Mavis Lilian Batey, MBE (née Lever; 5 May 1921 – 12 November 2013), was a British code-breaker during World War II.
[2] Batey was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal in 1985, and made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1987, in both cases for her work on the conservation of gardens.
[2] She worked as an assistant to Dilly Knox, a classical scholar and papyrologist from King's College, Cambridge who was so eccentric that, in 1920, he forgot to invite two of his brothers to his wedding.
[2][13] The Allied success in the naval Battle of Cape Matapan in March 1941 was an early example of the contribution of the work at Bletchley Park to the war effort.
One of these cribs was SUPERMARINA, meaning Naval High Command, which was used in a message from Rome to Crete that included "Today 25 March 1941 is the day minus three".
Mavis Lever and her colleagues, including Margaret Rock, worked for three days and nights and discovered that the Italians were intending to attack a Royal Navy convoy transporting supplies from Cairo to Greece.
He included a stanza dedicated to Batey and the key role she had played in the victory: "When Cunningham won at Matapan, By the grace of God and Mavis, "Nigro simillima cygno est, praise Heaven, A very rara avis"
[20] The Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, used different Enigma machines from the Army, Navy and Air Force, without a plugboard but with additional turnover notches.
This enabled the British to be able to read the Abwehr messages and confirm that the Germans believed the Double-Cross intelligence they were being fed by the double agents who were recruited by Britain as spies.
[21][22] She was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal in 1985, and made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1987, in both cases for her work on the conservation of gardens.
[1][3][24] In 2005, The Gardens Trust held the first Annual Mavis Batey Essay Prize, a competition geared towards international students who are enrolled in a university, institution of higher education or who have recently graduated from one.