Codebreaker played vital role during World War Two

FLO Cole, who turned 90 a few days ago, has a photograph of herself taken when she was 20, at the height of the Second World War.

It shows her sitting on a fence in a Lincolnshire field with a big smile on her face, and for decades to come she wasn’t allowed to tell anybody the reason for that smile.

“I’d just passed my coding training,” she said, “and one of the girls said ‘Get up on there, Flo, and show us your legs’.”

The training, at RAF Cranwell, qualified Leading Aircrafts-woman Florence Cole to join a team of 50 transcribing blocks of letters and digits transmitted by the enemy and intercepted by British wireless telegraphers.

The transcriptions, on whose accuracy countless lives depended, were then sent to a rather nondescript Buckinghamshire country house called Bletchley Park, whose top secret wartime function wasn’t officially acknowledged until the 1970s.

There they were passed through what was then the most complex computer on earth, giving the Allies a vital advantage and almost certainly shortening the war.

Like most people who have done great things, Flo is never boastful, but she’ll do anything she can to encourage us to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

Tomorrow, as on all Remembrance Sundays, she’ll attend the service at her local church in Shrivenham.

“What Remembrance Sunday means,” she said, “is that, please God, never never let us forget what all the services did for our freedom.

“When you consider what we’ve got... I’m talking to you now with all the freedom in the world to say what I want and with nobody to come here and take me to prison or kill me.

“I always think of all the ones who have gone on and who didn’t have any glory.”

Flo is from Birmingham, one of six children born to a housewife mum and a silversmith dad. The young woman was called up for military service in 1943.

“Before that,” she said, “I’d done a bit of everything. I was a slip of a girl. I’d done a bit of typing in a funny little office. Life was a bit simpler in those days.

“They wanted me to go in the Army but I had two brothers in the Air Force and I wanted to go there.”

After basic training at RAF Innsworth in Gloucestershire, Flo was posted briefly to RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire, headquarters of 617 Squadron.

A few months earlier, the squadron had carried out the Dambusters raid, losing 53 men.

In her short time at the base she deveoloped a respect for the crews which was to remain with her, as would her sense of injustice at the lack of official recognition for Bomber Command’s vital role.

That lack of recognition, possibly the result of politicians’ squeamishness over bombing raids on cities, was reversed in June of this year with the unveiling by the Queen of the Bomber Command Memorial at Hyde Park Corner.

“I was disgusted that it took 70 years for Bomber Command to be recognised,” Flo said. “I was so upset because of having been with them and seeing those boys – and they were just boys – giving their all.”

Flo served until late 1944. In civilian life she worked as a wig consultant with House of Fraser.

She was married to Trevor, an electrician who had spent the war with the Eighth Army, specialising in fearsomely dangerous mine detection. She has a daughter.

Trevor died some years ago of Parkinson’s Disease, and Flo has tirelessly raised thousands of pounds to help find a cure for the condition.