Baroness Trumpington : 'At my age I don't give a damn what I say'

From "The Daily Telegraph"....:


14 Aug 2012

Baroness Trumpington : 'At my age I don't give a damn what I say'
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From cracking U-boat codes to flicking a V-sign in the Lords, the 
formidable 89-year-old Baroness Trumpington has done it her way

By Elizabeth Grice

'I'm holding the bloody door !' booms a voice down the hall of the mansion 
block. Baroness Trumpington's robust greeting sets the scene for what is 
to follow. In one hand she grasps a walking stick, with the other she is 
wrestling with her spring-loaded front door. Though built like a galleon, 
she is nearly 90 and her strength cannot be what it was..../snip/


....Where most people have family photographs, she has a storyboard of 
modern British history : a warmly signed photo of John Major, a picture of 
her with Ted Heath, a framed letter from Gordon Brown, thanking her for 
"the vital service" she performed for the country at Bletchley Park during 
the war. In another photo, resplendent in Royal Mail red, she is 
next-but-one to the Queen at a state banquet. What was Her Majesty like to 
talk to ? "Cosy."..../snip/


....The land girl episode was mercifully brief, releasing Baroness 
Trumpington - or Jean Campbell-Harris, as she was then - for more exciting 
duties at the cipher intelligence centre at Bletchley Park. She is free 
now to talk about how she helped to crack the German U-boat code, but 
decades of imposed silence have calcified into habit. "You can - but you 
can't," she says. "None of us can because we have kept quiet for so long. 
The shifts were the worst thing : nine to six, four to midnight, midnight 
to nine. You could never get a sleep pattern. I was tired all the time."

That didn't stop her hitch-hiking to London on 48-hour leaves and dancing 
all night.

Just as it seems as if the subject of Bletchley has run out of steam, she 
remembers a "very unsuitable" incident from those days. She and her small 
group specialising in the analysis of German naval signals were punished 
for singing the Horst-Wessel-Lied, the Nazi Party's anthem. "You had 
nothing to do but work so you got up to mischief," she explains. "I know 
the whole thing."

Suddenly, she breaks into song : "Die Fahne hoch ! Die Reiten fest 
geschlossen ! Very naughty, but we were very young."..../snip/


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/features/9472666/Baroness-Trumpington-At-my-age-I-dont-give-a-damn-what-I-say.html

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