Born: 17 March 1891, Ireland
Died: 26 October 1962
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Turlough O’Riordan and Linde Lunney. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Anderson, Emily (1891–1962), academic, code breaker, musicologist and translator, was born on 17 March 1891 at Taylor’s Hill, Galway, second daughter of the four children of Alexander Anderson, professor of natural philosophy and later president of Queen’s College Galway/University College Galway (QCG/UCG), and Emily Gertrude Anderson (née Binns) from Co. Limerick, daughter of a bank manager in Galway. (Anderson’s siblings were Elsie (1890–1957), Alexander (1895–1967), who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1920 and changed his name around 1924 to Arthur Andrews, and Helen (1902–37).) The Andersons were presbyterian and lived in the quadrangle at the heart of the university. Anderson’s mother was active in reform organisations and, with her daughters, attended local suffrage meetings; they were founder members of the Connaught Women’s Franchise League in Galway in January 1913. In 1920 Alexander Anderson published the first public suggestion of the existence of black holes (‘On the advance of the perihelion of a planet, and the path of a ray of light in the gravitation field of the sun’) in The Philosophical Magazine.
Anderson was educated privately by a Swiss governess who was fluent in French and German. She learned piano from an early age and at fourteen commenced a series of visits to Germany, before entering QCG in 1908; she won a literary scholarship after an exceptional performance in her first-year examinations, when she placed first in English, French, German and Latin; in 1909 and 1910 she held the college’s Browne scholarship, and in 1911 graduated Bachelor of Arts (BA) in French and German. She then specialised in German and undertook postgraduate work at the universities of Berlin and Marburg, likely working towards her doctorate; her studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the first world war. In 1915 Anderson was appointed modern languages mistress at Queen’s College, Barbados. After working there for two years, she returned to Galway in 1917. She was the first person to hold the newly established separate chair of German in UCG, and radically modernised and extended the course to incorporate middle and old high German, literature and phonetics, and to include more works on the history of the language and its literature.
Anderson was approached in autumn 1917 about joining the British war effort. Although the manner of her recruitment remains unknown, her linguistic acumen and knowledge of mathematics, as well as her family’s cultural identification with the United Kingdom (her brother fought in the war and was interned in a German prisoner-of-war camp in November 1917) probably contributed to her decision. Her father’s friendship with Sir Joseph Larmour, the esteemed Cambridge University mathematician (where many intelligence operatives were recruited), may also have been a factor. In July 1918 she moved to London and joined MI1(b), the British army’s cryptanalytic bureau. There, alongside a small group of women code breakers assembled within the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Anderson excelled at ‘attacking’ foreign diplomatic cable traffic, utilising her cultural knowledge and linguistic and mathematical skills. Between 1918 and 1920 Anderson divided her time between Galway, retaining her position at the university, and London, where she continued to work with MI1(b) and the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS). The GC&CS, established in November 1919, collected expert cryptanalysts who had worked on signal and military intelligence during the first world war. In January 1920 she formally joined GC&CS, resigning from UCG in June. Notionally a ‘junior assistant’ with the Foreign Office, Anderson worked on the cracking and analysis of Italian diplomatic communications. In 1927 she became head of the Italian diplomatic section, where she recruited and managed a team of expert linguists.
In addition to her work with the Foreign Office, in 1923 Anderson published an English translation of Benedetto Croce’s Goethe from Italian, which had drawn extensively on German sources. Engaging with German sources and their Italian translations, this work not only refined Anderson’s linguistic skills but also undoubtedly aided her cryptographic work. As Goethe had known both Mozart and Beethoven, it also served her later musicological research. In effect, she had commenced a dual life. Publicly she was a translator and musicologist, soon to be internationally recognised; her daily work as a leading cryptanalyst was concealed. Drawing upon her love of Germany and its culture, in her spare time she compiled and translated the collected letters of Mozart and his family. These were published in the three-volume The letters of Mozart and his family (1938) which collected over 900 letters, including a dozen newly discovered letters. She was the first scholar to treat seriously Mozart’s sometimes scatological and nonsensical letters, which previous scholars had censored or omitted, using her cryptographical acumen to reveal the coded allusions in the letters.
From 1920 to 1926 she lived at the Forum Club in Grosvenor Place and then at the Lonsdale Club in Hampstead. Drawn to the relaxed, cosmopolitan nature of the latter leafy suburb she lived in a flat on Arkwright Road from 1926 to 1938, and then from 1938 at Ellendale Road, where she remained. Anderson adored playing the piano and acquired a Bechstein boudoir grand piano; in 1930 she passed the associate examination of the London College of Music.
As tensions grew across Europe in the late 1930s, Anderson’s work provided insights into Italian diplomatic and naval planning across the Mediterranean. In 1939 Anderson was the sole woman at ‘senior assistant’ rank. Intelligence and code breaking capabilities were unified at Bletchley Park, where Anderson was stationed from August 1939 to July 1940. After Italy entered the war in June 1940, relevant British cryptologic and intelligence resources were collected into the Combined Bureau Middle East, opened at Heliopolis in Cairo, Egypt, later that year. Anderson sailed to Durban and traversed Africa to join the bureau in Cairo to be closer to those intelligence sources, enabling more rapid deciphering and analysis. She was head of the Italian military section, focussed on cracking codes used in diplomatic communications between Rome and Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia (then under Italian occupation), and within the Italian military command operating across East Africa. Leading a team in demanding conditions, Anderson cracked a series of Italian ciphers, revealing Italian battle plans for Libya and Egypt. This advanced and highly detailed intelligence made a significant contribution to ensuing British military successes in Libya and Ethiopia, and to the capture of hundreds of thousands of Italian troops. As the Axis powers surrendered in North Africa, Anderson returned to England in May 1943, where she was assigned to the Government Communications Bureau in Berkeley Street, London. There she tackled German and Hungarian diplomatic codes (in the 1930s she had worked on Hungarian cipher books with Dilly Knox, a renowned expert in linguistic approaches to code breaking). A notoriously difficult language to master, Hungarian diplomatic codes were regarded as an especially taxing cryptographic challenge by the intelligence community. In July 1943 Anderson was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE, civil division) ‘for services to the forces and in connection with military operations’ (London Gazette, 13 July 1943). Her singular importance, and distinction as one of the few women working at the highest echelons, saw her referred to as ‘Emily’ in high-level British intelligence communications and correspondence.
Anderson’s prowess emanated from her ability to translate and decrypt simultaneously. This was especially important in diplomatic intelligence analysis where, alongside linguistic precision and sophistication, nuance and emphasis are intrinsically important. She excelled in book-building and cypher-stripping as diplomatic signal intelligence deciphering became increasingly important as the cold war commenced. While she could be demanding of colleagues and collaborators, Anderson’s austere façade hid her warm personality.
Post-war, Anderson resumed work on Beethoven’s letters, collating and transcribing correspondence on visits to archives and collections. After thirty years in the British civil service, she retired in November 1950. Her unusually long tenure in the demanding intelligence field was enabled by the stimulation and freedom her linguistic and musicological research engendered, and her parallel careers drew on – and nurtured – overlapping skill sets. Anderson revelled in the challenge of unlocking Beethoven’s hieroglyphical handwriting. Utilising approaches from her intelligence work enabled Anderson to conquer his (mostly Gothic) script, as well as the coded notes he composed to himself in marginalia. She deployed her palaeographic skills to identify patterns and repetitions, from which she could recognise letters, words and phrases. Anderson’s three-volume Letters of Beethoven was published in October 1961. Universally praised and widely lauded by musicologists and antiquarians, it collected 1,570 letters, 230 of which had not previously been published. That year she also published an English edition of Hebel’s Bible stories, translated from Swiss-German; she also wrote historical articles for various music journals. In recognition of her contribution to Germanic culture and music Anderson was awarded the Order of Merit, first class, by the West German government at a ceremony in Bonn in October 1962.
Anderson had commenced preliminary work on revising The letters of Mozart and his family before her death on 26 October 1962 at New End Hospital, Hampstead, London, from heart disease (the revised edition was completed by her friends Monica Carolan and Alexander Hyatt King). After her funeral on 1 November 1962 at Hampstead parish church, attended by leading figures from the intelligence community and the world of London classical music, Anderson’s remains were cremated at Golder’s Green. On her instructions no funeral urn, burial plot or monument were instituted.
Anderson’s will made several philanthropic bequests. £1,685 went to the Royal United Kingdom Beneficent Association to help persons of reduced means in the Republic of Ireland. After other bequests to friends and family, a trust fund was established, under which one-third of the residual estate went to the Musicians Benevolent Fund and the remainder was willed to the Royal Philharmonic Association for the establishment of an international annual competition for violin-playing in London. The Emily Anderson prize for young violinists was duly established in 1967 by the Royal Philharmonic Society and continues to be awarded. The University of Galway is home to the Anderson Centre for Translation Research and Practice (established in 2021), while in 2017 the university’s concert hall was renamed in Anderson’s honour. Facing the entrance to the quadrangle where she grew up, the Emily Anderson concert hall hosts an annual concert in memory of one of the university’s most distinguished alumni.