Neil Leslie Webster

He was a key figure in radio intelligence and cryptography who worked in the Fusion Room at Bletchley Park and was closely involved in the hunt for "cribs" for the Enigma machine.

Neil's mother Mabel Steel married her first cousin John 'Jack' Webster who also worked all his life in the Indian Civil Service being awarded the Order of the Star of India.

The Central Party moved to The Warren, Harpenden, and the unit he worked in was from then on known as the ‘Fusion Room’ – continuing in Beaumanor Hall and finally in Bletchley Park (BP) where, as a Major, he was liaison officer between signals intelligence and cryptographers, in what is now known as SIXTA.

[8] The Fusion Room grew from a small beginning in 1940 until, by the end of the war at BP in 1945, it numbered over two dozen men and women, including a few American army officers who had arrived in 1943.

[9] Webster’s role as liaison between traffic analysis and cryptography meant he was centrally involved in the search for ‘cribs’ – short pieces of enciphered text where the meaning is either known or can be guessed, which allow the whole cipher to be broken.

Neil Webster was a very intelligent man, a brilliant mathematician, a classical scholar, a linguist, literate and artistic, widely read and politically aware, liberal, agnostic, courteous, civilised, charming and very kind.

His family, friends and colleagues remember him in later life as a sort of Bertrand Russell character – with a mane of silver hair, penetrating blue eyes, a quizzical look, and an immediate enthusiasm for any discussion or argument or challenge.