Fairlie went to St Hugh's College in Oxford in 1935 and left with a first class degree in Modern and Medieval Languages.
[3] By the time she obtained her Doctorate of Philosophy in 1943, Fairlie had been recruited to work at Bletchley Park which was Britain's centre for deciphering intercepted German wartime messages.
She was employed as an assistant of the Foreign Office, but she was assigned to work in a section led by Vivienne Alford.
These phrases may have been associated with technical descriptions and Fairlie had to quickly extend her knowledge to matters outside literature and history.
Leonard Wilson Forster who worked at Bletchley described how Fairlie's research techniques which she had used for her doctorate were strangely still relevant as they tried to understand the German, Italian and Japanese technical jargon.