Britain's Greatest Female Codebreaker

Last week I spoke at the Irish Embassy in London at the launch of Jackie Uí Chionna's biography: Queen of Codes: The Secret Life of Emily Anderson, Britain's Greatest Female Code Breaker.

 

I am part of the first generation of Siginters who joined GCHQ after the Bletchley Park story had become avowed, and after the myth of Bletchley had begun to take hold (How a Tiny Number of Boffins and Chess Players Defeated Hitler and Won the War). For those of us interested in accurate history, it was a bit hard to situate the myth against the realities of Sigint in the Cold War, and I suppose it was the realisation that the myth was a myth, and that by taking back bearings from where GCHQ was at the end of the 1980s it might be possible to achieve a better and more three-dimensional understanding of wartime Sigint.

 

That in turn, under the guidance of Peter Freeman, developed into an interest in pre-Second World War Sigint: what happened in the period leading up to 1914 to turn Sigint from a vague idea in August 1914 into two going concerns by November 1914? What had the inter-war GC&CS achieved that meant that it had been factored in to war planning as a 'must-have' by 1938?

 

It was in this context that I first began to come up against references to Miss Emily Anderson. She had joined MI1(b) in 1918 from Galway University and was the only woman to become a Junior Assistant in GC&CS. She was formidable as a cryptanalyst, leading the Italian Section and recovering both Italian codebooks and the key material the Italians used for superencipherment. She trained new staff in cryptanalysis: not just members of staff, such as Wilfrid Bosworth and Josh Cooper, but also the military staff attached to GC&CS before being sent out to India or Palestine (Tiltman said that she seemed to bully his attached officers). In 1940 she had gone to Combined Bureau Middle East in Cairo to head up a detached GC&CS element to ensure that intelligence to support allied operations in that theatre was received as messages were decrypted, rather than depending on the vagaries of communications with Bletchley Park. She stayed there throughout the Western Desert Campaign, then returned to Berkeley Street to resume her work on enemy diplomatic telegrams and retired before GCHQ moved to Cheltenham. Awarded the OBE for her service in Cairo, she received after retirement the Cross of the Federal German Order of Merit for her work on transcribing the letters of Mozart and Beethoven.

 

I am normally chary of expressions like 'Britain's Greatest Female Codebreaker': if she was the 'greatest' shouldn't we be able to say who was second greatest, and third, and fourth? It strikes me, though, that in this case (as in Tiltman's) her claim to the title arises from the fact that there is nobody else at all on the same level. Margaret Rock, and Joan Clarke, for example, were exceptionally talented cryptanalysts, but achieved their results as parts of a team working on different elements of the same problem, able to draw on the successes of others to take their own work forward, and at a time, and in an organisation that recognised and accepted the fact that women were as able to do this work as men. Emily Anderson's talents were such that the Admiralty effectively ignored the fact that she was a woman and turned her into an honorary man (she was the only woman Junior Assistant) and paid her at much more than the top of the female pay scale in order that she would work for GC&CS. Her work on Italian diplomatic cryptosystems was a unique triumph: she made the recoveries and built the Italian books herself, and trained staff to be able to do as she did. Her insistence on going to Egypt so that the value of her work could best be realised by allied forces was another example of an indomitable desire to ensure that her skills weren't wasted.

 

I heartily recommend Jackie's biography of Emily Anderson, and have tried to be careful here not to reveal the fruits of her research. Her book makes clear that her achievements in musicology were as important as her work on cryptanalysis – and shows that she was able to use the same techniques in both fields; and the story of her family adds an unexpected element to her story. I have followed this story for six years since I was first in contact with Jackie and am astounded at the amount of new material she has been able to find.

 

Most importantly, the book confirms that Emily Anderson really was Britain's Greatest Female Codebreaker and deserves a much more prominent place in the Pantheon than she has enjoyed hitherto.