Politician, ex-codebreaker Baroness Trumpington dies at 96

[TexasTowelie]

LONDON -- British socialite, codebreaker, politician and bon vivant Jean Baker — better known by her title, Baroness Trumpington — has died. She was 96.

Son Adam Baker says she died Monday in her sleep.

Born into a wealthy family, Baker served in naval intelligence at the Bletchley Park codebreaking center during World War II.

She later became mayor of Cambridge and entered the House of Lords in 1980. She served as a whip and minister in 1980s and 90s Conservative governments.

Read more: https://www.thenewstribune.com/entertainment/celebrities/article222234035.html

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Quite a character:

Dancing the night away in London on 48-hour passes, she told friends as a cover story that her department was responsible for deciding who got medals, which apparently focused the minds of young officers. Her mother scraped together clothing coupons to buy her a dress for the 1941 debutantes’ ball, which she briefly attended but sneaked off to go to the Café de Paris. Minutes before she arrived, it was bombed, killing 80 people.

She had an ability to think fast in any situation. She related how once she was staying in a country house, putting her hair in curlers at her dressing table, when Lord Beaverbrook entered the room, wearing only his pyjama tops. “Oh good,” she said. “I needed a hand. Could you hold these for me please?” She passed him her curling papers, which he dutifully doled out to her, and then when she had finished and thanked him dismissively, he obediently padded out of the room.
...
She loved bridge and horse-racing and was a steward at Folkestone racecourse. On one occasion as a minister she was being shown around a stud when a stallion demonstrated his masculinity, somewhat to the embarrassment of the staff. “It’s all right,” she reassured them. “I’m sure he just knows I used to be a mayor.” She chose the crown jewels as her luxury when she appeared on Desert Island Discs in 1991, in the hope it would enhance her chances of rescue.

Trumpington enjoyed the celebrity of her later years, which included a starring role in a television documentary on fashion for the elderly. She published a ghost-written autobiography, Coming Up Trumps, in 2014 and retired from the House of Lords when she was 95, in 2017. Two weeks before she died, in a ceremony at her Chelsea nursing home, she was invested with the Légion d’Honneur by the French ambassador, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, in recognition of her wartime service.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/nov/27/lady-trumpington-obituary

[mahatmakanejeeves]

2. Lady Trumpington, Code Breaker and Irreverent Politician, Dies at 96

I was about to start a new thread, when a search turned up this existing thread. I'm already using up my free New York Times articles.

Hat tip, Twitter:

Speaking of this new translation of "The Encyclopedia of Gestures," some desultory comments about "V sign" in the culture and in our dictionaries.

Link to tweet

Here is the entry for the V sign in "The Encyclopedia of Gestures," which gives both the "victory" version and the "intended to cause offense" version.

Link to tweet

This insult made the news this week in obits for Lady Trumpington, who famously flashed the gesture in Parliament.

Link to tweet

It's a bit odd that the illustration at the entry for "v sign" in Webster's Third (1961) is the "offensive" version.

Link to tweet

For the Eighth Collegiate (1973), the palm was turned around.

Link to tweet

Lady Trumpington, Code Breaker and Irreverent Politician, Dies at 96



Lady Trumpington with the Yeomen of the Guard in the House of Lords in 2005. She embarked on a political career late in life that made her a celebrity in Britain.
Andrew Parsons/Press Association, via Associated Press

By Palko Karasz
Nov. 27, 2018

LONDON — Lady Trumpington, who worked on the top-secret Bletchley Park code-breaking operation during World War II and later embarked on a political career that made her a celebrity in Britain in her 90s, died on Monday. She was 96. ... Her death was confirmed on Twitter by her son, Adam Barker. He did not say where she died.

https://twitter.com/adamant138

Lady Trumpington — as Jean Alys Campbell-Harris — worked as a cipher clerk, typing intercepted messages from the German Navy, at Bletchley Park, the wartime British decoding facility where Alan Turing helped crack Germany’s Enigma code. ... Bletchley Park’s achievements, kept secret for decades after the war, were made widely known by the films “Enigma” (2001) and “The Imitation Game” (2014), and, in 2017, by the posthumous pardon of Mr. Turing, who had been prosecuted after the war for homosexuality.

Lady Trumpington was appointed to the House of Lords, the upper chamber of the British Parliament, in 1980. She held a series of government positions from 1985 to 1997, leaving her last ministerial post at age 75.

Her time in the limelight began in 2011, when, at 89, she made a two-fingered gesture of contempt to a fellow peer, Lord King, a former Conservative defense secretary, after he had referred to her age during a televised debate in the House of Lords. (The particular V-sign she used is regarded as an insult in Britain.) ... “His family say he is famous now,” she said about the episode.
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