Jean Briggs Watters

Jean Annette Watters (née Briggs; 15 October 1925 – 15 September 2018) was an English cryptanalyst. During World War II, she was a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service and one of around ten thousand women enlisted to decrypt the German Enigma machine code at Bletchley Park. She never revealed details of her work.

Biography Jean Briggs Watters was born in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, England on 15 October 1925, the eldest of three sisters. She attended art school in Cambridge before deferring her studies to join the Women's Royal Naval Service. She was one of some ten thousand women assigned to the top-classified Ultra programme that the British Government instituted at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire in order to decrypt the German Enigma machine code; she was tasked with operating an electromechanical device known as a bombe. Watters was principally a homemaker, but she was also an accomplished artist; her work ranged from birthday cards that she created for her children to paintings that were exhibited, although she refused all offers from admirers who asked to purchase her work. Watters died on 15 September 2018 in Omaha, Nebraska. At the request of her eldest son, Robin Watters, she was buried with full British military honours at the Omaha National Cemetery on 24 September. Her work at Bletchley is featured in an interactive display in the United States Air Force hangar at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford.