My friend Irene Dixon, who has died aged 96, was one of the first female operators of the second world war codebreaking machine Colossus Mk I at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.
Irene, an east Londoner, might never have worked at Bletchley had it not been for a chickenpox infection that prevented her from being sent to work in a wartime munitions factory in Birmingham. Someone must then have spotted her talent and, when she had recovered, she was given psychometric tests, after which she was invited to join the Women’s Royal Naval Service. In 1943 she was posted to Bletchley to work on top-secret equipment.
From her modest East Ham terrace home Irene suddenly found herself living in a naval “cabin” on HMS Pembroke in the stately home of Woburn Abbey. A little older than me and the seven other Wrens in our cabin, she came to be known as Moua – mother of us all – and was instrumental in our bonding.
Irene worked in the Newmanry section at Bletchley, which had been established to automate codebreaking. As a Colossus operator she developed especially good relations with some of the great names associated with Bletchley codebreaking, including Max Newman, Jack Good, Donald Michie, Shaun Wylie and her favourite (and fellow Eastender), Tommy Flowers, who created Colossus.
Though brought up in East Ham, Irene had been born in Whitechapel to Sarah (nee Flowerday), a housewife and secretary of the local women’s section of the Labour party, and her husband, James Griffiths, who worked at Beckton gas works. After leaving Sarah Bonnell grammar school in Stratford she worked as a market researcher with Unilever before going on to Bletchley Park.
After the war she returned to Unilever, where she held a management position before, in 1951, marrying Sid Dixon, a quantity surveyor, and leaving her job to start a family. In Barking, where she and Sid had moved after their marriage, they made a huge local impact, especially through their local church. Irene’s energy, personality and humour charmed everyone.
In 2014 I was reunited with Irene at the 70th anniversary of Colossus at the National Museum of Computing, and our friendship took off from where it had left off.
During the war none of us understood the significance of our work in helping to crack the Lorenz-encrypted messages of Hitler’s high command, and for decades afterwards we could not speak of our work. In recent years, however, Irene took delight in telling of her clandestine glimpses of the behind-the-scenes activity, normally out of sight to all but the codebreakers themselves. Her vivid recall brought alive the experience of working at Bletchley for the generations of today.
During her final years Irene was a diligent full-time carer for Sid until he died in 2020. She is survived by their children, Gillian and Graham, and three grandsons, Ryan, Dean and Nicholas.
