His father Herbert, had trained as a pharmacist, but worked for Lloyds Bank head office in the City for the rest of his 40-year career, since coming to London from Wales in 1915.

[2] Early in the Second World War, his tutor at University College London, Prof. Leonard Willoughby, who had worked during the First World War in Room 40, the main cipher-breaking unit of that time,[3] recommended the twenty-year-old Roberts as a German linguist to the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park where he was interviewed and accepted by Colonel John Tiltman as a codebreaker and linguist.

The Newmanry, which became active in July 1943, developed and used machine methods to help speed up one stage – breaking of the chi-wheels but the psi-wheels and motor-wheels were still broken by hand in the Testery.

Tens of thousands of Lorenz messages were intercepted by the British and broken at Bletchley Park by Roberts and his fellow code-breakers in the Testery.

Tunny provided vital information that changed the course of the war in Europe and saved tens of millions of lives at critical junctures – such as the Battle of Kursk in the Soviet Union, and D-Day.

There he employed his fluency in the German and French languages while working in the British Zone, interviewing witnesses and victims for various cases and taking legal statements from them for use in court.

His clients included British Gas, Reebok trainers, DuPont Teflon, Lycra, American Airlines, Chrysler cars, Holiday Inn hotels and many others.

For the last six years of his life, he campaigned for proper recognition for Bletchley Park's "4Ts" — for his colleagues in the Testery, and especially for its three "heroes": Alan Turing who broke the naval Enigma, Bill Tutte who broke the Lorenz cipher to help shorten the war, and Tommy Flowers who designed and built the Colossus, the world's first large-scale electronic, digital, programmable computer — to vastly speed up the chi-wheel stage of the breaking of Tunny traffic.

[9] Roberts accepted all of these accolades as acknowledgment not of his own accomplishments, but of the work of his teammates at Bletchley Park, most of whom died unrecognised, before Tunny was declassified.