Cynthia Mary Crews (nee Jopson) was born in Liverpool on 31 March 1906, the daughter of Samuel Robson Jopson, foreign commercial traveller, and Mary Alice Brooke. She was educated at the Belvedere School in Liverpool before coming up to Girton College in 1924 with the Ashworth Hallett Scholarship. Placed in the first class in both parts of the Modern Languages Tripos, she took her degree in 1928, and a PhD in London in 1930. In 1931 she married Dudley Clavell Crews but later divorced. She then married Jacques Andre Golse in 1946 and later divorced again, but she continued to be known as Mrs Crews. Cynthia Crews was a student of many languages. From early in her career she specialised in Judaeo-Spanish (the language spoken by the descendents of the Spanish Jews banished in the later Middle Ages), undertaking some of her early research at the University of Bucharest. She published widely on the language and collected materials for a dictionary (see GCPP Crews 4/1). She moved about in a variety of teaching and research appointments in England, France and Ireland, teaching and lecturing in French, German and Spanish. She returned to Girton as Pfeiffer Research Fellow in 1937-39, but left on the outbreak of war to work in the Censorship (Postal Censorship, Uncommon Languages Department, 1939-40), as a Teacher of English (for the British Council in Turkey, 1940-42), and for the BBC (as Sub-Editor for Turkish, Near East Section, 1943-45). Subsequently her work at Leeds University as Lecturer, then Reader in Romance Philology, enabled her to continue her research and to enjoy teaching at all levels. Cynthia Crews still had a number of research projects in hand when she died in Leeds on 8 September 1969.