| Alda Milner-Barry | |
| Birth Date: | 5 July 1893 |
| Death Place: | Cambridgeshire, England |
| Occupation: | Educator, codebreaker |
| Relatives: | Stuart Milner-Barry (brother) W. H. Besant (grandfather) |
Alda Mary Milner-Barry (5 July 1893 – 26 March 1938)[1] was a British cryptoanalyst and academic. She was a fellow and vice-principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, and part of MI1b, the British military intelligence unit of the War Office in World War I.[2] [3]
Alda Milner-Barry was born in 1893, the daughter of Edward Leopold Milner-Barry, Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Bangor, and his wife Edith Mary Milner-Barry .[4] Her grandfather was William H. Besant, a mathematical fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. Her aunt Alda Marguerite Milner-Barry was an author, lecturer, and hymnwriter.[5] Her younger brother, Stuart Milner-Barry, was a renowned chess player and would become a codebreaker at Bletchley Park during World War II.[6] [7]
While an undergraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge, Alda Milner-Barry covered her father's lessons at the University of Bangor while he was working as a translator in the British Admiralty.[8] She completed the Medieval and Modern Languages tripos at Cambridge in two years, instead of the usual three, in 1914.[9] In 1916, she graduated with first class honours in English and German. She immediately took up work as a translator in the Intelligence Department of the War Office. In around 1917, Milner-Barry was the interim Professor of German at University College Galway for a year. She then went to MI1b, where she was appointed deputy to codebreaker Emily Anderson.
From 1920 to 1934, she was a lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham and, from 1934 to 1938, the tutor of Sidgwick Hall, Newnham College.[10] [11] She became vice-principal of the college, remaining in that position until her death in 1938, at the age of 44, at a nursing home in Cambridgeshire.