Eleanor Gwendoline Hollington, née Paxton (1 February 1919 – 12 June 2014) was a Cambridge graduate in Modern and Medieval Languages who worked as a civilian translator for the Government Code and Cypher School at

Bletchley Park Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes ( Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years following ...

from 1941 to 1945.

Biography

Born on 1 February 1919, Gwen Paxton won a scholarship to Roedean School and went on to study French and German at Girton College, Cambridge. During her studies, she spent a year at the

University of Freiburg The University of Freiburg (colloquially german: Uni Freiburg), officially the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg (german: Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg), is a public university, public research university located in Freiburg im Breisg ...

to improve her German.Obituary
in ''

The Times ''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (fou ...

'', 25 June 2014. Accessed 17 November 2014. At Cambridge, she earned

blues Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the Afr ...

in lacrosse and lawn tennis. In an interview in 2011, she stated: "Before the war I had lived in Germany for a year studying at Freiburg as part of my degree and I made a lot of friends. A lot of the Germans I knew were charming, so it was difficult to think of them as the enemy."Katie Linsell
"Bletchley Park remembered by Harpenden woman"
, ''Hertfordshire Advertiser'', 13 March 2011. Accessed 17 November 2014. Upon graduation she was recruited to work as a civilian translator at

Hut 4 Hut 4 was a wartime section of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park tasked with the translation, interpretation and distribution of '' Kriegsmarine'' (German navy) messages deciphered by Hut 8. The messages were largely ...

, Bletchley Park, translating decrypted German naval communications into English. She worked there for four years, while billeted with a family in

Woburn Sands Woburn Sands () is a town that straddles the border between Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire in England, and also is part of the Milton Keynes urban area. See map. The larger part of the town is in Woburn Sands civil parish, which is in the City ...

. After the war, she worked for a publishing company as a literary assistant. She married Barrie Hollington (died 1964), with whom she had five children. She died on 12 June 2014.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hollington, Gwen People educated at Roedean School, East Sussex Alumni of Girton College, Cambridge University of Freiburg alumni Bletchley Park people German–English translators Women in publishing 1919 births 2014 deaths 20th-century British translators 20th-century British women writers Bletchley Park women