Captain Roberts with Susanne Kord and Jonathan Wolff in
2013, receiving his UCL Honorary Fellowship.
Captain Jerry (Raymond C. Roberts - one of the last of a top World War Two codebreaking team at Bletchley Park - has died, aged 93, following a short illness. Professor Susanne Kord (UCL German) pays tribute below: Captain Jerry (Raymond C. Roberts MBE (18 November 1920- 25 March 2014) studied German at UCL from 1939-1941. Because the city in which he studied was being bombed by the nation whose language and culture he was studying, he completed his course at UCL at Aberystwyth. He did not, in fact, ever set foot on the actual UCL campus until his daughter Chao graduated, also from UCL German, in 2007. Nevertheless, Jerry had strong ties to the Department and the University. He credited his German professor, Professor Leonard Willoughby, with starting his career as a code-breaker, because it was Professor Willoughby (a World War I code-breaker himself) who, impressed with Jerry's knack for the language and for solving puzzles, recommended him to Bletchley Park. There, Jerry became one of the four founding members of the Testery, a small team that was assigned the breaking of the German High Command's most top-level code Tunny.
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