Codebreaking pioneer
The work of Britain’s wartime cryptanalysts is now well known – but there is one woman whose contributions have gone largely unrecognised. JACKIE UÍ CHIONNA examines the life of the linguist and musicologist who became the nation’s most senior female code
In November 1962, at St John’s Parish Church, Hampstead, the funeral took place of a 72-yearold retired civil servant named Emily Anderson. An apparently unremarkable, rather shy woman, one neighbour tellingly observed that she was “very self-contained, and very discreet, and not interested in useless chatter”. There were many among the congregation who could testify to the usefulness of those characteristics in the secret double life that this former professor of German had lived since abandoning academia to enter what was euphemistically known as “a division of the Foreign Office”. Yet the evidence was there, hiding in plain sight, for laid side-by-side on her coffin were the two significant awards she received during her lifetime: the OBE conferred on her by King George VI in 1943 for “services to the forces and in connexion with military operations... GHQ, Middle East”, and the Order of Merit, First Class, bestowed on her by the Federal Republic of Germany in 1961 for her significant contribution to Beethoven scholarship.
The representative of the German embassy who attended the funeral was, like his government, completely unaware that the woman they had honoured for her work on translating Beethoven’s letters had been breaking their most secret codes for decades. Emily Anderson had lived two distinct, yet parallel lives – her public life, as an internationally respected music scholar, and her scrupulously guarded professional life, as the most senior female codebreaker in British intelligence for more than 30 years.
Anderson was born in 1891 in Galway, in the west of Ireland. Her father, Alexander Anderson, was a Cambridge-educated professor of physics, who became president of University College Galway (UCG). The second oldest of four siblings, Anderson grew up in the president’s residence of UCG, in the college quadrangle. Educated by a succession of Swiss governesses, she became fluent in German and French from a young age. But the studious girl with an aptitude for languages was also a talented
The German government was completely unaware that she’d been breaking its most secret codes for decades
pianist, and it was music that became the grand passion of her life. Graduating in 1911 with a first-class honours degree in modern languages, she went to Germany to pursue postgraduate studies at the universities of Berlin and Marburg.
At the outbreak of war in 1914, Anderson fled Marburg and began teaching languages at a girls’ boarding school in Barbados. In December 1916, her brother Alexander, serving with the Royal Flying Corps, was shot down over the Somme and taken prisoner by the Germans. Anderson returned to Galway in May 1917 to take up an appointment as professor of German, but she was also motivated by a desire to play her part in the war effort, and her father’s Cambridge connections led to her being “passed under the microscope” to assess her suitability for what was termed “military intelligence work”.
Anderson resigned her chair in July 1918, having agreed to serve for the remainder of the war, and became part of a secret group of female language lecturers known as the Hush WAACs, who were trained to decode the SIGINT (signals intelligence) messages sent in Morse code by the enemy. The work required mental gymnastics skills that defeated most linguists, but from the outset Anderson proved to be a quite exceptional codebreaker. When the war ended, she was one of only four women asked to stay on and form part of a new permanent SIGINT organisation, known as the Government Code & Cypher School (GC&CS) – the forerunner of today’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
From Bletchley to Cairo
Anderson’s metier was diplomatic intelligence (DIPLO), and in the interwar period she was acknowledged as the ‘Queen of Diplo’, becoming head of the Italian Diplomatic Section at the GC&CS. DIPLO was particularly important during these years, as intercepting diplomatic messages between embassies and politicians was key to understanding the intentions and ambitions of rival powers. Anderson was considered one of the top three female codebreakers in the world; the other two – Agnes Meyer Driscoll and Elizebeth Friedman – were both American.
Anderson moved to the GC&CS’s war station at Bletchley Park in August 1939, where she began a relationship with a female colleague, Dorothy Brooks, the two women sharing a billet in the village of Swanbourne. She
remained at Bletchley until July 1940, when the Italian threat in east and north Africa increased, and at her request she and Brooks were sent to a newly established joint Military and Air Force cryptologic bureau in Cairo, known as Combined Bureau Middle East (CBME), to be closer to Italian SIGINT traffic. As the position in Cairo related to military and not diplomatic codes, Anderson relinquished her position as head of Italian DIPLO, and never held the role again.
Anderson’s work in Cairo was the high point of her career. The SIGINT that she provided helped bring about Allied victory in the east Africa campaign and the loss of Italy’s colonial territories in the region. As a result, she was awarded an OBE in 1943. Of the role played by SIGINT, the man in charge of Britain’s East Africa Force, Lieutenant-General Sir Alan Cunningham, acknowledged that: “There can seldom in the history of war have been a campaign in which the commander was so continuously
served with accurate information of the enemy’s movements and dispositions.”
Disappearing from view
In 1943, with the Italians all but defeated, Anderson returned to London, where she worked on German, Italian and Hungarian codes at the GC&CS’s Berkeley Street office. Her relationship with Dorothy Brooks did not survive their time in Cairo; Brooks later married and had a son. Anderson retired in 1950 as the most senior female codebreaker in the British intelligence service, and began living with another woman in the mid-1950s, before that relationship, too, ended.
Remarkably, in spite of the intense pressures of her professional life, throughout her codebreaking career Anderson spent her spare time undertaking two significant
None of her many musicological friends ever suspected that she was anything other than what she professed to be
scholarly works. The first, an English translation of
The Letters of Mozart and his Family, was published in 1938. The second, a translation of The Letters of Beethoven, was published in 1961. None of her many musicological friends throughout the world ever suspected that the genteel Miss Anderson, usually attired in a smart silk blouse and well-cut suit, who visited archives in Berlin, Bonn, Vienna and Salzburg and spoke German like a native, was anything other than the “civil servant with the Foreign Office” that she professed to be.
Following her death from a heart attack on 26 October 1962, Anderson’s remains were cremated. Per her instructions there was to be no interment and no monument: her ashes were scattered on the crocus lawn at Golders Green Crematorium by the venue’s staff. As she had intended, all trace of this intensely private woman disappeared. All that remained was what she perceived as her greatest legacy: her collections of the letters of Mozart and Beethoven.
Jackie Uí Chionna teaches history at the University of Galway. She researched Anderson’s life for her recent book Queen of Codes: The Secret Life of Emily Anderson, Britain’s Greatest Female Codebreaker (Headline, 2023)