Professor Alison Fairlie FBA (23 May 1917 – 21 February 1993) was a

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scholar of French literature. She was a long time fellow of

Girton College, Cambridge Girton College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was established in 1869 by Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon as the first women's college at Cambridge. In 1948, it was granted full college status by the un ...

Life

Alison Anna Bowie Fairlie was born in

Lerwick Lerwick ( or ; ; ) is the main town and port of the Shetland archipelago, Scotland. Shetland's only burgh, Lerwick had a population of about 7,000 residents in 2010. It is the northernmost major settlement within the United Kingdom. Centred ...

on the island of Shetland.Malcolm Bowie, ‘Fairlie, Alison Anna Bowie (1917–1993)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 200
accessed 11 Oct 2015
/ref> Her father had been the Presbyterian minister in Lerwick but he died when she was young. Fairlie went to

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in Oxford in 1935 and left with a first class degree in Modern and Medieval Languages.Obituary: Professor Alison Fairlie
The Independent, Retrieved 11 October 2015 The occupation of France interfered with what might have been her base for post doctoral work. She had returned to work in Paris until it fell to the advancing German armies in 1940. Fairlie made her way to

Bordeaux Bordeaux ( ; ; Gascon language, Gascon ; ) is a city on the river Garonne in the Gironde Departments of France, department, southwestern France. A port city, it is the capital of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, as well as the Prefectures in F ...

where she saw many diplomats abandoning their expensive cars. She did not have diplomatic credentials but they managed to persuade a Dutch grain ship to take them to England.Alison Fairlie
British Association, 1993 By the time she obtained her Doctorate of Philosophy in 1943, Fairlie had been recruited to work at Bletchley Park which was Britain's centre for deciphering intercepted German wartime messages. She was employed as an assistant of the

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, but she was assigned to work in a section led by Vivienne Alford. The work involved trying to understand unusual phrases discovered in messages. These phrases may have been associated with technical descriptions and Fairlie had to quickly extend her knowledge to matters outside literature and history. Leonard Wilson Forster who worked at Bletchley described how Fairlie's research techniques which she had used for her doctorate were strangely still relevant as they tried to understand the German, Italian and Japanese technical jargon.Alison Fairlie
Extract from Proceedings of the British Academy obituary by Malcolm Bowie FBA (PBA 84, 285-287) The group was said to be inspired by the polymath Geoffrey Tandy. Her first book was titled ''Leconte de Lisle's Poems on the Barbarian Races'' and it was published in 1947. This book was an edited version of her doctoral thesis. Fairlie died in

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in 1993.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fairlie, Alison Anna Bowie 1917 births 1993 deaths People from Lerwick Fellows of the British Academy Scholars of French literature Bletchley Park women Alumni of St Hugh's College, Oxford Fellows of Girton College, Cambridge Bletchley Park people Foreign Office personnel of World War II