Kate Middleton Visits WWII Code-Breaking Center Before Heading to Windsor to Meet Baby Archie
Kate Middleton is connecting with her family roots with a visit to a World War II code-breaking center on Tuesday.
The royal mom of three, 37, stepped out at Bletchley Park, the secret wartime spy base brought to life in the movie Enigma (starring Kate Winslet), and where her paternal grandmother, Valerie Glassborow, and her twin sister, Mary, worked during WWII.
Kate, who wore her Alessandra Rich blue-and-white polka dot dress, first visited the center five years ago, discovering more about her grandmother.
“I have always been immensely proud of my grandmother, Valerie Glassborow, who worked at Bletchley Park during the Second World War,” Kate wrote in 2016 for a special puzzle book produced by GCHQ, the UK’s Signals Intelligence and Cyber Security agency. “She and her twin sister, Mary, served with thousands of other young women as part of the great Allied effort to break enemy codes. They hardly ever talked about their wartime service, but we now know just how important the men and women of Bletchley Park were, as they tackled some of the hardest problems facing the country.”
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As the 75th anniversary of D-Day nears, Bletchley Park Teleprinter is hosting a special exhibit based on newly declassified material, which shows how the intelligence effort coordinated at the center helped in the success of the D-Day landings at Normandy, France. Using sophisticated codebreaking techniques, workers at Bletchley Park supplied information to the American and British led forces in the weeks leading up to D-Day on 6th June 1944.
Princess Kate was shown around the interactive exhibition and met some of those who have helped restore the historic building of the building.
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And, in the second part of the visit, she joined some schoolchildren who took part in one of Bletchley Park Trust’s learning activities – an immersive experience which took them into the wartime world of codebreakers, and how they intercepted and deciphered German communications to be then analyzed by experts.
Kate’s relatives, the Glassborow twins, served in Bletchley’s Hut 6 as duty officers in the “Cover Management Y” team that identified interception sites and signals that were suitable for monitoring. They would then pass the information on to code breakers.
Later today, Kate is expected to join husband Prince William to visit Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and their baby son Archie for the first time in Windsor.
