After the war, Fred moved to Nottingham where he started a photography firm with a fellow Polish ex-paratrooper.
It was here he met Patricia, his wife.
“I met my wife in Jessops in one of the shops,” he said. “She was a model there, once I saw her, I said ‘this is my wife’.”
The couple raised three children, and were together until her death in 1996 – but Fred never told her about his wartime role.
“My wife died and she still didn’t know what I was doing. I never told anybody,” he said. “In fact, she always complained – ‘all your friends, when they come visit, they all have stories to tell, you never tell anything’.
“You were sworn not to tell, so I kept that.”
Having reached the age of 103, Fred puts his long life down to luck, whiskey and stopping smoking in 1963, and believes he must now be the last surviving Polish codebreaker.
“I’m bound to be, I am 103-and-a-half, and I was the youngest by two years,” he said.
