Cicely Mayhew

Cicely Elizabeth Mayhew, Baroness Mayhew (née Ludlam; 16 February 1924 – 8 July 2016) was a British diplomat. She was the second woman to work for the British Foreign Office,^[1] and its first female diplomat.^[2]

Early life

She was born on 16 February 1924, the daughter of a metallurgist father who made his fortune in copper in Rhodesia.^[1] She grew up in Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa.^[2] She attended Loreto Convent School, Pretoria until 1932.^[3]

Age 10 she returned to Britain to be educated and did not see her mother again until her twenties. She attended Sheffield High School and then won a scholarship to Cheltenham Ladies College and went on to read French and German at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, graduating after only two years in 1944 with a First.^[1]

Career

In 1944, near the end of World War II, she was recruited by British naval intelligence and worked at Bletchley Park, in Hut 8, translating decoded German Navy signals.^[1] After the war she was appointed as the UK's first woman diplomat. Her first posting was to Yugoslavia.^[1] On her marriage in 1949 she was required to leave the service and her pension was converted to a dowry under rules which the Foreign Office maintained until 1973.

Personal life

In 1949 she married Christopher Mayhew, the politician, broadcaster and writer, whom she met when they were both in the diplomatic service, and they had two sons and two daughters. He died in 1997.^[4]

She spent her later years in a care home in Wimbledon,^[2] and died on 8 July 2016.^[1]

Published works

• Beads on a String: A Fractured Childhood. Book Guild. 2000. ISBN 978-1-85776-421-5. 

References