Jane Fawcett MBE was a British codebreaker, singer, and heritage preservationist.
16 Facts About Jane Fawcett
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Jane Fawcett recently became known for her role in decoding a message, which led to the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck.
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Jane Fawcett wrote and edited works including The Future of the Past; Seven Victorian Architects; The Village in History and Save the City.
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Jane Fawcett was raised in London, attended Miss Ironside's School for Girls in Kensington, trained as a ballet dancer, and was admitted to the Royal Ballet School.
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Jane Fawcett was then sent to Zurich to learn German, shortly thereafter moving to the St Moritz ski resort.
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Jane Fawcett found that lifestyle boring, "a complete waste of time" and was relieved when invited by a friend to apply to the Bletchley Park project.
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Jane Fawcett joined a group of women known as the "Debs of Bletchley Park", so called because they were women recruited from upper classes, debutantes, to work in secret as part of the Enigma project.
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Jane Fawcett's work did not come to light until decades later, during the 1990s, as it had been classified under Britain's Official Secrets Act.
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Jane Fawcett was one of the human sources Michael Smith interviewed for his book, The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories.
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Jane Fawcett performed Scylla in Jean-Marie Leclair's Scylla et Glaucus and the Sorceress in Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas.
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In 1963 Jane Fawcett took an executive position with the Victorian Society, founded in 1957 as a heritage preservation organisation dedicated to preserving Victorian architecture and works.
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Jane Fawcett was dubbed "the furious Mrs Fawcett" for her role in fighting with British Rail to preserve historic railway stations, and was instrumental in the 1967 preservation of St Pancras station in London and the gothic Midland Grand Hotel.
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Jane Fawcett worked to save much of London's Whitehall from destruction.
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Jane Fawcett's husband joined her in historic preservation work in 1965, joining first the Garden History Society, and then, in 1969, the National Trust in full-time work.
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In 1976 Jane Fawcett was appointed MBE and stepped down from active leadership.
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Jane Fawcett died at home in Oxford on 21 May 2016 at the age of 95.