My mother, Jacqueline Woodfill, who has died aged 94, worked with the Bletchley Park codebreakers during the second world war before marrying and moving to the US, where she raised her family.
She was born in Brockham, Surrey, to John Iselin, a barrister of Swiss descent from a noted Basel family, and his wife, Marian (nee Hewitt), whose father had been a wealthy London merchant. Despite these apparently illustrious forebears, the family was relatively poor by 1940, the year in which both Jacqueline’s parents died. In the same year, she became the first pupil from Dorking county school to go to Oxford, winning a scholarship to study English at Somerville College, where her tutor was Mary Lascelles.
Upon finishing her degree, she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service and was assigned to work at the Bletchley Park codebreaking centre in Buckinghamshire. Her painstaking task was to examine slips of paper looking for repetitions or duplicates – if she found some repetition, there was a little excitement and she would take the slips to someone else for them to work on.
Jacqueline had found Oxford rather cold and lonely, and enjoyed the spirit of camaraderie she found at the ATS – she always emphasised that the achievements at Bletchley were the result of teamwork.
After the war, she became a children’s librarian and then an archivist at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. She met Walter Woodfill, a US historian with a particular interest in early music, when he visited Hatfield to examine manuscripts in the library there, and they married in London in 1956.
Thereafter they lived in Delaware and California, where they brought up their three children, Celia, John and Thomas. Jacqueline was an ardent volunteer worker at the University of California at Davis arboretum, and at the University of California at Berkeley botanical garden.
Following Walter’s death in 1987, Jacqueline returned to the UK. She settled in Iffley, Oxfordshire, where she spent happy years gardening, minding cats, walking dogs, working in the village shop, ringing the Iffley church bells and reading.
In addition to her children, she is survived by two grandchildren, Nika and Ian.
