OBITUARY : Sarah Baring

Saturday 16 Feb 2013

OBITUARY : Sarah Baring
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Sarah Baring, who has died aged 93, was a leading light on the London        
social scene before spending three years at the top-secret code breaking 
establishment Bletchley Park; on VE-Day she met the heir to a viscountcy
and was engaged to him within a week.

She was born Sarah Kathleen Elinor Norton on January 20 1920, the only
daughter of the filmmaker the 6th Lord Grantley and his wife Jean ( née
Kinloch ). Brought up mainly in Scotland, Sarah was educated by a
succession of disagreeable European governesses, but when she was 17 her
parents dispatched her to Munich to broaden her horizons and learn German.

In later life she reflected on her impressions of the Nazis : "Hitler and
his entourage used to take tea in the Carlton Tea Rooms in Munich, and my
girlfriend and I would sit at a neighbouring table and pull faces at him.
They knew us by sight and knew we were English, so they just pretended we
weren't there. We weren't arrested, because at that stage the Germans
were still being frightfully nice to us. All over the city there was a
terrible feeling of fear - you could feel it, sense it, almost smell it.
But by the time I left, I could speak German fluently, which was to have a
profound effect on my future."..../snip/


....After a few months at Hawker Siddeley, both Sarah and Osla received 
letters summoning them to a Labour Exchange in London, where they were 
tested in their skills in the German language ( Osla had been at finishing 
school in Austria ). They passed, and were ordered to report to "Station 
X" in Buckinghamshire.

Sarah Norton had never heard of Bletchley Park, and when they arrived they 
were assigned to Hut 4. "Nobody explained anything" she recalled. "You 
were merely told that pieces of paper in German would come through and you 
had to take out any salient information, put it all on to a filing card 
with the coordinates, and index it. The information we were dealing with 
was obviously decrypted. Even then we didn't know the whole picture. We 
just did what we were told."

Sarah Norton worked on the Naval Section index, helping to provide details 
of the U-boats to Hut 8, run at that time by Alan Turing, of whom she once 
said : "[ He ] was immensely shy, especially of girls... I once offered 
him a cup of tea, [ and ] he shrank back as if I'd got measles or 
something. He was wonderful. We were all very proud of him."

The work was gruelling, and Sarah Norton and her colleagues took their 
pleasures where they could : "One afternoon, we decided to give Jean 
Campbell-Harris, who later became Baroness Trumpington, a ride in a large 
laundry basket on wheels that was normally used to move secret files. We 
launched it down the long corridor where it gathered momentum by the 
second. To our horror, Jean suddenly disappeared, basket and all, through 
some double swing doors, crashing to a halt in the men's lavatories. A 
serious reprimand was administered and our watches were changed so we were 
distributed among a more sober group."

She could not help but be struck by the eccentricities of the place: 
"There was one cryptographer with red hair and a red beard, and he studied 
Japanese in the evenings as a relief from his cryptography. But in the 
winter he wore a blue pixie hood on his beard. A pixie hood's the thing 
you put on babies' heads."

Sarah Norton spent three years at Bletchley, and in 1944 was sent to the 
Operational Intelligence Centre at the Admiralty in London as a liaison 
officer between the Admiralty and Bletchley..../snip/


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9873999/Sarah-Baring.html

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02482/baring_2482638b.jpg