Clara Grace Thornton
British diplomat, academic, translator and code-breaker
Clara Grace Thornton (1913–1987) was a British diplomat, an academic, a translator and a code-breaker at Bletchley Park. She ended her career as Secretary of the Women's National Commission, the official advisory body founded in 1969 to ensure that UK Government policy took account of women in matters of public interest.
Early life and education
She was born on 27 June 1913; her father was a jeweller and silversmith and an alderman. Her secondary education was at Kettering High School.
She studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, matriculating in 1932. At the time, women could not receive full degrees from the University of Cambridge.
She took Part I English Tripos, and then the Archaeology and Anthropology Tripos (B), receiving a 1st class mark in her exams.
She received a number of scholarships from Cambridge to fund graduate studies before becoming the University Scandinavian Student from 1936 to 1938, working at the University of Copenhagen and the Reykjavik University. She was awarded her PhD in early Icelandic studies in 1938.
Career
For most of the war Thornton worked in the Ministry of Information, including work with the code-breakers at Bletchley Park.
“Clara Grace Thornton” enters the record as british diplomat, academic, translator and code-breaker. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Clara, Grace and Thornton can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Clara Grace Thornton” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.