A Bletchley Park worker during World War II and a New York socialite in the 1950s, she became a government minister and a celebrity in her 90s.
LONDON — Lady Trumpington, who worked on the top-secret Bletchley Park code-breaking operation during World War II and later embarked on a political career that made her a celebrity in Britain in her 90s, died on Monday. She was 96.
Her death was confirmed on Twitter by her son, Adam Barker. He did not say where she died.
Lady Trumpington — as Jean Alys Campbell-Harris — worked as a cipher clerk, typing intercepted messages from the German navy, at Bletchley Park, the wartime British decoding facility where Alan Turing helped crack Germany’s Enigma code.
Bletchley Park’s achievements, kept secret for decades after the war, were made widely known by the films “Enigma” (2001) and “The Imitation Game” (2014), and, in 2017, by the posthumous pardon of Mr. Turing, who had been prosecuted after the war for homosexuality.
Lady Trumpington was appointed to the House of Lords, the upper chamber of the British Parliament, in 1980. She held a series of government positions from 1985 to 1997, leaving her last ministerial post at age 75.
Her time in the limelight began in 2011, when, at 89, she made a two-fingered gesture of contempt to a fellow peer, Lord King, a former Conservative defense secretary, after he had referred to her age during a televised debate in the House of Lords. (The particular V-sign she used is regarded as an insult in Britain.)
“His family say he is famous now,” she said about the episode.
She found fame of her own, an irreverent, outspoken 6-foot-tall figure whose gray curled hair might have easily been styled by Queen Elizabeth II’s hairdresser. She was invited to appear on television talk shows and starred in a documentary film about fashion for older women.
As a guest in 1991 on the BBC radio program “Desert Island Discs,” which invites public figures to choose and discuss the music they would take with them if they were castaways, she said that in addition to “I’ll Follow My Secret Heart,” by Nöel Coward, she would also want to take along the crown jewels, “because somebody would come to look for me.”
This month, she was among a group of Bletchley Park veterans awarded the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest honor, for their contributions to the liberation of France.
