Roma Craze

Roma Marian Craze was born in Melbourne. The family moved to Western Australia after the First World War and lived in Cottesloe.

Her schooling was at MLC, then at PLC, and the University of Western Australia, where she graduated BA in 1936. She left Perth in 1938 and worked briefly in Germany, but left for England several days before War was declared in 1939.

An uncle had arranged a meeting for her with a contact in the Foreign Office. Five weeks later, Craze signed the Official Secrets Act and was given a rail ticket to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. She was one of the first five women to be seconded to the secret facility where analysts and codebreakers were based, listening to broadcasts and reading intercepted communications to find the coding patterns hidden within. Craze was at Bletchley Park for the duration of the war, putting her language skills to good use in the Signals Intelligence and Traffic Analysis group, which was charged with recording and analysing activity on enemy radio networks.

Bound by the Official Secrets Act, Craze did not speak about her wartime experiences until old age, merely noting in the 1991 PLC News that she “spent the war years in England, where she met and married her husband John Gornall”. They returned to NSW where they farmed for nearly forty years.

Little was known of her contribution to the war effort, and the risks she took, until 2014 when a former PLC classmate made a chance reference to Craze’s War work.

Gornall Family and Presbyterian Ladies College Archive. With thanks to Shannon Lovelady Archivist, Presbyterian Ladies College