Traces along the Wild Atlantic Way
Emily Anderson

Emily Anderson was born in Galway in 1891. Her father was the president of Queen’s College, Galway, which is also where she grew up from the age of eight onwards. Emily herself studied at the university in Galway, graduating with first-class honours and “special distinction” in German and French. In 1917, the linguist became the first professor of German in Galway.

In 1917 she was recruited by British intelligence and in 1920 she became a permanent member of the Foreign Office. Emily Anderson worked as a codebreaker of diplomatic codes at Bletchley Park, the headquarters of codebreakers during the Second World War. She excelled at discovering the patterns in codes. Her speciality was Italian, even though she was a professor of German. Emily was the best-paid woman in the British secret service and campaigned for a better pay for her female colleagues. Nevertheless, she was not paid as much as the men doing the same job. Anderson was also the first woman in the English civil service to be appointed a junior assistant. As a side project, she translated letters by Mozart. Her translations were published in three volumes with the title Letters of Mozart and His Family in 1938. She received great acclaim for this project and her translations are still perceived as an important reference work.

King George V awarded her an OBE in 1943 for her essential work as a codebreaker. Her codebreaking skills might well have come in handy for her deciphering of Beethoven’s letters, which was her project after the Second World War. The Letters of Beethoven was published in 1961. In the same year, Anderson received an Order of Merit from the German government for this project. Emily died a year later in 1962 in Hampstead, London.