Jane Fawcett

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Jane Fawcett MBE (born Janet Caroline Hughes ; 4. March 1921 in Cambridge - 21st May 2016 in Oxford ) was a British Codebrecherin , singer and monument nurse . She was best known for her role in deciphering a message that led to the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck . From 1963 to 1976 she was secretary of the Victorian Society . She wrote and edited several works including The Future of the Past , Seven Victorian Architects , The Village in History, and Save the City .

Personal life

Janet Carolin (or Caroline) Hughes was born in Cambridge on March 4, 1921. She grew up in London, attended “Miss Ironside's School” in Kensington , trained as a ballet dancer and was accepted into the Royal Ballet School . As a young woman of 17 she was told she was "too tall" to become a professional dancer and her promising ballet career ended. She was then sent to Zurich to learn German and shortly afterwards moved to the St. Moritz ski area .

After six months, her parents asked her to return home to "come out" as a debutante . She found this lifestyle boring, a "complete waste of time," and was relieved when a friend invited her to apply for the Bletchley Park project.

During World War II , Hughes met Royal Navy officer Edward "Ted" Fawcett (September 22, 1920 - October 19, 2013) and married him shortly thereafter. Together they had two children, Carolin, an opera singer, and James, an experimental neurologist.

Fawcett died on May 21, 2016 at the age of 95 at her Oxford home.

Military service

In 1940, at the age of 18, she was interviewed by cryptanalyst Philip Stuart Milner-Barry and took part in the secret code breaking project at Bletchley Park. She joined the group of women in Bletchley Park called "Debs of Bletchley Park" because they were women recruited from upper-class debutantes to work in secret as part of the Enigma Project. Fawcett was assigned to Hut 6 , a decryption room in which only women worked on decrypting the radio messages encrypted by the Army and Air Force with the Enigma I. The conditions in the dimly lit, barely heated and poorly ventilated rooms were poor and the women worked long hours under extreme pressure. In Hut 6 , Fawcett and the other women received the daily Enigma keys and typed them into their own Typex machines. They then tried to determine whether the messages contained recognizable German.

On May 25, 1941, Fawcett and several other women were informed of the search for the German battleship Bismarck . Shortly afterwards, she deciphered a message relating to the Bismarck, which precisely described her current position and destination in France. Based on this information, the Bismarck was attacked by the Royal Navy and sunk on May 27th. This was the code breakers' first significant victory that demonstrated the value of the project.

Her work did not become known until decades later, in the 1990s, as it was classified under the UK's Official Secrets Act . Fawcett said they were almost ashamed for just doing Bletchley, compared to the Navy's publicly recognized work. Then when their hard and exhausting work became known and they were asked to speak about it, it felt pretty overwhelming to them. Fawcett said she had never told anyone about her job, not even her husband. Her grandchildren were very surprised.

Fawcett was one of the people interviewed by newspaper reporter Michael Smith for his 2015 book The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories .

Singing career

Fawcett's service in Bletchley ended in May 1945. After the war ended, she married Edward Fawcett, took his surname and trained at the Royal Academy of Music . From the end of the war until the early 1960s, she was an opera singer for 15 years. She played Scylla in Jean-Marie Leclair's opera Scylla et Glaucus and the Sorceress in Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell . As a singer, she also gave solo concerts.

Monument preservation

In 1963, Fawcett assumed a senior position with the Victorian Society, which was founded in 1957 as a historic preservation organization dedicated to the preservation of Victorian architecture and works. As their secretary, she was effectively the general manager and worked closely with the director, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner , to save many buildings from demolition.

For her role in the fight with British Rail for the preservation of historic railway stations, it was "the furious Mrs Fawcett" ( the angry woman Fawcett called). In 1967 she played a key role in maintaining London's St Pancras train station and the neo-Gothic Midland Grand Hotel, now the St. Pancras Renaissance London Hotel . She also saved much of London's Whitehall from destruction through her work .

Her husband also joined the preservation industry in 1965, first joining the Garden History Society and then the National Trust in 1969 full-time.

In 1976 Jane Fawcett was appointed to the Order of the British Empire (MBE) and stepped down from active leadership.

In later years she taught monument conservation at the Architectural Association School of Architecture .

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fawcett - Deaths Announcements. In: The Daily Telegraph . May 1, 2016, accessed September 3, 2019 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h Bruce Weber: Jane Fawcett, British Decoder Who Helped Doom the Bismarck, Dies at 95. In: The New York Times . May 28, 2016, accessed September 3, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Obituary: Jane Fawcett: The deb who sank the Bismarck. In: The Economist. June 4, 2016, accessed September 3, 2019 .
  4. ↑ a b c d Julia Llewellyn Smith: The Deb of Bletchley Park: 'There was always a crisis, a lot of stress and a lot of excitement'. In: The Daily Telegraph . January 10, 2015, accessed September 3, 2019 .
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g h Jane Fawcett, Bletchley decoder-obituary. In: The Daily Telegraph . May 25, 2016, accessed September 3, 2019 .
  6. ^ A b c Jan Woudstra: Edward Fawcett obituary. In: The Guardian . November 21, 2013, accessed September 3, 2019 .
  7. ^ A b c d e Matt Schudel: Jane Fawcett, British code-breaker during World War II, dies at 95 ( June 2, 2016 memento in the Internet Archive ) In: The Washington Post , accessed September 3, 2019.
  8. ↑ Michael Smith: The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories . Aurum Press, 2015, ISBN 978-1-78131-387-9 .
  9. ↑ Miss Jane Caroline Hughes (Fawcett). In: Bletchley Park. Retrieved September 3, 2019 .
  10. ↑ a b c Jane Fawcett (1921 - 2016): Decoder on the trail of the Bismark. In: Daily Express . May 28, 2016, accessed September 3, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Fawcett, Jane
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hughes, Janet Carolin (maiden name); Hughes, Jane; Fawcett, Janet Carolin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British code breaker, opera singer and conservationist
DATE OF BIRTH March 4, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Cambridge
DATE OF DEATH May 21, 2016
Place of death Oxford