Jane Fawcett: Identifed message that led to Allied success in sinking the Bismarck

Jane Fawcett, who was a reluctant London debutante when she went to work at Bletchley Park, the home of British code-breaking during the second World War, and was credited with identifying a message that led to a great Allied naval success, the sinking of the battleship Bismarck. She has died at her home in Oxford, aged 95.

After the war, Fawcett had a career as a singer, and later as a preservationist. But she played her most significant historical role as an eagle-eyed decoder in British wartime intelligence.

In May 1941, the Bismarck, Germany's mightiest warship, had become a prime target after it sank one of England's most powerful vessels, the battle cruiser HMS Hood, in the battle of the Denmark Strait, between Iceland and Greenland. Much of the British fleet was in search of the Bismarck, which was presumed to have withdrawn to the North Atlantic around Norway.

Fawcett, then known as Jane Hughes, had just turned 20 and had been working for a time at Bletchley Park, the Buckinghamshire estate north of London where the intelligence operation known as the Government Code and Cypher School was located.

Thousands of young women worked there during the war; many, like Fawcett, had been recruited and hired from the upper social strata. They performed a variety of tasks assisting the mostly male chess geniuses, linguists, mathematicians and rogue intellectuals struggling to unscramble German military communications written in the complex disguise generated by so-called Enigma machines.

Enigma generated new codes daily, and though by 1941 the Allies had achieved some success in decrypting German missives, it remained labour-intensive hit-or-miss work that required vigilance by a chain of operatives. At Bletchley, Fawcett worked in Hut 6, where the focus was on breaking codes emitted by the German army and the Luftwaffe.

As described in a 2015 book, The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories, by Michael Smith, her station was in the decoding room, where she sat with a machine called a Typex, which had been modified to replicate an Enigma. When a daily Enigma code was broken, the keys to the code were passed along to Fawcett or another young woman in the decoding room. She would then plug the keys into her own Typex machine and type out the encoded messages.

The Typex machines fed out a decoded script on strips of paper tape, and the first thing Fawcett and her colleagues needed to do was check to see that the decoded messages were in fact in recognisable German; she had spent time in Switzerland, where she learned the language. The German messages were passed along to Hut 3 next door, where they were featured in intelligence reports.

On May 25th, 1941, Fawcett was among those in Hut 6 briefed on the search for the Bismarck.

“We all knew we’d got the fleet out in the Atlantic trying to locate her because she was the Germans’ most important, latest battleship and had better guns and so on than anybody else, and she’d already sunk the Hood,” Fawcett recalled in the book. “So it was vitally important to find where she was and try to get rid of her.”

She was just over an hour into her shift when she typed out a message from the main Luftwaffe Enigma. Reading the message, she recognised that a Luftwaffe general whose son was on the Bismarck had sought to find out if he was all right and had been informed that the ship, damaged in the previous battle, was on its way to France – to the port of Brest, in Brittany – for repair.

The message, passed instantly along the chain of command, was instrumental in finding the Bismarck, which was first spotted from the air by a seaplane and subsequently attacked by aircraft carrier torpedo bombers and swarmed by Royal Navy battleships and cruisers. It was sunk in the Atlantic west of Brest on May 27th.

Janet Carolin Hughes was born on March 4th, 1921 – probably in Cambridge, where her paternal grandmother lived, though her family lived in London. Her father, George Ravensworth Hughes, was a lawyer for the guild known as the Goldsmiths’ Company; her mother, the former Peggy Graham, did charitable work as a prison visitor.

As a girl, Jane aspired to be a ballet dancer and trained for a year at Sadler’s Wells, but at 17 she was deemed too tall for the company; as a consolation, her parents sent her to Switzerland, where she spent six months studying German. Her mother called her back for debutante season, insisting it was time for her to come out in society.

Resentful of this turn of events, she applied to work at Bletchley after receiving a letter from a school friend who was already there. It was the winter of 1940, and she was 18.

She signed the Official Secrets Act, compelling her to keep the nature of her work to herself, and was dispatched to Hut 6. She told her parents that she had joined the Foreign Office, though she was going only 50 miles or so from home.

"It was very bad accommodation," she recalled in The Debs of Bletchley Park. "Very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer. No insulation of any kind except for blackout curtains.

“We had horrid little trestle tables, which were very wobbly, and collapsible chairs, which were also very wobbly, very hard. There was very poor lighting; single light bulbs hanging down from the ceiling. So we were really in semi-darkness, which I expect is what the authorities wanted, better security.”

After the war, Fawcett trained as a singer at the Royal Academy of Music, and through the early 1960s she toured as a recital and opera singer. She joined the Victorian Society, formed to protect Victorian-era buildings, and won a famous battle against British Railways – which denounced her as “the furious Mrs Fawcett” – to save the St Pancras train station in London and, alongside it, the Midland Grand Hotel. She later taught building preservation at the Architectural Association School of Architecture.

Fawcett met her future husband, Edward Fawcett, known as Ted, at a luncheon arranged for young naval officers to meet young women; they married just after the war. Fawcett worked as director of publicity for the National Trust, a British charity devoted to conservation and protection of historic sites. He died in 2013.

Fawcett is survived by her son James, daughter, Carolin Comberti, and five grandchildren.

– New York Times News Service