The Andersons were Presbyterian in a Catholic city, and lived cloistered within the campus walls. Uí Chionna surmised that the family’s relative isolation from their wider society “led Emily to be very self-reliant and secretive”. It was at Galway that Anderson studied, swiftly displaying her outstanding ability with languages. She graduated with first-class honours and “special distinction” in both French and German.
“It’s ironic, but it is also a fact,” she says. “Emily worked for British intelligence all her professional life. Yes, she was an Irish woman, born and raised in Ireland. But she was recruited to British intelligence; she was born in 1891 into the British Empire, and she was recruited in 1917 and became a permanent member of the British Foreign Office in 1920. She is British to all intents and purposes. And she wasn’t the only one.
Many of those who worked there were decoders, which was a crucial but much less challenging job. At base, it involved listening in to the Morse code that came through the wireless signals and transcribing the dots and dashes into letters and numbers. “But you don’t know from that information what [is] the message being sent, or even what the language is. It could be German or Italian or French. And if that language is then encrypted, it’s a further complication. Experienced linguists like Emily would look for where you would expect to see a verb in a sentence. She could literally look at a page of what would look to the rest of us like gobbledegook, and she could make sense of it, and start to see patterns emerging.