't got that I suppose what I'm trying to say is that if yesterday's intelligence seems clean and something we trusted and believed in and now it seems like it's called disinformation and it's a much muddier arena I suppose in the war no-one knew about Bletchley when I interviewed people who worked in the forces at Bletchley outstations there was a woman I spoke to and she said well there was something called Station X but we had no idea what it was we didn't really know what they were doing I mean church will call them the geese that laid the golden egg but never clucked because they were so that secrecy was maintained wasn't it whereas I suppose now you're talking about like in the media and in public we're kind of we can debate all this it's a very different discourse Betty I wonder if you could talk us through the impact of that secrecy and the extent to which it prevented you from understanding really what you were doing on one level especially when you first entered the park well yes I mean the official sequence act some of you may have had to read it it's a very frightening document and suddenly bearing in mind I was 18 and not very experienced in the ways of the world I read it and I signed it and I came out of the mansion thinking well you have no choice you just keep everything to yourself as you've been told and that's the end of it and my parents never knew where I was or what I was doing and they both died before I had the opportunity to tell them what I was doing and it was a very, very strict discipline and I understand that it was very well kept throughout, naturally there was a one instance apparently where some girls were talking out of turn and they disappeared from you we never heard about them again It's interesting because retrospectively there was always this fear you know how does it keep mum be more like dad this idea that women were less discreet than men we do I think scientifically speak about 4,000 more words a day on average as a gender but then yet when it came to how the she's laughing in the background have you got a word in Duncan I'll shut up in a moment but the the JIC committee was very worried about these young girls and yet it was in the 60s and 70s men desperately wanting to leave their mark for posterity Churchill included his memoirs had to be fully edited and he had to be drawn across the coals because of the place we were at in the cold war that actually meant in the end in the 70s that the likes of Betty could finally speak because it had been breached by not young girls who actually most of the young girls went back into the kitchen and were never asked about their war anyway there's this wonderful irony of course because Betty how many times straight after the war sort of 45 to 65 were you ever asked about what you did just occasionally but my answer was always the same that it was very boring not worth talking about or something to that effect you weren't writing your memoir back then the interesting thing is that you see we were free to speak after 1975 wasn't it, that's right and knowing that I was free to speak about what I'd been doing I didn't want to I'd been bottling it up for so long I just I just didn't want to talk about it it was many years before I was encouraged to give talks about it well it's a good thing for people like me and Tessa that people of your generation were persuaded to talk in the end I know my grandfather would literally never talk about the war at all and my grandmother who was in the ATS I mean this is an interesting question I think with the kind of books that we do you're reliant on people who want to talk who respond if you put out an ad or however you approach them who want to talk to you my grandmother would never have talked to anyone about her time in the ATS obviously she agreed to talk to me grudgingly but she hated it she hated it from day one she resented it, she was very down on it and it was a real eye-opener to me when you were talking about reading letters at the time it was that there is always a danger that you're getting a certain slice if you go about your history the way that we do because you're getting the people who want to speak actually that is a subsection of the whole Do you feel that Betty you love remembering now we've had great fun haven't we I think what really stood out for me the first time I met Betty and there she was driving along the road with your foot down on the gas we'd just come back from one of Betty's lectures and she said this is a picture of you up there by the way Betty you're in America, the Pentagon you're doing your paraphrasing in this brand new green military giant literally the perspex has just been taken off the building you're the only female ATS girl I think in that giant building we'll come to those memories in a second and I say to Betty this must have been the best time of your life Betty I mean I know it was a wall but she went oh no now is the best time of my life because there's been something about that remembering process for you that's been great fun hasn't there oh yes absolutely it's amazing how interested people are in that part of the wall because America was very different from Bletchley especially as I was one of 32,000 people in the Pentagon and the only member of the ATS which was I think something to write about and you saw some things there Eisenhower came roaring in didn't he, but Victoria to the western part? Yes he came in on a tank it was the center area of the Pentagon is enormous and he was able to come in with his tank and a couple of others and masses of troops and waving to everybody that was a unique experience I think and so too were you there when the time of the end of the war of course in the Pacific and the dropping of the bombs that was quite an extraordinary moment wasn't it really a complex one? Very complex we just didn't know about it and suddenly everything stopped yes I'll never forget that day it was the day that when we were told about it publicly all the owners of cars in Washington fixed their horns and left them on for about 24 hours you've never heard such a cacophony in all your life and of course on the other side of the world there were these appalling bombs going off Betty's story and the humanity with which you tell it Betty always reminds me of the complexity because I think there's a danger of you know we've turned the Second World War into almost a bit of a fairy story with goodies and baddies and I remember you talking about later on discovering about the impact of these nuclear bombs and left you feeling quite desperate in a way didn't it? Oh it's a terrible thing I mean okay we didn't want to be overrun by the by the Japs but to me it's a totally inhuman thing altogether absolutely awful Just quickly on Betty personally you mentioned it there about the sort of selection process and the way oral history has inbuilt distortion I think there is one danger of people like Betty talking to you Betty because I think we imagine that all your generation were like you but of course you are the most Betty's the most extraordinary outlier I can't underline this enough I've spent a lot of time with exceptional women but there is no one I know of 98 and 11 months who A can get on Zoom B does all their own cleaning C puts up with me sleeping on a camp bed dragging in BBC crews at 7 in the morning when she's still in her 90 and he came in through the back door didn't he? Oh yes! So this idea I think oh gosh they really were the great generation and then I spoke to a gentrologist and he said no I mean why you're finding you're always using superlatives and these women seem really extraordinary because yes there's luck built into living for a very long time but also you have to be exceptional you have to have inbuilt ambition curiosity, multi-generational friendships really good discipline I present to you the exception of the rule You must have found that Duncan it's difficult not to put in adjectives going amazing, wonderful Oh my god I love our brackets BFF I know what you mean but I don't know if you find this Tessa I mean not I interview a lot of people for my books I think when I did the book about the women's forces I interviewed about 100 people across the three of them and you remember the ones you tend to write more about the ones you get on with there are also some who are pretty horrible or do you know what I mean like you do have bad experience you have bad days at work where someone is just like a nightmare just don't remember anything or you know they didn't do anything very interesting I don't know I mean maybe I've been less maybe you've been luckier than me I have fewer, I go in deeper I have fewer women and I really I have this sort of casting process where I whittle them down to the best ones and then it's true they are the exception ones but I'm kind of aware it was a real revelation to me working on the sugar girls which is the first of these books that I did I can't remember who it was an old lady who ended up being in the book but I suppose I'd sort of thought you know I knew my grandparents I didn't know that many people of that kind of generation and I sort of expected all these old ladies to be quite sweet and kind somehow and I interviewed this woman and she was just absolutely awful and she was telling this story about the woman down the road and how they were friends but they obviously hated each other it was all this kind of bitchy stuff going on and I was like wow okay but not necessarily so I think I'm a bit wary of there is this idea in America particularly the greatest generation and I think certainly that generation lived through more than probably any other generation in the West and a lot of the stuff they lived through brought out the best sometimes the worst but often the best in them a lot of them grew particularly in the forces one of the things I loved about that book is just seeing the transformation in terms of there was one woman that I interviewed who started off as this really mousy anxious girl no one expected anything of her she ended up in the desert in Egypt in charge of a whole group of women in the Waff she was the one they'd come to if they needed a scorpion squashing or they needed directions to Cairo she came back from the war completely transformed so for her she was made exceptional by that experience and it was an exception for women wasn't it Betty because it was pretty dull, predestined relatively domestic life that most girls were going to be living and suddenly along comes a war you know it was a huge transformation for most of you wasn't it oh absolutely yes because it depended very much on what you were doing whether you were a cook and orderly a driver or on a gun side all these trades were very very different but just even just being out away from home living with other girls people your age yes well of course for me it was wonderful because I'd been as you all know I was brought up in the country miles away from anything and anybody and the very fact of being with a crowd of girls and listening to their side of the stories was an education in itself for me and I dare say others felt the same and also there was that great time when we were all pulling against a common enemy pointing in the same direction in a way that a lot of Europe that had been occupied and had a much more complex ambiguous response to the war I think we see it again with Ukraine now if Ukraine wasn't a country 8 weeks ago at Damwell is now they're all like this is what and Britain very much had that it was a kind of high point the high noon of Britain's identity and you very much lived that Betty it's much more complicated being British now I suppose is what I'm trying to say than it was 80 years ago yes very very different scene altogether we won't pursue that by the way Betty has an MBE we're allowed to name drop a famous political friend who lives next door to you go on name drop him sorry name drop you know the health minister he's your best friend oh Saj basically they're really good chums and whenever any one of my trendy friends goes oh that dreadful man you know whatever he's doing next and I say he's awfully kind to my Betty I have to just caveat that with he does have a heart we're very fortunate to have him as our local MBE there you go he's a picture on the wall and everything I'm telling you so we're going to go on to now a bit about quickly about and I wondered if you can add to this this idea of the way we remember the war and how important it's become to our national identity I think partly because it was that high noon experience and Betty for you it's been life transforming I don't know if you recognise this picture do you do you remember when that was taken yes where is it I can't see it at the moment oh you can't see it I don't know what you can't see oh that was when I was I'm sitting opposite the Duchess Cambridge indeed there she is she's got her listening face on yes she could be a normal historian I think her aunt or something was at Bletchley wasn't she no it's her grandmother grandmother sister don't worry no sorry I stand corrected but it's been an amazing experience because I think especially for women but generally for old people that agency is removed people ask less questions there is a kind of shrinking if you like of life and it's been an extraordinary moment in the sun hasn't it this last 10 15 years oh yes very much so yes did you have the picture of me with the queen I think that might just be the next picture I've got do you want to see this yeah is that your the MBE or the legend on earth is that the legend on earth which I think it's five of us from Bletchley have received have you got the MBE there too yes I have the MBE as well they're a bit too heavy to pin on the cardigan droops if she sticks there you are it's very it's quite competitive because we went on a tour didn't we Betty do you remember you'd just been given your MBE and we went with the other vegetable and none of them could bring themselves to say well done I'm sorry wow okay well it's interesting I think it is worth bearing in mind because I think sometimes when we think of women in the war initially maybe we think of them in those kind of support roles or whatever but you know women were getting medals there was a woman who got a George Cross for saving a man's the pilot's life I think throwing a body over him when his plane was exploding or something there was a woman Constance Babington Smith who was the first person to locate the launch sites of the V1 the doodle bugs going over and there were about 2,000 women who were killed during the course of the war you know some of them at the first was on on one of the Akak sites literally on her machine they had this machine called a predictor which was like this great big box that would calculate if you're better on the technical side of this than me but it calculates the length of the fuse and yeah exactly and the box is moving round and she was mortally injured but stayed on her job on this elaborate box long enough for someone else to take over and then literally fell down and died at their feet and the guns never stopped firing that was something they were all firing at but the irony of course isn't it that women were non-combatants absolutely essentially retained their non combat status which meant of course they could die for King and Country but they couldn't fire back so there was and that really women have only been allowed into every area of the army in 2018 I think finally I mean I always don't know about you Betty but I always think there's something interesting about how we look or gauge women's progress in the military through the extent to which they're allowed to man up right up until 2018 and we don't look at the the humanising aspect that women in uniform bring to the military services it's your good friend our very good friend actually Ali Brown a former Colonel Ali Brown he said to me well when we were on the ground in Kosovo you know women and children came to us you know actually there they are often it's your peacekeeping mission you're a huge part of a nation's propaganda when you're on the ground in British military uniform and you need to be approachable and female soldiers are more approachable Betty's silent that's I'm sorry I'm sorry the sound has gone a bit I didn't catch all your shit Well we're very near the end I just going to put up a little picture of the Queen who looks very like Prince William there don't you want? Yes the jeans but it was very interesting finding out more about the Queen's service because she was really just popped in at the end there is a sort of moral booster but she's been a great way as you have been of sort of remembering the war tying us back to that nostalgic period in the Blitz hasn't she in a way Betty and it was in that context that you two met I think she was rather an awe of you wasn't she she wrote you a letter Well now she didn't her um what you call it her equity did yes that's his letter not hers but still I think she was clearly moved by the experience I think she was she was very kind she spent a lot of time with me Whenever I hear something about the Queen's health I just ring up Betty and check she's okay and I think well that's fine because she's a cut you're two years older three years older than the Queen yes and also wears those perilous court shoes and I wouldn't buy a pair of my soft sandals you don't have any soft sandals do you I do actually now what should we open it up to questions would this be a good time to I think we've got questions in the room and then this if this iPad doesn't die before we get to them we might have some questions I gave Duncan the owner's task well here we go I'm going to start with a question on the iPad since it's only got 10% battery it says hi Betty sorry to sound like a local news journalist and I just want to know what your top tips for a long life are and most importantly your advice for living well and happily did you hear that Betty? My goodness I don't know whether I have any recipe for that except that I come from a family of long livers one of them had his 100 and second birthday this last week and there are but apart from that I suppose eating sensibly and exercising sensibly is the luck of the draw It's also you have an extraordinary optimism Betty and you're very good at maintaining relationships I think that there is something key in that Yes I agree I think one needs to find friends, make them and keep them Yeah That's why I'm here today talking Rebecca Sorry are there any questions here in the room as well if anyone would like to ask either Betty or either of us Yeah Is there a mic? Have the fear and the sweaty hands of the whole thing First of all Betty thank you so much this is the first zoom call in two years where I haven't felt like wandering off and just you know folding washing or something I've completely gripped so thank you very much for getting on to zoom today So because you've been mentioning Ukraine a lot I'm a humanitarian advisor working on Ukraine at the moment and I come to conflict and war from a very different perspective and I don't know if you know but actually in the east of Ukraine globally it's the oldest caseload of humanitarian needs in the world especially elderly women as well and one thing that we're terrible at is being able to understand and transmit not just the needs of people who are elderly but also the capacities and strengths and I'd really be interested in your advice from the kind of the sensibility of oral historians and social historians on how we can do a better job of telling that story in real time obviously without kind of getting into an oxymoron of real time history but you know we don't want to tell this story ten years down the line, we want to be able to transmit this now thank you Do you mean as in like how do we get the stories out of Ukraine of the elderly people now I feel like that's I don't know about you or more of a journalist than I am but like I I guess I mean there are safety issues presumably I mean obviously the journalists who are going I've no idea I mean obviously if people can zoom or can speak on the phone or whatever then that is great I mean I'm very impressed I can probably help you with a contact in east Ukraine on that because I'm going into Moldova next month for the end of the Transnistrian conflict and actually one of the places I'm interviewing is an old folks home because the perspective they have on this but I think it's absolutely vital and it was again in the pandemic where we I thought a lot of the very old generation who are most impacted were without a voice is so right and actually those least able to move away from harm are old people funnily enough we've just been working in the north Romanian border where the woman who was visiting her family 86 contracted coronavirus ended up in north Romania with coronavirus in a hospital then had to get back to her home in Georgia via Turkey the whole thing was a sort of and it was a hugely expensive as well and she had no money it's absolutely horrific but we don't hear that story we see them it's almost like we've in many ways the optics seem quite regressive it's a very male war for understandable reasons the women and children are very female and they're the ones leaving and there's a total absence of old people we're simply not seeing them they don't feel able to leave they don't want to leave they have less knowledge actually of a lot of what's going on in the war because they don't have access to social media but I would try and access summer I'll see if I can help you access some of those the care homes where they are and of course elderly people in Ukraine aren't generally as old as Betty you know the life expect I think it's about 10, 15 years younger in Ukraine I don't know there won't be very many 99 year olds I don't think alive in east Ukraine Betty but do you feel I mean you're exceptional in the voice that you have for your age would you agree with that well yes I think so although I mean obviously I'm not as bright as I used to be but I think the thing is to do as much as you can to yourself that to me is partly the recipe and it's also life saving though you told me in lockdown that you did 15 newspaper interviews and it kind of saved you oh yes one day yes yes I had more to do during lockdown and I did another yes and so that goes to show the impact you know just giving them a voice accessing them, asking them it makes the impotence we all feel it's sort of 100 fold I would imagine for them yeah go ask it's interesting though I mean you were saying the sort of face of the war in Ukraine I mean I suppose that's true but I was very struck by these images of you know female MPs getting hold of guns and being like you know we're going to defend our country I mean I think there is that sense that's one of the things that's quite shocking about some of those images is that idea of you know people from all walks of life getting involved just as they did with the women's forces exactly I mean it reminded me of that the idea and obviously you're right the women's forces in the second world war in order to deal with this kind of public issue with the idea of women serving they had to have this royal proclamation that said that women were not allowed to use deadly weapons which meant for example on the Akak sites they had to have men as well so the women did all the calculations and used all the complex machinery to make sure that the shells hit the planes which they very rarely did to be honest but you know in theory they hit the planes but a man had to pull the trigger that was the rule you know a woman was not allowed to touch that because then she would be killing someone potentially but even so it does strike me there is something unusual about that idea I suppose of civilians being militarized and particularly female civilians being militarized in that way any other questions? let's do one in here while it keeps logging itself out any more questions in the room while I try and find out what the next one on here is yep that will sponsor with a question, we've got the answer right Duncan this is for Betty there was clearly lots going on at Bletchley Park and at the Pentagon you're an incredibly intelligent woman I know how much did you work out of what was happening elsewhere at those sites or did you just focus on the bit that you were working on? yes so this was the thing we were not allowed to talk about anything outside our own office I don't know talk about anything we saw, read or heard unless you were very senior and I wasn't and we certainly were not allowed to communicate outside our own particular office that was one of the great ways they held the secret wasn't it that even if you got strung up by your ears you wouldn't have had much to tell them anyway concentric circles of knowledge and very few people were sort of enwised at the top level and I think that's practice anyway in the military but particularly in intelligence it's going to take you on my journey with Betty that's Betty's book which she wrote which is how I found out about her and then I banged her in this book this is at the National Army Museum you do installations there don't you do you remember that Betty? that was before lockdown we go with our periods in army girls and then in we've got to let Duncan in there somewhere and he's been absolutely brilliant coming here today thank you Rebecca Rebecca doesn't often talk about the world war 2 I think it's a bit contaminated sometimes I think sometimes the telling of world war 2 has been unhelpful in some respects for our contemporary British political story so it's very, I'm very appreciative for his fest hosting us it was Duncan's idea it was yes because I know Rebecca had said we don't do world war 2 not doing world war 2 stories but you see I think it's interesting so I've written a lot about women in the war you've obviously written a lot about women in the war I don't do like military history I can barely understand what this machine is that helps to see the planes I'm not into any of that at all I'm much more interested in civilian experiences of war in kind of those sort of ordinary in quote marks people's experiences of war whatever they are and I do think someone said to me a few years ago he said what's wrong with you, why are you so obsessed with war you've written about the first world war you've written about the second world war why do you write about something else my feeling is it's just that particularly the second world war is a period where so many people are put in situations that they would never have been put in before and it's fascinating if you're interested in ordinary people's experiences of history how that changes them what they go through it's about finding being able to talk to people like Betty and get it from the horse's mouth when I've written about the first world war you can't do that, you only get the letters but being able to speak to people and find out what it was like I think is a great privilege and it's also about the relationships in case you haven't guessed I really love Betty and I love you for persevering with zoom this morning I was almost in tears on the stairs I think Betty sounds quite stressed but no, you're part cool as a cucumber I love you Betty, thank you so much for joining us today thank you so much