Mavis Batey, Bletchley Park code breaker in World War II, dies at 92 In May 1940, Mrs. Batey - then the unmarried Mavis Lever - joined the team of code breakers at Bletchley Park, the British cryptography headquarters. Trained in the enemy's language and endowed with a facility for words, she became a key contributor to a wartime project that remained classified for decades. But by the time of her death on Nov. 12 at 92, Mrs. Batey was regarded in England as a national heroine. Working with Alfred Dillwyn "Dilly" Knox and other celebrated code breakers, she learned to decipher what she called the "utter gibberish" of encrypted German communications. Battling the Enigma Like many of her colleagues, Mrs. Batey worked on a "need-to-know" basis and did not understand at the time the significance of her efforts. In recent years, with the release of British wartime records, it was revealed that her code-breaking helped the Allies cripple the Italian navy in 1941 and assisted the 1944 Normandy invasion. Winston Churchill, Britain's wartime prime minister, was said to have called the Bletchley Park code breakers his "geese that laid the golden eggs but never cackled." Fueled by what Mrs. Batey described as "ersatz coffee," they toiled in secrecy to decipher the encoded messages spat out by the Axis powers" Enigma machines. Mrs. Batey recalled reporting for duty at Bletchley Park, a Victorian estate about 50 miles north of London, and being "thrown in at the deep end." "No one knew how the blessed thing worked," she once told an interviewer, referring to the Enigma, a machine that resembled a typewriter and scrambled messages with confounding complexity. Knox, by her description, was an "eccentric genius" so consumed by his work that he on at least one occasion stuffed his pipe with bits of sandwich rather than smoking tobacco. "He would ask, "Which way does the clock go round?" " Mrs. Batey recalled in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. "If you were stupid enough to answer "clockwise," he would always answer, "not if you're the clock!" That summed it up: You had to be prepared to think in a different way. Mrs. Batey's first major contribution came in March 1941, when she helped decipher Italian naval communications revealing an impending attack on British ships ferrying supplies from Egypt to Greece. One message declared the arrival of "day X minus 3." "Why they had to say that I can't imagine," Mrs. Batey later said, according to the Telegraph. It seems rather daft, but they did. She was the cryptographer on duty to decode a subsequent message explaining in excruciating detail the Italian battle plans. The information was passed to Adm. Andrew Cunningham, the commander of Britain's Mediterranean fleet, who was then in Alexandria, Egypt.