THE code breakers will meet the WI in south Shropshire.

In 1939, several hundred people students, professors, international chess players, junior military officers, actresses and debutantes reported to a Victorian mansion in Buckinghamshire known as Bletchley Park.

This disparate group were to become the code breakers at Station X’, the Allies top-secret centre for deciphering enemy codes.

Their task was to break the ingenious Enigma cipher used for German high-level communications. The settings for the Enigma machines changed continually and each day the German operators had 159 million million million different possibilities.

Yet against all the odds this gifted group achieved the impossible and coping with even greater difficulties, going on to break Shark, the U-boat Enigma, and Fish, the cipher system used by Hitler to talk to his guards. At the war's end, Japanese naval codes too, were receiving their attention.

On Friday September 30, Dr. Mark Baldwin an expert on the subject is to give a talk at Knowbury Memorial Hall (near Ludlow) on Enigma and the work of Alan Turing and many others to crack the code which shortened the war, by one estimate, by three years. The work at Bletchley Park also, by the way, did much to usher in the era of modern computing.

The evening starts at 7.30 pm and tickets are £5.00, available from Annie Felix on 01584 890638, or on the door. There will be a bar - the evening is organised by Knowbury W.I. - all welcome.