An 88-year-old Calgary woman has been honoured by Britain for her work during the Second World War.
Marion Booth received the Bletchley Park Commemorative Badge at a ceremony on Tuesday. The award is named for the secret English code-breaking facility featured in the award-winning film "The Imitation Game."
Booth was just 17 years old when she was recruited to join the Women's Royal Canadian Naval Service – also known as “the Wrens.”
“Seeing all these boys I was in high school with going off to war at 17, 18, 19 years of age,” she said, “we girls all just decided we wanted to do something.”
The Wrens worked with “humongous” radios to intercept Japanese and German Morse code signals that would later be translated to English, she says. Booth also learned Russian along the way.
Her work was classified for a quarter of a century, and Booth says it was difficult to keep her past hidden from her husband and children for so long.
Now she’s happy to see it celebrated publicly.
“It means that what we did didn't go unnoticed,” she said. “We did a lot in Canada to help the war effort.”
With a report from CTV Calgary
