[6] In 1934 Senior was chosen over Alec Clifton-Taylor for the role of Assistant Keeper in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.
[6] As the threat of war grew closer Senior helped secure safe passage for those fleeing Nazi Germany and became a friend to a number of eminent Jewish emigre art historians including Ernst Gombrich, Yvonne Hackenbroch, Edith Hoffman, Ernest Kitzinger (who she had met in Munich) and Fritz Saxl-Kitzinger.
Senior also travelled to Germany, where, claiming to be "an official representative of His Majesty's Government", she urged Ernst Kitzinger's parents leave the country.
[6] Senior was killed in a German air raid while at home in her flat at 17b Canonbury Square in London in the early hours of 11 May 1941.
[6] In 1941 she gave birth to a daughter, Sally Maud Senior who was born in her grandmother's house in East Dean in Sussex.
It was only once she had children of her own that Sally Senior found out that her mother's old friend "Uncle Tom", who had written letters to her throughout her childhood was her father.
Ernst Gombrich, in the preface to his work The Story of Art,[10] makes this comment: This book would never have been written without the warm-hearted encouragement it received from Elizabeth Senior whose untimely death in an air raid on London was such a loss to all who knew her.In similar vein, Thomas Kendrick, who was to become Director of the British Museum in 1950, included this comment in the preface to his book Late Saxon and Viking Art, ...I acknowledge an irredeemable debt to my colleague Elizabeth Senior, who was killed in 1941, for she gave me invaluable assistance with her camera and her sketch-book, and I know well that her sensible suggestions and courageous opinions have brightened and improved almost every chapter I have written.