Jane Fawcett

Jane Fawcett MBE (née Hughes; 4 March 1921 – 21 May 2016)[1] was a British codebreaker, singer, and heritage preservationist.

She wrote and edited works including The Future of the Past; Seven Victorian Architects; The Village in History and Save the City.

[4] She found that lifestyle boring, "a complete waste of time"[4] and was relieved when invited by a friend to apply to the Bletchley Park project.

[4] In Hut 6, Jane and other women like her would receive the daily Enigma keys and type them into their own Typex machines.

[5] Compared with the publicly acknowledged heroics of the navy, Fawcett said "we felt slightly ashamed of having only done Bletchley, like also-rans.

So when everything we had done, which we knew had been very hard work and incredibly demanding, suddenly showed its head and we were being asked to talk about it, it felt quite overwhelming.

"[4] Fawcett was one of the human sources Michael Smith interviewed for his book, The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (2015).

[8] After the war ended, she married Edward Fawcett, took his surname, and trained at the Royal Academy of Music.

[6] As its secretary, she was effectively the chief executive, working closely with the director, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, to save many buildings from demolition.

[2] Hughes met Royal Navy officer Edward "Ted" Fawcett (22 September 1920 – 19 October 2013)[6][10] during World War II and married him shortly thereafter.