History's Secret Heroes: Series 2: The Enigmatic Emily Anderson

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In November 1962, mourners gathered at St.

John's Parish Church in Hampstead, North London.

They were attending the funeral of Emily Anderson.

It was packed to capacity.

There were absolutely no seats available.

There was a marvellous opera singer.

It was full of music.

of a very, very high caliber.

Anderson had never married or had children.

The only member of her birth family who attended the service that day was a cousin.

In the main, the congregation was made up of those who had admired and loved her from the world of classical music.

She was a musicologist, she translated the letters of Beethoven and Mozart, and she had been a professor of German at a university.

But at the same time, everybody in that room would have only known a part of Emily's life, not the whole.

Anderson had lived in Hampstead, where neighbours thought they had the measure of her.

She was a woman who had no time for fripperies, who had no time for anything that was useless, basically.

She was very business-like, friendly, but very distant and self-contained.

She attended church and went to concerts, but beyond that, she remained apart from Hampstead's cosy society scene.

One woman noted that she had looked older than her 71 years.

And in a sense, that's a very prescient observation because I'm sure the stress of her life and what she had to do probably did age her prematurely.

The achievements of her life in music were on display.

Sitting on her coffin, open on her coffin, were two boxes, which were velvet-lined boxes, which contained the two awards that she'd been actually given in the course of her life, one of which was the Order of Merit First Class, which had been conferred on her only a year previously by the German government for her work on translating the letters of Beethoven.

The musicians and academics in attendance might have been more surprised by Anderson's other distinction.

Also sitting on her coffin was another box, which was the OBE that she'd been given in 1943 for military intelligence work in Cairo.

Anderson, it transpired, had played a crucial role in the Allied victory in World War II.

There were some civil servants and and intelligence officers at the funeral, but most of her friends had no idea about that part of her life.

And none of them knew that she'd lived this dual life, that she'd lived this double life, one of which was in the public domain, and the second she never ever spoke of to anybody.

They had no idea that she was Britain's top female codebreaker.

I'm Helena Boncarter, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Secret Heroes.

True stories of deception, acts of resistance, and courage from World War II.

The enigmatic Emily Anderson

My interest in history has always been in the personal.

I like personal stories and I like figuring things out.

Jackie Ikeana is the author of Queen of Codes and is a historian based at the University of Galway.

But I'm a particular, you know, murder mystery addict.

I'll watch anything, Lewis, Endeavour, Marple.

I'll watch it all basically ikeana first came across emily anderson when she was working in an archive i opened up a file which is full of regular documents people's resignation letters or promotion letters and there was a letter from emily anderson it was dated in july 1918 towards the end of the first world war Anderson had addressed it to the governing body of University College Calway, where she was professor of German.

She was saying I wish to resign my post and nothing remarkable about that.

But inside the file there was a secret sort of flap and I had a rummage in that and there was a second letter and it was a letter that Emily Anderson had written to her friend who was the college registrar.

He was a priest.

In this second letter Anderson disclosed the real reason she was giving up her post.

And it was an extraordinary letter because it said, I feel I have been called to do this work.

I feel I can do it.

I'm to be sent to London, trained and then sent to France to break military intelligence codes.

And I was just thinking, what?

Where did this come from?

This discovery set historian Jackie Ikeana on a path of investigation that would consume her life for several years and reveal a truly remarkable World War II hero.

She had many questions about Emily Anderson.

I was also trying to think outside the box, as Inspector Morse might do and tried to figure out well how did she get here?

Why was she chosen?

Who recruited her?

How was she trained?

How did she come to be as good as she was?

And why have we not heard anything about her?

It's unclear exactly how Anderson was recruited but her suitability for a career in intelligence was no mystery.

She in a sense was born and trained without knowing it to be a code breaker because her father was a physics professor so therefore he was good at mathematics as well as physics so she inherited that from him.

He was also a very keen linguist so she inherited her love of languages from him too

and she of course loved music.

So when you take those three things together, linguistics, languages, music and mathematics, there's the code breaker there.

There's the perfect code breaker with all sides of the brain working at the same time looking for repetitions and patterns.

Anderson had been born in Galway on the west coast of Ireland in 1891.

In a city where most people were Catholic, her family's Presbyterianism set them apart.

Her father was president of the local college, now the University of Galway.

She lived in this college quadrangle somewhat of an isolated life.

And because of that, because she didn't have many friends outside of her family and the university community, I think she became very inward looking, very self-reliant, very self-contained, very private.

When she went to the university herself, Anderson read modern languages, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

After graduating at the top of her class, she continued her studies in Germany.

So she probably had

a stellar academic career ahead of her until she married and had to give up her position.

But of course that was never going to happen.

On the outbreak of war in 1914, she returned to Ireland and took up a teaching job back at the college in Galway where she had grown up.

At the age of just 26, she was promoted to a professorship.

When the offer of joining the British Intelligence Service arrived though, she seized the opportunity to embark upon a new life in England.

She really didn't want to be back living with her parents at that age and what is there for me apart from marriage and family and she didn't want that.

The Allies desperately needed linguists to work in code breaking.

They had run out of men at this stage because the war was well into progress and they needed women to do the decoding.

During the First World War, diplomatic messages were sent over the wireless.

Anyone could listen in.

The only way to send a message securely was to encrypt it, manually translating it into a code.

The recipient would have a copy of the code too, so they could translate it back into readable text.

And that had to be done and changed regularly because once somebody had broken your code, you had to come up with a new one so that your messages could be sent again.

And the volume of messages was such that codes were changing all the time.

And they desperately needed somebody who could look at a sheet of paper of

a mixture of letters and numbers and try to make out A what language it was in, in, b what was being said, and see if this code was going to last, how many more messages can we decode in that code before they change the code and we have to start all over again.

After the end of the First World War, British politicians were unnerved by developments such as the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia.

Britain, therefore, continued its surveillance of foreign powers.

A new agency pooled the resources of the Army, the Royal Navy and the new Royal Air Force.

It would be called the Government Code and Cipher School.

In fact, it was the precursor to what we now know as GCHQ or General Communications headquarters.

Most of its posts were filled by military men, but an approach was made to four women.

And Emily was one of those four.

And when they joined, the assumption was that they'd be happy to just doing what they had been doing during the war, doing their duty, being happy to play second fiddle in terms of their promotion prospects to their male colleagues.

But Emily Anderson remember was giving up a position as a professor to take this job when they offered it to her.

And she pretty much shocked them, I think, by saying, yeah, I might take the job, but number one, you have to give me a career track.

I need to be able to be promoted.

So I want an official title.

And number two, I want you to pay me an equivalent money to what the men are getting.

The officials may have been shocked, but they could not lose Anderson.

She was at this point one of the highest ranking women, not just in the intelligence service, but in the civil service as a whole.

By day, Anderson worked at the Foreign Office, breaking codes.

In the evenings and at weekends, she worked on musicology.

Because she was a linguist, those friends who knew she worked for the civil service imagined she must be doing a humdrum translation work.

It made sense to them that an unmarried woman with no family would take on extra busy work to fill her time.

Between the wars, when Italy turned to fascism, Anderson broadened her remit from working solely in the German language to working in Italian as well.

Her command of both languages meant she could decrypt entire conversations between what would become Axis powers.

So she's listening in on what's happening between the politicians, the political leaders, the diplomats in the various embassies around the world.

She was listening to what the embassy in Berlin was saying to the embassy in Rome.

So she's listening in on conversations between representatives, or in fact, even actual conversations between Hitler and Mussolini, for example.

So she knows before anyone else what Mussolini's intentions are, what he was leaning towards.

She knew what Hitler was thinking.

The intelligence that Anderson gathered in this period helped British intelligence to prepare for another world war.

The threat of war loomed over Europe once more.

There were fears it could break out out at any time.

Air raids on London might be imminent.

The government code and cipher school began to search for a location away from the capital where codebreakers could work and live, safe from any potential bombing.

Among those earmarked for evacuation to the countryside was Emily Anderson.

So she and all of her senior colleagues were told, have a bag ready, you need to be ready to drop everything at a moment's notice.

You will receive a phone call or a telegram which will say Anti-Flow is not well.

And that was the code word, mobilise, get yourself to Bletchley.

Bletchley Park was a country house in Buckinghamshire, about 50 miles northwest of London.

It was conveniently located on a railway line serving both Oxford and Cambridge, university towns where many academics who worked on code-breaking lived or worked.

The Secret Intelligence Service arrived there in 1938 under cover as Captain Ridley's shooting party.

In reality, Captain Ridley was an SIS officer.

Anderson was in the second cohort of intelligence officers to arrive at Bletchley and was billeted nearby with a local family.

I think GCHU only began to articulate this relatively recently, but the idea that great minds don't think alike,

that things work so much better when you have a range of personalities and types around the table.

Tony Cromer is GCHQ's historian.

He's researched the histories of many Bletchley codebreakers, including such figures as Alan Turing.

Turing, so famously suffering from hay fever, wore his gas mask when he went cycling around the countryside because the filter in his gas mask was something that would stop the pollen getting through.

He had a bicycle that he used to get to and from Bletchley.

It had a loose chain apparently and when he was cycling to Bletchley he knew how many rotations it would take before the chain would fall off so he would count them in his head and then he would reverse pedal just before he got to the pivotal point when the chain was about to fall off.

Somebody else who sort of finished his cup of coffee while he was outside by the lake and threw his cup and saucer into the lake.

Another code breaker, Dilly Knox, worked closely with Anderson on Hungarian codes.

And his favorite method of decoding secret messages was to sit in the bathtub.

So he had a bathtub in his office and he would sit in the bathtub and think.

It helped him to think.

And he would break these codes and his secretary would come in and an assistant would come in with various different transcripts and would have to sort of avert their gaze while they were dropping this stuff off to himself in the bath.

And some of his colleagues recalled him on one occasion absent-mindedly smoking his pipe and putting his sandwich into the pipe instead of tobacco.

He was in such a visionary stage of trying to figure something out.

Now

there are these stories but it would be very wrong just to think oh it was just a collection of oddballs.

You need I think to turn it round and say here was a place that really could harness skills of idiosyncratic people who wouldn't have easily fitted in in other places.

Emily was a gay woman, and for her, the fact that she was gay was not exceptional at Bletchley.

There were many people who were.

Commander Alastair Denniston, who led Bletchley Park, once said, What I want are

people with these skills, and I'm not really worried about what they do in their own time and in their private lives.

In their first year at Bletchley, Anderson's focus was on Africa and the Middle East.

Benito Mussolini was advancing on multiple fronts.

Italy had taken Libya in North Africa, Eritrea in East Africa, and neighboring Abyssinia, which is now Ethiopia.

In Europe, Italy had also annexed Albania and was preparing to attack Greece.

Then, in June 1940, Italy declared war on Britain.

Italian forces occupying Libya posed an immediate threat to British Imperial forces stationed in Egypt, which included Indians, Australians and New Zealanders.

These troops guarded a great prize, the Suez Canal.

The canal allowed oil from the Persian Gulf to be transported efficiently to Europe without having to circumnavigate the whole of Africa.

The British Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force all ran on oil.

If that supply was cut off, the consequences for the British war effort would be disastrous.

Anderson knew it would be difficult to break the Italian codes quickly enough, not just because of their complexity, but because communications were hampered by the war.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to get messages from East Africa and North Africa back to Bletchley.

They were intercepting those messages and they were changing their codes frequently.

Anderson felt it would save crucial time if she herself went to Cairo.

It would be dangerous, but she would be much closer to the source of the messages and able to listen into the wireless communications herself.

And she went to Commander Denniston and said, I want to go there and I want to go there soon.

Commander Denniston obliged.

So she was really taking her life in her hands when they went by boat from Liverpool to Durban in South Africa and then moved their way up the entire length of Africa to Cairo.

The journey took five weeks.

Anderson travelled with their partner, Dorothy Brooks, herself a talented codebreaker.

Once they reached Cairo in the summer of 1940, Anderson and Brooks helped to establish the Combined Bureau Middle East.

Soon after they arrived, the Italians invaded Egypt.

They were able to take some territory in the west, but were held back by their own indecisive command.

For now, the Suez Canal was safe, though no one knew how long for.

It was essential for Anderson to keep decoding access plans.

If you walked into her office, what you would have probably seen was a woman sat at a table with a lot of squared paper and different coloured pencils.

You were sitting at a desk faced with this blank sheet of paper.

Lives were on the line.

Break it, you'll save lives.

Don't break it, you could possibly be responsible for the death of millions.

Anderson's work required not only an extraordinary level of numeracy and linguistic prowess, but considerable ingenuity.

So let's imagine you want to send a message saying,

I will be at the rendezvous at 10 o'clock tomorrow morning.

You would go to your code book and you would see I will be

would have a value.

Let's give it a number.

1234

at

5892

the rendezvous 6429,

tomorrow, etc., etc., that each word or group of words is represented by four figures.

So that in itself immediately disguises the message.

Anderson's team cracked one code after another, revealing battle plans from Libya and Ethiopia.

They even intercepted reports sent back to Rome by the Italian Viceroy in Addis Ababa.

In the mountainous regions of Ambaralaki came the end of the war in Abyssinia.

On the precipitous heights where fierce battles were fought, the last remnants of the Italian army under the Duke of Aosta capitulated.

It's a great triumph for all the imperial forces who took part in the campaign for the liberation of a stolen empire.

It played a crucial part

in

the speed with which the Italians were defeated in East Africa.

Emily Anderson was providing the information to the British command about what the Italians were doing and how they were doing it that enabled the British to regroup and then to halt the advances and then to advance themselves, force the Italians onto the defensive and eventually defeat them in the East African campaign.

As a result of the intelligence gathered and decoded by Anderson and others, Mussolini's armed forces were constantly undermined and the Axis was weakened.

The Allies defeated Mussolini's forces in North Africa, took Sicily and bombed Rome.

Eventually, in July 1943, Mussolini himself was ousted.

He was later rescued from imprisonment in a Nazi raid.

He returned to Italy as a puppet of the Nazis, his power broken.

After three years in Cairo, Anderson returned to England in 1943.

She received an OPE for demolishing the Italian military machine in East and North Africa.

Look what she achieved.

Look what she was able to do, simply because she refused to compromise.

She saw what needed to be done and did it.

The details of what had happened at Bletchley, though, remained classified until 1974.

You know, GCHQ is a secret intelligence organisation.

That means that a lot of what happens inside will never ever be known outside.

Not one single rumour of a code-breaking operation there ever leaked back to the Germans.

They never suspected it.

And they were, as a result of that, called the geese that laid the golden egg and never cackled.

On the 28th of April 1945, Mussolini tried to escape over the Swiss border, but was captured and assassinated.

Two days later, Adolf Hitler killed himself.

The war in Europe was effectively over.

Anderson retired from the intelligence services in 1951.

After that, she spent her days translating the letters of the German composer, Ludwig van Beethoven.

She said, in fact, at one point that she, and it was only five people in the world who could read Beethoven's handwriting.

He wrote a scrawl that was like a drunken spider coming across a page.

This is talking about music from London.

In 1961, Anderson appeared on the BBC Home Service programme talking about music.

Also taking part in the programme is Emily Anderson, whose life work has been the translation of the letters of Mozart, which came out some years ago, and this new edition of the letters of Beethoven.

Anderson was interviewed by the musicologist Dennis Stevens.

He talks to her about what was her inspiration, and she talks about being a young girl in Galway and being sent to Germany to learn German.

We detested it, but we were put into German families and made to talk German music.

And then he talks to her about the handwriting.

And when he gets to that section of the interview, he says it's very difficult handwriting to decipher, isn't it?

I think so.

I've never come across a handwriting

where one has first to make out every single letter of the alphabet, the form it takes in his handwriting, and then its combination with other

letters, particularly consonants.

And she begins to talk about looking at it over and over again and deciding: is it this?

No, it's not this, and over is it this?

No.

And it suddenly comes like a flash what the word is.

And she's pretty much indicating that she's using her decoding skills in order to decode the handwriting of Beethoven.

Of course, I see comparing the printed version with the original.

I start in that.

Use the printed version as a crib.

I see.

But what she didn't know, and what the two of them are clearly finding out in the course of the interview, is that Dennis Stevens himself had been a codebreaker.

So he's using word like crib, and she uses word like crib, and he's clearly thinking to himself, this woman was not a foreign office official.

She was definitely a codebreaker and likely a very good one.

Beethoven and Emily Anderson were respectively reviewed and interviewed by Dennis Stevens.

And this is John Amis saying, goodbye from London, for that's the end of today's programme of talking about music.

Except for a PS by Richard Strauss.

In the recording, there is no hint of this that anyone outside the world of codebreaking would notice.

Under the Official Secrets Act, both Anderson and Stevens would have committed to remaining completely silent on the subject of what they had done for 60 years.

Neither.

would have broken that bond.

But it's the one and only interview that Emily ever gave, and I think it was probably the only time in her life that she gave any sort of a window into her secret professional life as a codebreaker.

When Jackie Ikiona was finishing her biography of Emily Anderson, she wanted to visit her grave to pay tribute to her work.

That proved to be impossible.

There was no funeral pyre, there was no funeral urn, there was no headstone.

She had left very strict instructions that her ashes were to be taken out and scattered on the crocus lawn at Golders Green crematorium with nobody else in attendance.

And I remember hearing that from the very kind lady in Golders Green who telephoned me to give me that news.

And I think I probably sat there for about a half an hour afterwards.

I couldn't move because I just thought, yes, of course you did, Emily.

That's absolutely what you did.

You wouldn't have done anything else.

No fuss, I'll do it.

And then we move on and there's no trace.

Next time on History's Secret Heroes, Manfred Gantz joins an elite secret unit of Jewish commandos to take on the Nazis with advanced fighting and counterintelligence skills.

But can he save his own family?

He thought of his parents and he wanted to be with them again and he wanted to get them to safety.

Manfred Gantz, an ex-troop.

Hi, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is Young Again, my podcast for BBC Radio 4, where I get the chance to meet some of the world's most noteworthy and intriguing people and ask them the question: if you knew then what you know now, what would you tell yourself?

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