Elizabeth Watkins
(d.1853)

Died aged unknown

June Knowles (24 June 1923 – 14 October 2012), better known by her pen name Elizabeth Watkins, was an English author, brought up in Kenya, where her parents - Oscar Ferris Watkins (1877–1943) and Olga Florence Watkins (née Baillie Grohman) (1889–1947) - had started a coffee farm outside Nairobi, and later educated at St Anne's College, Oxford. In 1941, aged just 18, she falsified her age in order to join up with the Women's Auxiliary Air Force as a cypher officer. Serving in Cairo at the height of the Eighth Army's North African Campaign, she worked at the Heliopolis signals base and other secret locations translating top secret signals for the British High Command, including relaying intercepted German Ultra traffic, intelligence considered so secret that it was not even shared directly with the other Allies. Later posted to Kenya to be with her dying father, she was then sent to the Seychelles, where she supported the dangerous work of the Catalina crews of the Canadian and allied air forces, flying vital anti-submarine missions to protect the sea routes to India. Subsequently, volunteering for further active service she was posted to Caserta to do cyphers for the Allied advance into Southern Italy. In 1949 she married Oliver Staniforth Knowles (1920–2008) in Nairobi, they had met at Oxford University and moved to Kenya where he was in the Colonial Administration. They had four sons. Watkins died on October 14, 2012 at the age of 89 at her home in Oxford, after a short illness.

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