Churchill called them “the hens who laid the golden eggs but never clucked”, and indeed the wartime heroines of codebreaking and cryptology often stayed shtum for decades after their efforts were thought to have shortened World War II by a couple of years.

For Helensburgh’s Agnes McGee, who has just died, it was a great adventure which took the 19 year old Wren across the oceans to Ceylon having trained at Dover Castle, a branch of the famous Bletchley operation.

Like so many young women whose war effort was devoted to unscrambling enemy messages with the aid of a portable Enigma decoder, Agnes slipped back into domestic life here on the Clyde with neither fuss nor fanfare.

It often seems extraordinary that that generation of women who proved their worth and their considerable versatility in roles as varied as the land army, frontline nursing, and munitions assembly should subsequently have such difficulty in persuading post war employers that they weren’t a tribe of airheaded, delicate flowers unfit for real jobs and ready promotion.

Over the years I’ve met dozens of the most unlikely heroines whose daring deeds remained secret – often, even to partners and families.

In the case of the codebreakers of course tight lips and security were part of the deal, and you often hear tales of married couples who only discovered well into their wedded life that both had worked in different branches of this very secret service.

But even where their wartime exploits were well documented, many thousands of women who did dirty and dangerous jobs were somehow filed under “housewife” when they came home, or accessed jobs only in those sectors classified as “suitable for women”.

It would be nice to think that in a more enlightened century no such dotty prejudices still prevail, but there are whole tranches of life where women don’t so much bump their head against a glass ceiling as get concussed by it.

The sheer numbers of women training to be doctors and lawyers should surely impact on this in terms of promotion but the breath is not currently being held.