Patricia Davies (née Owtram; born 19 June 1923) is an English former codebreaker who served as a special duties linguist in the Women’s Royal Naval Service during World War II.
[1] As a teenage interceptor, Davies listened to radio transmissions in both German and encrypted code as part of the British war effort, transcribing and decoding the messages and passing them on to Bletchley Park.
In the 1930s, the Owtram family also employed an Austrian Jewish refugee, Lilly Getzel, as a cook after she left Austria escaping the Nazi dictatorship there.
[9][1] When it was discovered from the results of a WRNS German test that she spoke good conversational German, she signed the Official Secrets Act[10] and, after two weeks of basic training and a further intensive specialist interception course, was made Petty Officer and started work at the British navy’s signals collection sites, called Y stations, around the coast.
She later transferred to Lyme Regis in 1943 as Chief Petty Officer, and then to Dover (opposite Cape Gris Nez) where she turned 21 two weeks after D Day.
[11] Later she worked for the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force, in London under General Eisenhower, scanning German official documents to search for potential war criminals.
[11] She was offered a job as a translator at the Nuremberg trials but, at her mother's request, went home to be with her father who had returned after surviving his ordeal as a POW.
[8][13] In 2020, Pat Davies and Jean Argles published Codebreaking Sisters: Our Secret War, a book about their own wartime experiences, written under their maiden name of Owtram.
[3] Still giving talks in 2023, to, for example, older groups in the University of the Third Age (U3A), Davies wrote, "It usually raises a laugh when I tell them that I may be the only old lady in Chiswick who knows how to use a Sten gun."
[7] On Armistice Day 2022, aged 99, Davies joined Andrew Pierce and Tessa Dunlop for an interview about her wartime experiences.