A LOWESTOFT woman who helped an army of code breakers during the second world war has been honoured for her efforts.Edna Lodge, who lives in Victoria Road in Lowestoft, has been awarded a Bletchley Park badge to commemorate her part in the top secret work that took place to decipher Nazi codes.

A LOWESTOFT woman who helped an army of code breakers during the second world war has been honoured for her efforts.

Edna Lodge, who lives in Victoria Road in Lowestoft, has been awarded a Bletchley Park badge to commemorate her part in the top secret work that took place to decipher Nazi codes.

Mrs Lodge was a petty officer in the Women's Royal Naval Service and received training as a special duties operator.

She was then posted to an underground wireless station in Scarborough, where her duty was to listen in to messages in Morse code which were being sent between German ships and land stations.

Her messages were then passed on to the code breakers working at Bletchley Park, where intelligence officers broke the codes for the Enigma and Lorenz coding machines, allowing countless lives to be saved.

Due to the nature of her wartime work, Mrs Lodge was sworn to secrecy at the time along with the 9,000 civilian and service personnel based at Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes.

She said: 'I still find it hard to speak about what I did during the war. It was very important work and none of us would talk about it.'

Waveney MP Bob Blizzard, who helped Mrs Lodge with her application for the badge, said: 'It was incredibly important work that was carried out at Bletchley, not just for Britain but for the whole of Europe, if not the world.

'We in Waveney are justly proud to have among us someone who played a part in this very important work'

The government's communications headquarters has already received 1,500 applications for the badges, which are designed to look like one of the Enigma machine's cogs.

Veterans who are no longer alive will be commemorated on a roll of honour.