Obituary - Jane Fawcett, Bletchley decoder who played key role in sinking of the Bismarck

Died: May 21, 2016

JANE Fawcett, who has died aged 95, was a Bletchley Park decoder who played a key role in the sinking of the infamous German destroyer Bismarck when she realised one of the messages she was decoding was from Luftwaffe HQ revealing that the vessel was heading for the French port of Brest. The message was passed on, the Navy gave chase and Bismarck was sunk.

It was a stunning victory for the Allies at an early stage of the Second World War and Mrs Fawcett remembers a great cheer going up at Bletchley when news of the Bismarck’s fate was announced on the radio. Mrs Fawcett and her colleagues in Hut 6 had been told how important it was to find the vessel and get rid of her after she was responsible for sinking the British destroyer HMS Hood.

Mrs Fawcett was always intensely proud of her role at Bletchley and was present when the Duchess of Cambridge visited the refurbished Hut 6 in 2014 but she also established a name for herself after the war as the head of the Victorian Society, which was established to campaign to preserve historic buildings. In the role, she helped save St Pancras station and its Gothic Midland Hotel from demolition and so determined was she that to the managers at British Rail she became known as the Furious Mrs Fawcett.

She was born in London into a well-to-do family and initially wanted to be a ballet dancer until the teachers at the Royal Ballet School told her she was too tall. After a few months in Switzerland learning German, she then had to endure the season as a deb, going from party to party before being presented to the Queen.

She then received a letter from an old school friend who was working at Bletchley who told her that it was, in her words, perfectly frightful but that she should try and get a job there. Intrigued, Mrs Fawcett applied, was interviewed and found herself in Hut 6.

The conditions were not great and the job repetitive: to decode messages on a device that replicated the Nazis’ Enigma machines. She then used her knowledge of German to check that the messages were genuine before passing them to Hut 3.

The day she stumbled on the message about the Bismarck, she was just an hour into her shift. “We all knew that we’d got the fleet out in the Atlantic trying to locate her because she was the Germans’ most important, latest battleship and had better guns and so on than anybody else, and she’d already sunk the Hood,” she said. “So it was vitally important to find where she was and try to get rid of her.”

The message itself was addressed to a Luftwaffe general who was seeking information about his son who was serving on the Bismarck. He was told that the ship, which had been damaged in battle, was on its way to France for repair. Once the message was decoded and passed on, Royal Navy battleships sped to the area and attacked the German vessel, which sank on May 27, 1941.

After the war, Mrs Fawcett trained as a singer and worked professionally for many years before joining the Victorian Society. She eventually stepped down in 1976 and regarded the saving of St Pancras as her greatest achievement.

She was appointed MBE for her services to conservation and is survived by her son James and daughter Carolin. Her husband Ted died in 2013.