Jane Fawcett obituary

It was typical of Jane Fawcett’s forthright style that after being introduced in 2014 to the Duchess of Cambridge, who was visiting Bletchley Park’s refurbished Hut 6, where Germany’s wartime Enigma ciphers were broken, she refused to let go of the duchess’s hand until she had told her how important the women who worked there had been in winning the second world war.

Fawcett, who has died aged 95, was one of thousands of young women recruited to work at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, during the war, carrying out every role from clerical work to codebreaking. It was not who, or what, you were at Bletchley that mattered; it was what you were capable of. Fawcett was proud of having made her own contribution in May 1941 when the Royal Navy was trying to track down the German navy’s most up-to-date battleship, Bismarck, in the north Atlantic.

The Admiralty had not believed the Bletchley Park analysts who told them that the Bismarck was heading for France until shortly after Fawcett came on shift in Hut 6. She was just 20. Working as a decoder, typing what seemed like gibberish into a British Typex cipher machine modified to operate like the German Enigma machine, she realised that the message emerging in German revealed that the Bismarck was heading for the French port of Brest. It was this vital piece of information, confirming what the Bletchley analysts had been saying, which allowed the Royal Navy to track down and sink the Bismarck before she reached French shores.

She was born Janet Caroline Hughes in London, the daughter of George, the clerk of the Goldsmiths’ livery company, and his wife, Margaret (nee Graham), and was educated at Miss Ironside’s school for “young ladies” in South Kensington, which saw no value in young women taking exams or going to university. In an early display of independence, she dropped the last letters of both her given names and thereafter was known only as Jane.

She won a scholarship to Rada, but turned it down to train as a dancer under Ninette de Valois at Sadler’s Wells, where she shared studios with the young Margot Fonteyn. But after landing a part in Swan Lake, Fawcett was told by De Valois: “Your back’s too long and you’re too tall. We can’t use you.”

Her parents sent her and a friend to Switzerland to learn German under the tutelage of a doctor in the Zurich suburb of Rüschlikon, but, deciding that it was too boring, they decamped to St Moritz. Jane was then forced reluctantly to endure “the season” in London, the year when young upper-class women in their late teens attended a series of parties, and events such as Wimbledon and Ascot, and were presented to the Queen.

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She was recruited to Bletchley along with a number of other debutantes deemed unlikely, by the nature of their background, to spill the beans. That idiosyncratic approach soon collapsed under the immense pressure of breaking first the German and Italian codes and then those of the Japanese, and by the end of the war two-thirds of the more than 10,000 people working at Bletchley were women drawn from all social backgrounds.

Mavis Batey, one of the leading codebreakers and a close friend of Fawcett, would later point out that it was a place where “a girl of 19 with a bright idea would be encouraged to take it forward, long before any official equality for women”.

In 1947, Jane married Ted Fawcett, a former Royal Navy officer whom she had met during the war. She studied singing at the Royal Academy of Music while having their two children. “I went to my final exam with one of my children inside me and the other one asleep in a carrycot and the examiners kept asking me if I wanted to sit down because I was seven months’ pregnant,” she said.

She sang professionally for 15 years, undertaking operatic and recital work; her most prominent roles were Scylla in Scylla et Glaucus and trouser roles such as Octavian in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and Cherubino in Le Nozze di Figaro. But the strain of touring while bringing up her children led her to quit and become the secretary of the Victorian Society, set up by Nikolaus Pevsner and others to preserve Britain’s historic buildings.

She and Pevsner, backed by John Betjeman and Prince Philip, waged a successful campaign against British Rail’s attempts to demolish London’s great Victorian rail terminuses. BR bosses dubbed her “the furious Mrs Fawcett” and she always regarded saving St Pancras station and its Midland Grand Hotel as being one of her most important achievements.

Fawcett stepped down in 1976. She was appointed MBE for her services to conservation and elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. She then set up a groundbreaking building conservation course at the Architectural Association and was pleased to discover that one of her students had recently been commissioned to work on saving the historic buildings at Bletchley Park.

Ted died in 2013. Fawcett is survived by her son, James, and daughter, Carolin.