Pamela Pigeon
Pamela Pigeon was a New Zealand-British cryptographer who was the first female commander in Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, known as GCHQ.Biography
Pigeon's father, a surgeon, immigrated to New Zealand in 1902. She grew up in Wellington, New Zealand, where she attended Queen Margaret College and won awards for language and speech writing.
It's not known when she emigrated to Britain. However, during World War II she worked as part of a secret intelligence unit located in Marston Montgomery, a remote base in Derbyshire set up in 1941 as an outpost of RAF Cheadle. In around 1943, she became the leader of a team of linguists who listened in on shortwave German naval and air force radio broadcasts to decode information on troop movements. The team also worked "fingerprinting individual German radios," identifying them through the fact that "each crystal at the heart of a radio oscillated slightly differently." Their work helped to sink the Bismarck, a crucial German battleship. GCHQ historian Tony Comer identifies this as a key moment in the war.
