Kate Middleton Pays Tribute To Her Code Breaking Granny At Bletchley Park

It's always nice to hear something about the Duchess of Cambridge that doesn't involve what she's wearing or what her baby son is doing.

She might be sartorially blessed and said baby may be the future King of England, but there's only so many ways you can say a prince looks cute and a princess looks pretty.

So when she headed to WWII's Bletchley Park it was interesting to hear that one of Kate's ancestors was part of the code-cracking team that helped bring down the Germans in the Second World War.

It turns out that the £8m renovation of of the history space is close to Kate Middleton's heart, as Valerie Glassborow, her paternal grandma, worked there during the war.

Valerie was a banker's daughter and worked at Bletchley with her twin sister Mary, in hut 16. She would go on to marry Kate's grandfather, Peter Francis Middleton, after the war.

Peter was a Mosquito pilot who fought in the war and made it to the grand old age of 90 before passing away in 2010.

The pair would go on to have four children, the eldest of whom, Michael, would become Kate's father.

There were 9,000 female code breakers working at Bletchley during the war, but they were paid a third of their male colleagues and most went back to ordinary life after the war.

The Duchess met one of her grandmother's former colleagues, Lady Marion Body, and the pair were given a tour of the newly rennovated buildings together.

Kate looked her usual demure self, wearing a military-style navy skirt and white blouse combination by Alexander McQueen. She last wore the outfit on a tour of Birmingham in 2011, showing off her waste-not-want-not fashion credentials once again.

Author and historian Michael Smith explained: "The key thing in all of this is that [decrypting Enigma] allowed D Day to go ahead.

"Without it, it might well have been put back two years. Bear in mind, this was at a time when the UK and USA were developing the atomic bomb which was later used on Japan. It's not at all clear they wouldn't have used it on Germany if they thought it necessary."