Trinity Graduate Honoured for Wartime Code-breaking Work

Posted on: 21 January 2016

A Trinity graduate who was part of the Bletchley Park’s top-secret team of intelligence analysts during the Second World War has been honoured for her role.

Eileen Leslie Greer, who worked as a German language specialist in the codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park from 1941 to 1945, was honoured with a medal, the Bletchley Park commemorative badge earlier this week. She was also presented with a certificate, which expresses the British government’s “deepest gratitude for the vital service you performed during World War II”.

The award was presented to 98-year-old Mrs Greer by the British ambassador to Ireland, Dominick Chilcott, at St Mary’s Home, Pembroke Park, where she now lives.

Born in London, her father, the son of distinguished Trinity classicist Robert Yelverton Tyrrell, was a barrister and her mother was a motorcycle dispatch rider for the Royal Flying Corps during the first World War. Shortly after Mrs Greer’s birth, the family moved to Dublin.

Mrs Greer attended Alexandra College, then in Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin and afterwards went to Trinity College where she took a first in German. Prior to World War II Mrs Greer worked as a German lecturer in Queen’s University, Belfast.

Soon after the war broke out Mrs Greer offered her services to the British government, which was quick to realise her value as a fluent German speaker, and she found herself working in the top-secret Bletchley Park, the British centre for code-breaking and intelligence-analysing during the war. There her job was to produce intelligence reports on German army and air force signals decrypted by other colleagues. After the war, she continued working for the foreign office and was awarded an MBE.

Eunan O’Halpin, Professor of Contemporary Irish History, commented: “Leslie Greer’s Bletchley Park badge and certificate honour but do not fully reflect her work in Britain’s vital codebreaking operations, which tends to be acknowledged generically under the heading of ‘women’s contributions’ as though all females were filing clerks, typists or machine operators. She was a German language specialist, initially concentrating on the tedious but vital tasks of categorising and indexing decoded German military messages. Her talents were soon recognised, and she was selected to be one of a small group who regularly advised the codebreakers on what enemy traffic they should concentrate on.”

“Leslie is also one of the few people left who saw both Hitler and Churchill in the flesh, the former when she was a language student in Germany before the war, the latter when he came down to Bletchley Park to thank its people for their contributions to the war effort.”

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