A WOMAN who helped intercept coded wartime messages has received a commemorative badge for her efforts after nearly 55 years.

Grandmother May Stephens, from Eckington, near Pershore, was among veterans awarded with the Bletchley Park badge and certificate last month.

She also met the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh during their recent visit to GCHQ in Cheltenham to mark 100 years of Britain’s security services.

Mrs Stephens, aged 85, was one of the wireless operators who tuned into German radio transmissions during the Second World War.

She took down encrypted messages transmitted in Morse code, which were then sent to Bletchley Park, the forerunner to GCHQ, for codebreakers to decipher.

The vital intelligence work was officially revealed in 1974 and has since been credited with turning the course of the war.

However, at the time it was so secret many operators did not even tell their families.

Mrs Stephens, of Tewkesbury Road, said: “We couldn’t tell anyone. I never told a soul until 1974 and by that time my family were gone. My dad never asked. He knew I was doing something but he didn’t want to worry me because we were afraid somebody would let it out.”

Mrs Stephens joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service “on impulse” in 1943 and spent six months training on the Isle of Man before being sent to a station near Harrogate.

She said: “It wasn’t hard work.

“It was just monotonous and tedious. We had to be careful what we wrote down because it was all completely jumbled up. It didn’t make any sense to us.”

Mrs Stephens said she was thrilled to meet the Queen last month. She said: “She spoke to me. She said: ‘How are you and isn’t it a lovely day. What do you feel about today?’ and I said I was quite delighted and very shocked to be there.”

“Phillip was more chatty. He was laughing his head off at everyone.”

Noel Whittaker, aged 86, and his wife Christina, aged 87, of Droitwich Road, Claines, who met at the Harrogate station, have also received the badge.

Mr Whittaker said: “At the time, they just told us the messages were going to station ‘X’. A dispatch rider waited to take them down.”

Mrs Whittaker said: “The only time we got to know what they were sending was when the war was ending and they were quickly sending the message ‘Allies coming’ in German.”