"The German government was completely unaware that she’d been breaking its most secret codes for decades"
In November 1962, at St John’s Parish Church, I Hampstead, the funeral took place of a 72-yearold retired civil servant named Emily Anderson. An apparently unremarkable, rather shy woman, one neighbour tellingly observed that she was “very self-contained, and very discreet, and not interested in useless chatter”.
There were many among the congregation who could testify to the usefulness of those characteristics in the secret double life that this former professor of German had lived since abandoning academia to enter what was euphemistically known as “a division of the Foreign Office”. Yet the evidence was there, hiding in plain sight, for laid side-by-side on her coffin
