Category: Previous Lectures

Cover of “Queen of Codes: The Secret Life of Emily Anderson, Britain’s Greatest Female Code Breaker” Galway woman Emily Anderson may have appeared to the world as the epitome of ordinary,yet was in truth anything but. Born in 1891 as the daughter of the President of Queen’sCollege Galway, during World War I she was recruited to British intelligence to work as acodebreaker. So exceptional were her skills that she was one of the few women retained towork in intelligence during the interwar period, and subsequently served as a codebreaker atBletchley Park and later Cairo, winning an OBE in the process. Though widelyacknowledged as an exceptional musicologist – her translations of the Letters of Mozart andthe Letters of Beethoven are classics to this day – her professional life as Britain’s greatestfemale codebreaker remained secret until the recent publication of her biography by JackieUí Chionna. In this lecture Dr. Uí Chionna will recall the remarkable life of the woman whoearned herself the title “Queen of Codes”. Dr. Jackie Uí Chionna teaches History at the University of Galway. Her biography of EmilyAnderson, Queen of Codes: The Secret Life of Emily Anderson, Britain’s Greatest FemaleCodebreaker, was published by Headline UK in 2023. Her previous… Read the rest