Baroness Trumpington Former Bletchley Park cipher clerk who became a much-loved institution in the House of Lords
https://digitaledition.telegraph.co.uk/editions/edition_YJ2uq_2018-11-28/data/580436/index.html?share=1&
Thanks to e-pal Fred M……An obituary of a Great Dame of the British realm…..rsk
BARONESS TRUMPINGTON, who has died aged 96, was a former mayor of Cambridge and became the oldest and second longest-serving member of John Major’s administration; she was also by far the most popular.
Built to last, forthright and formidable, Jean Trumpington made up for any lack of intellectual brilliance with a capacity for hard work combined with down-to-earth common sense and an engaging habit of telling jokes against herself.
First recruited into Government ranks in 1983 as a Lords whip, her first job was to act as “keeper of the gate” by placing her imposing form next to the most popular exit to persuade errant Conservative peers to vote. But in fact she became far more effective in this role as a government minister; the prospect of a vintage performance by Jean Trumpington was usually enough to pack the chamber.
In 1987, as a minister at the Department of Health and Social Security, in answer to a question about whether Aids could be transmitted by insects, she replied: “I have replies to questions on bed bugs and monkeys, but I regret that I do not have fleas.”
In 1992, as an agriculture minister, she gave an answer to a question in which she referred to “the Commission’s proposals for reforming the CAP would replace existing support arrangements by a system of compensatory aid, linked directly or indirectly to the cultivated area or the number of animals kept by each farmer,” ending with: “And if you understand that, you’re a better man than I, Gunga Din.”
In October 1993, shortly after her appointment as a spokesman at the Department of National Heritage, she confessed to finding it difficult to master her brief and during one flustering question session she admitted: “I had been worried I might get my knickers in a twist,” she admitted.
The following year, wearing a stout woollen suit that evoked her career in naval intelligence, she struck an incongruous figure as the department’s representative at rock music awards: “I am here to collect autographs for my secretary,” she announced. “Is Elton John here?”
“I seem fated,” she protested unconvincingly. “When I’m trying very hard to be dignified, something always goes hideously wrong.”
In 2011 she was captured on camera giving a V-sign to Lord King of Bridgwater when he referred to her as looking “pretty old” during a Remembrance debate. “It was entirely between him and me – I thought,” she told The Daily Telegraph’s Elizabeth Grice. “I wasn’t conscious of there being television [cameras there]. I did that [she repeats the gesture with faux innocence] to his face. His family say he is famous now.” She repeated the two-fingered salute at Ken Clarke when they both won Oldie of the Year awards in 2012.
There were few members of either house who did not have a stock of Jean Trumpington stories, for she was a factory of jokes told against herself. Once, when asked about her wardrobe, she confessed to having three, labelled “outsize”, “fat” and “obese”.
In 1980, when she was created a life peer, she told Garter King of Arms that she wished to become Baroness Trumpington, after the Cambridge ward she had represented. But apparently the title belonged to somebody else. “Is there not another place near Cambridge you would like?” he asked.
“You don’t think I’m going to call myself Lady Six Mile Bottom, do you?” she demanded. She emerged as Baroness Trumpington.
Nevertheless, she had a serious side. As a junior Minister at the Department of Health, she was responsible for its public campaign against Aids, a problem she confronted with characteristic robustness: “Children must learn the facts properly,” she argued in 1986, “instead of getting behind the bicycle shed to pick up bits and pieces.”
Jean Trumpington was born Jean Alys Campbell-Harris on October 23 1922. Her father, Arthur, was a Bengal Lancer who had been ADC to the Viceroy of India. Her American mother, Doris, was an heiress of a Chicago paint manufacturer, and the family lived in a Georgian town house with 10 servants in Great Cumberland Place, just north of Hyde Park.
Her parents, Jean recalled, “brought me up much as they had been brought up: young children led a nursery life, with mother and father sweeping in to say goodnight, all dressed up for the evening with their friends in the Prince of Wales’s set.” After the family money vanished in the Wall Street Crash, they moved to a smaller place in Kent.
As a child, she recalled: “I wavered between wanting to be a vet and a ballet dancer,” and she was briefly dispatched by her mother to train at the Ballet Rambert. Aged 11, she was sent to Princess Helena College, Ealing, which she hated, leaving aged 15 with no qualifications. She was then sent to study art and literature at a finishing school in Paris, where she also played a lot of tennis, recalling that “there was serious talk of junior Wimbledon”.
During the Second World War she worked as a Land Girl on Lloyd George’s estate at Churt and then took a secretarial course before being recruited to work on naval intelligence at Bletchley Park. She was selected to work at Bletchley because of her family ties. There was a general belief at the time that people from the upper classes were less likely to betray their country.
“They were really frightfully snobbish about the girls who worked there,” she recalled. “A friend of my father’s said: ‘Maybe when Jean’s finished her secretarial course she would like to go to a place called Bletchley.’”
Frank Birch, the head of Hut 4, the German naval section, interviewed her over tea in the Lyon’s Corner House at the Trafalgar Square end of Whitehall. Birch, a famous actor and producer, had been a codebreaker during the First World War.
Once the naval Enigma ciphers were broken, she and a number of other young women selected for their knowledge of German typed the intercepted German messages into British Typex cipher machines modified to work like the Enigma machine.
The deciphered messages came out on streams of sticky tape like that used for telegrams, which was stuck to the back of the original messages and sent into the “Z Watch” next door where the intelligence reports were compiled.
She became very friendly with two of the debs working in Hut 4, Osla Benning, whose boyfriend when Jean and she first met was Prince Philip of Greece, and Sarah Norton (later Sarah Baring), whose godfather was Lord Mountbatten. On their days off, they rushed up to London on the train to sample a bit of nightlife. They were young women who, despite the awful backdrop of the war, were determined to enjoy their time off.
One afternoon, when their watch was over, Osla Benning and Sarah Norton decided to propel Jean Harris down a long, sloping corridor in one of the wheeled laundry baskets in which the decoded messages were delivered.
“We launched it down the corridor, where it gathered momentum by the second,” Sarah Norton recalled. “To our horror, at the T-junction, Jean suddenly disappeared, basket and all, through some double swing doors.”
Sarah Norton would subsequently dine out on the claim that the basket carrying a giggling Jean careered into the gents’ loo, but in fact it burst into the office of Commander Geoffrey Tandy, the head of technical intelligence.
The middle-aged Tandy was a very serious academic who had already shown his irritation at the girls’ willingness to enjoy themselves when there was a lull in the work. Jean took the brunt of his anger.
“Geoffrey Tandy had already decided he did not like me and now he was absolutely furious. As a punishment the three of us were taken off the same shift and it took us three weeks to get back together again.”
After the War Jean Harris was sent by the Foreign Office to Paris to help set up the European Central International Transport Organisation. From 1950 she worked as secretary to Viscount Hinchingbrooke – Victor “Hinch” Montagu MP.
In 1952 she moved to work for an advertising agency in New York, where she lived above the Stork Club on East 52nd Street, off Park Avenue, and threw herself into the glamorous social whirl of Manhattan and the Hamptons.
There she met a young Cambridge don, Alan Barker, a former cavalry officer who had been wounded in Normandy and was there on a Yale fellowship. They married in 1954 and returned to England, living first at Eton, where he taught history, then at Cambridge, where he became headmaster of the Leys School in 1958.
She soon established herself in the affections of boys at the school, who remembered her for the hearty Sunday lunches to which they were often invited at the headmaster’s house.
“I like my beef bloody and my lamb pink,” she once said. “I think summer pudding is the greatest British pudding that ever happened. I love good sausages and there’s an awful lot you can do with mince.”
Once, when reading a lesson at the King’s College carol service, the passage “a little lamb shall lead them” came out as “a little lamb shall feed them”. She did not realise her mistake until her son said: “Trust you, Mum, to think of food.”
She stood no nonsense. Once, brought in by her husband to talk to a group of boys who had grown their hair long, defying school regulations, “I said, ‘In my day, hair like yours was known as buggers’ grips.’ And I walked out again. The next morning, in chapel, I looked over and saw that every single one of them had had his hair cut.”
She celebrated her husband’s retirement in 1975 by leaping fully clothed into the swimming pool in front of the entire pupil body and their astonished parents.
It was at Cambridge that Jean Barker began her long career in the Conservative Party. She became the first woman to be elected president of the Cambridge Conservative Association and tried twice to be selected for a Commons seat, but encountered hostility to women MPs. Instead she threw herself into local government.
She served for 13 years as a Conservative councillor on Cambridge City and later on Cambridgeshire County councils. As Mayor of Cambridge in 1971-72, she became known as “the Swinging Mayor” for giving a discotheque as a civic reception.
In 1972, on a visit to a Newmarket stud, as she approached the box of an inmate called Hopeful Venture, the stallion began to show every sign of excitement. The director of the stud suggested it might be the scent she was wearing. “When stallions are not interested, we put scent on the mares,” he explained. “I am not only wearing scent,” she replied, “I am also an ex-mayor.”
Also in the early 1970s she became a magistrate at the time when Peter Cook, otherwise known as “the Cambridge Rapist”, was terrorising women in the city. In 1975 Cook, who would later be convicted of six rapes and a string of other offences, was charged and brought before her at an early hearing.
She recognised him as her friendly delivery man from Mac Fisheries. “He would drop off my groceries and I would always say: ‘Must lock the door after you’ve gone in case the Cambridge Rapist comes’,” she recalled. “I had to leave the bench straight away, of course.”
Created a life peer in 1980, Lady Trumpington made her mark as the Lords’ secret weapon in the annual tug-of-war contest with the Commons. In 1982 she introduced a Shops Bill to liberalise the laws on Sunday trading. The bill was passed by the Lords but talked out in the Commons.
In 1983 she caused controversy when she suggested that minefields on the Falklands should be cleared by driving flocks of sheep across them. Thousands of furious animal lovers wrote her abusive letters; one correspondent called her a “fat old scrubber”, she recalled. She remained completely unmoved: “I have received a very rude letter from the RSPCA to which I replied that sheep were replaceable and limbs and men were not,” she said.
She served as Government Whip in the House of Lords between 1983 and 1985, and again between 1992 to 1997 (when she was successively spokesman at the Foreign Office and at the Department of National Heritage). She served as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Health and Social Security between 1985 and 1987 and at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food from 1987 to 1992. She was promoted to Minister of State in 1989.
In 1982 Lady Trumpington’s husband Alan Barker, by then headmaster of University College School, Hampstead, had suffered a debilitating stroke and had to retire. Thereafter, Jean Trumpington combined her work as a Government minister with the devoted care of her husband. He remained an invalid until his death in 1988.
Her title as a whip was Baroness-in-Waiting to the Queen, a job that involved greeting overseas visitors on behalf of the monarch. In 1998, in recognition of her experience at court, the Labour government appointed her an Extraordinary Baroness-in-Waiting. She was appointed DCVO in 2005.
As a castaway on Desert Island Discs in 1990 she had chosen as her luxury item the Crown Jewels in order to maximise her chances of being rescued.
The publication, in 2011, of her jaunty memoir, Coming Up Trumps, brought her invitations to appear on television. In 2012 the chain-smoking peer appeared on the BBC’s satirical show Have I Got News For You, becoming its oldest ever guest and joking about smoking cigars after sex.
She also appeared on the Great British Menu and a television documentary, Fabulous Fashionistas, about older women and fashion, and in December 2017 she was a guest editor for the BBC’s Today programme. Topics she chose to explore included her long-standing campaign to legalise brothels, and living with incurable diseases.
She retired from the House of Lords on October 24 2017, the day after she turned 95.
She is survived by her son.
Baroness Trumpington, born October 23 1922, died November 26 2018
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