Unassuming, genteel, and unremarkable are just a few words that people throughout Emily Anderson’s life would use to describe her.
Those people did not realise that they had been in the presence of the nation’s most senior codebreaker during World War One and Two.
Emily Anderson’s Backstory
Anderson was born in Galway, west of Ireland, in 1891 to parents Emily Gertrude Binns and Alexander Anderson. She was the second-oldest of four siblings and grew up in the president’s residence at University College Galway (UCG), where her father was a Cambridge-educated professor of physics.
Growing up, Emily was educated by Swiss governesses, so over time she became fluent in both German and French. However, it wasn’t just languages that Emily had a knack for; she was also a passionate pianist, and music truly became her truest joy.
Graduating in 1911, Emily left UCG with a first-class honours degree in modern languages and pursued postgraduate studies in Germany at the universities of Berlin and Marburg.
Journey to Codebreaking
When the war broke out in 1914, Emily had to flee to Marburg, where she began teaching languages at a girls’ boarding school in Barbados.
Whilst there, in December 1916, her brother Alexander was serving with the Royal Flying Corps and unfortunately was shot down over the Somme and ended up being a prisoner of war by the Germans.
This disaster stirred something in Emily, and she wanted to contribute to the war effort instead of hiding, as a form of retribution for her brother.
So, researching her father’s Cambridge connections led her to be “passed under the microscope” and tested for her suitability for “military intelligence work.”
She passed and was invited to serve in the remainder of the war as part of a covert group of female language lecturers, also known as the “Hush WAACS”. These women were trained to decode SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) messages sent via Morse code by the enemy.
This work was not for the faint of heart, and Emily took on the mental gymnastics challenge. Working as part of the Hush WAACS meant dealing with cases that most linguists would struggle with, but not Emily Anderson.
She proved to be an exceptional code breaker, so when the First World War ended, she and the other women asked if they could stay on and become a permanent part of the new SIGINT organisation, the Government Code & Cypher School.
Emily Anderson, The Codebreaker
As time passed, Emily became adept in a specific area of decoding in diplomatic intelligence (DIPLO), to the point where she became known in the industry as the “Queen of DIPLO.”
Although this was an unofficial title, it led to obvious recognition in DIPLO, and she was promoted to Head of the Italian Diplomatic Section at the Government Code and Cypher School in London.
This work would be extremely important and potentially dangerous if she were found out. It included intercepting diplomatic messages between politicians and embassies to understand the intentions and ambitions of rival powers.
Emily Anderson was renowned and considered one of the top three female codebreakers (the other women were Agnes Meyer Driscoll and Elizebeth Friedman) not just in their department of DIPLO but worldwide.
In August 1939, she headed to Bletchley Park and remained there until 1940. This is where they saw the Italian threat in the east and in North Africa increasing.
Emily asked to be closer to the point where Italian signals were being intercepted. With that, she was stationed in the newly established Joint Military and Air Force Cryptologic Bureau in Cairo.
While in Cairo, Emily and her team decrypted Italian Signal Intelligence. In July 1943, King George VI recognised her wartime efforts by awarding her an OBE for her “services to the forces and in connection with military operations.”
However, because her position in Cairo was classified as military and not diplomatic decoding, she had to give up her position as Head of Italian DIPLO and never return to it.
Emily Anderson’s work in Cairo was the highlight of her career. Her SIGINT team contributed to the Allied victory in the East African campaign, which led to the loss of Italy’s colonial territories.
In May 1943, Emily returned to London from Cairo. From there, she worked on German, Italian, and Hungarian codes until her retirement in 1950. She retired as the most senior codebreaker in the British intelligence service.
Emily Anderson And Her Queerness
Emily was never married, and in some respects, due to her job, it would have been too difficult to do so anyway, given the discretion and secrecy of her role. However, her sexuality is something that has continued to raise an eyebrow.
Emily was a very private person, and because of the time period, it was almost impossible for queer people to live openly, so we can never know for sure what her identity was when it came to her being a part of the LGBTQ+ community.
We do know that when she moved to Bletchley Park in August 1939, she began a close relationship with a female colleague, Dorothy Brooks. They were so close that she moved out of her billet accommodation (temporary accommodation for soldiers) and shared a billet with Dorothy, which was not required.
Their relationship meant so much to Emily that she even requested that they travel and live together in Cairo, where they remained until Emily moved back to London in 1943.
Unfortunately, Dorothy Brooks and Emily Anderson later “broke up,” and Dorothy went on to marry a man and have a child, leaving Emily to move back alone. (We believe she was heartbroken because, come on! There may not be solid “evidence”, but our “gay-dar” is going OFF!)
When Emily retired in the mid-1950s, she was reported to have lived with another woman for a while, but that relationship also ended for unknown reasons.
It must have been very difficult to be a queer person at this time, not even to mention that homosexual behaviours were seen as a criminal offence in the UK.
The amount of internal and external homophobia that had been swirling around during this period must have had a detrimental and lasting effect on the longevity of same-sex relationships.
A Love of Music
Throughout the epic code-breaking, secrecy and accolades, Emily had one unwavering passion that never ceased: her love of music.
She somehow found the time, even with the immense pressures of her career, to work on publishing translated versions of various pieces.
She started in 1923 with Benedetto Croce’s Goethe, a work written in Italian about the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as she felt that her Italian, in her own words, “wasn’t her best language.”
So, what started as a skill-honing passion project was published in 1923. This ignited a love for research, writing, and taking those code-breaking skills to the next level.
Next, she turned her attention to tracking down, translating and publishing all the letters of the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart wrote his letters in German and Italian and used different codes within his passages that only his recipients could decipher, until Emily Anderson came along!
She described them as having “some passages which are curiously involved, words written backwards, phrases reversed, and many of them untidily written, larded with erasures and splashed with ink-dots”.
This work would have taken a long time to complete, not only to track down but also to translate back into English. Some of the pieces and letters even required her to travel extensively to obtain them.
Considering her job at the time and the fact that it was the 1930s, this feat was far from easy to achieve. However, we can bet she most certainly used the comprehensive contact list she had collected over the years from her secretive line of work to help her with this task.
In 1938, Emily Anderson completed and published three volumes of the English translation of “The Letters of Mozart and His Family.” These works made her famous for a completely different reason, which many people assumed was her ‘only’ accomplishment. (If only they knew!)
After the success of this piece, she started her next project, translating the complete letters of Ludwig van Beethoven. However, this project had to take a backseat for a while due to World War II.
She finally finished and published this second passion project in 1961.
Anderson’s Later Life and Death
In her later life, none of her musical friends that she had made had any idea of her wider accomplishments. The Emily Anderson they knew was a quiet, unassuming lady in a silk blouse and tailored suit who would only refer to her other career as “being a civil servant with the Foreign Office.” Neighbours described her as “self-contained” and apparently “unassuming.”
She had been leading a double life. She was the most renowned code breaker of her generation and contributed to the success of both World Wars.
She died on 26th October 1962, at the age of 72, from a heart attack. The funeral took place at St. John’s Parish Church, Hampstead. Even in death, her double life was overlooked, as hidden in plain sight, beside her in her coffin, were her two significant awards: her OBE from King George VI and the Order of Merit, First-Class, bestowed to her by the Federal Republic of Germany in 1961 for her contribution to Beethoven scholarship.
Emily Anderson was cremated and, per her instructions, had no monument or interment; her ashes were scattered on the lawn at Golders Green Crematorium by the staff.
Her death was, as her life was, extremely private and her true achievements and accolades were lost to time, with her only true love left for people to acknowledge her for, her passion for music.
A Codebreaking Pioneer
Although she may not have wanted her “other life” on display, what she has done for her country should be known to the world. We should remember Emily Anderson not only as a musical genius but also as the incredibly talented codebreaker and wartime hero she became.
This story is another example of the contributions LGBTQ+ people have made to their country and the world.
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