Patricia Davies

Patricia Davies ( Owtram; born 19 June 1923) is an English former codebreaker who served as a special duties linguist in the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II. She and her younger sister Jean Argles are often referred to as "The Codebreaking Sisters". As a teenage interceptor, Davies listened to radio transmissions in both German and encrypted code as part of the British war effort, transcribing and decoding the messages and passing them on to Bletchley Park.

After the war, Davies was a television producer, journalist, and author. She was also an organiser of the Chiswick Women's Institute and a patron of the Sea Cadets.

Early life Dorothy (née Daniel) and Carey Owtram had three children, Patricia, Jean, and Robert. Carey Owtram owned a cotton mill in Bolton, Lancashire, and the military-minded family lived in a large, countryside, sandstone house belonging to Carey Owtram's father. After being homeschooled, the children were sent to boarding school for a few years, Patricia Owtram leaving at 17 years old. In the 1930s, the Owtram family also employed an Austrian Jewish refugee, Lilly Getzel, as a cook after she left Austria escaping the Nazi dictatorship there. Patricia Owtram enjoyed spending her evenings with Getzel, who could not speak much English, and so Patricia learned enough of Getzel's native German language to achieve conversational fluency and proficiency in German. This helped her later in her interview for the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS). In 1939, Patricia Owtram gained her school certificate. As the war started, Dorothy Owtram, who had driven a truck for the Women's Land Army in the First World War, became an Air Raid Precautions warden. In 1941, Carey Owtram, having served in the Territorial Army, went to the Far East with his regiment. After the fall of Singapore in 1942, he was imprisoned in Japanese POW camps until the end of the war.

Career War service In 1942, age 18, Patricia Owtram joined the WRNS. and, after two weeks of basic training and a further intensive specialist interception course, was promoted to petty officer and started work at the British navy's signals collection sites, called Y stations, around the coast. These stations were called Y, phonetically standing for WI, which in turn stood for "Wireless Intercept".

Later she worked for the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, in London under General Eisenhower, scanning German official documents to search for potential war criminals. She then undertook research on The Lady Mother by Henry Glapthorne at Somerville College, Oxford, matriculating in 1951. Her supervisor was Arthur Brown, an academic of University College London as no suitable Oxford academic was available.

She was a journalist in Manchester for a time and a television producer for the then newly established Granada television. She was involved in the production of programmes such as Florizel Street (now known as Coronation Street), and was key in developing other well known programmes such as University Challenge, The Sky at Night where she worked and travelled with Patrick Moore, and Ask the Family. She retired in 1983. This led to their giving talks at book festivals, and making radio and TV appearances.

In 2020, Pat Davies and Jean Argles published Codebreaking Sisters: Our Secret War, a book about their own wartime experiences, written under their maiden name of Owtram.

Davies name is on a brick in the wall at Bletchley Park honouring those who worked in connection with the place.

June 2019, Davies was awarded the Légion d'honneur, Military, the highest order of merit in France.

In 2019, she was also granted the freedom of the Borough of Chiswick where she resides. Their parents never knew anything about the top secret war work that their daughters had undertaken.

Patricia Owtram was married to Ray Davies, a BBC journalist. published in 2021, and in both The Bletchley Girls 2015 and Elizabeth and Philip 2022 by the same author.

There are seven films about Pat Davies in the Veterans Video Archive.