Ray Wright sat tight on a clandestine past
Even close friends didn?t know his secret wartime past, until last month. Broadmeadow?s Ray Wright sat tight on a clandestine past until a letter from the Prime Minister of England Gordon Brown arrived thanking him ?for the vital services you preformed during World War 2?. Mr Wright?s 83rd birthday celebrations were heightened last month when he received the letter and could finally talk freely about his secret work. The top secret government department MI6 had approached him in 1944 as a teenager from Surrey. ?It was an adventure; I?d never been away from home before. ?They told me to catch a train here, and someone will meet you, and from there you will be on a ferry to Northern Ireland, it was all very exciting,? Mr Wright says. As one of the youngest members in the Government Code and Cypher School he had a vital role in intercepting and decoding German radio transmissions using a captured German decoder, the Enigma machine. In Northern Ireland Mr Wright had to record, as fast and accurately as possible, transmissions between German radio operators. The information was fed back to the now-famous Bletchley House, processed with the Enigma machine, and sent to Churchill at the War Office. ?The chances of guessing the codes was around 500 million million to one. ?One of the triggers that allowed the code-breakers to get a foothold on the cryptic messages was when German officers were lax with their messages. ?This allowed them to build up little pieces of knowledge, and out of this they created one of the first computers, the Bombe,? he says. Mr Wright recorded Germans codes in groups of five letters (HKEBT/LKEDU) of which there could be 500 or more in a transmission. Bletchley House was known as Station X and the information gathering houses throughout Europe where known as Y. ?We had to work very fast in Morse code to get the information to Bletchley House. ?You had to move fast, it was very challenging work,? he says. MI6 dealt with the radio operators and all the members of Mr Wright?s group were sworn ?indefinitely? to secrecy. The work of England?s code-breakers was kept so well secret that the Germans didn?t find out England had broken their Enigma code until 30 years after the war. ?Having that Enigma machine, and the work we did in intercepting messages, shortened the war by two or three years, it saves millions of lives,? he says. Mr Wright had no qualms joining the underground group. ?There was nothing you wouldn?t do to stop the enemy; we wanted to do our bit. ?Not for a moment did we think we would lose the war, even when we were losing. ?Everybody shared this optimism,? he says. After the fall of Berlin he was shifted from Ireland to the Middle East and continued to work for MI6. He went on to finish his radio operator training and joined the merchant navy, eventually making his way to Wellington.
