Ailsa Maxwell

Ailsa Giles Maxwell ( Macdonald; 16 December 1922 – 10 February 2020) was a British Bletchley Park code breaker and historian.

Early life and education Ailsa Giles Macdonald was born in Gourock on 16 December 1922, to Douglas Macdonald a railway manager, and his wife Grace, a school teacher. The family moved to London when her father was transferred to Euston Station, and Ailsa began her schooling in the city. She completed her schooling at Dumfries Academy, and then took up a place at the University of Edinburgh in 1942 to study economics.

Bletchley Park After completing the first year of her economics degree with distinction, Maxwell planned to join the WRENS, however she was approached by the Foreign Office in the summer of 1943, and invited to interview for an unspecified job. A fellow student of History at her university, Cecily Giles, was also made a similar offer. She and Maxwell accepted the offer and Maxwell was appointed to work as a Temporary Assistant at Station X, the UK's World War II code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park, in Buckinghamshire. She was billeted in a house with Wolverton along with a group of other young women.

After receiving two weeks training, Maxwell was appointed to Hut 6 where she worked in the Block D machine room. Maxwell was responsible for compiling menus from information obtained by other huts and inputting it to the electro-mechanical codebreaking Bombe, Maxwell described her work as follows."Our main job was, when a stop from the Bombes satisfied the way it had been set up, we then set this up on the Enigma machines to see whether it was right. We didn't know German, but it was obvious whether what came out was nonsense or made sense. I enjoyed it when we made up programmes, it was fun and something unusual to do." On the night of 7 May 1945 Maxwell was working along with Asa Briggs of the Intelligence Corps when the station received the uncoded message from Hitler's successor and President of Germany, Admiral Karl Dönitz, announcing Germany's unconditional surrender.