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A MEMBER of the Bletchley Park code-breaking team Jean Alys Barker, Baroness Trumpington, DCVO, PC, (née Campbell-Harris) died on 26 November 2018, aged 96, writes Melody Foreman. During the Second World War 18-year-old cypher clerk and society girl Jean was able to use her fluent German to transcribe Nazi messages from enemy submarines.
Her work in Hut 8, which she described as “deeply tedious”, was only made bearable by visiting her friend Lord Beaverbrook or dancing the night away in London on her 48-hour passes. Baroness Trumpington reminisced: “We girls did everything we could think of to lighten our lives and I am afraid we often behaved very badly indeed, which included throwing bread at each other at The Ritz and singing loudly.” As she found out in 1941 the high-life in the capital could be especially risky – on one evening she arrived at the Cafe de Paris minutes after it had been bombed by the Luftwaffe. Eighty people were killed and dozens injured.
But the privileged London-born daughter of a playboy father – a former major in the Bengal Lancers – and whose mother was heiress to the fortunes of a Chica…
