Jean Argles
British World War II code breaker / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jean Argles (née Owtram) (7 November 1925 – 2 April 2023) was a Second World War code breaker and cipher officer. She and her sister Pat Davies are often referred to as "The Codebreaking Sisters". As a teenager, Jean Owtram joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) in London, signing the Official Secrets Act 1911 and working in the Special Operations Executive (SOE). She contributed to the SOE’s resistance network behind enemy lines, decoding messages from agents in the field. Promoted to the rank of officer at the age of 18, she worked in Egypt, Italy and Austria. In her later years she discovered that her sister had also been doing secret war work. Until Argles died in 2023, they were the last two sisters who had been required to sign the Official Secrets Act. The sisters appeared live and on radio and TV,[1] relating stories of war time and co-publishing, in their nineties, a book titled Codebreaking Sisters: Our Secret War which became a best seller.[2]