But alongside this went an abiding sense – especially among the young women posted around the world – that they were growing up tremendously fast. Several such women recall that by their mid-twenties, a certain carefree element of youth had passed them by. The sights they saw, their intense experiences, forced them to swiftly adjust their perspectives on life; from the old expectations of quiet domesticity to the sophistication and confidence that their new, exciting, cosmopolitan lives bestowed. War is of course always transformative; for the women and the men of the Y Service, that metamorphosis was deep and fast.
Like their colleagues at Bletchley Park, those enlisted into the Y Services were compelled to sign the Official Secrets Act. Security was paramount – not merely throughout the years of conflict, but during the years afterwards. Like their Bletchley Park colleagues, the secret listeners of the Y Service had to keep quiet about their achievements, and even about the equipment that they had used. ‘I would have loved to have been able to tell my dad,’ says veteran Y Service operative Betty White with some feeling. ‘I would have loved to have told him about the work I did in the war. But I couldn’t. You couldn’t tell anyone for over thirty years.’
‘It was dinned into us right from the start,’ says Jay McDonald, who had also been recruited as a wireless operator. ‘Not only were we not to say anything. But we also knew just how vital the work was.’
Even if they have not had the full recognition that their colleagues at Bletchley Park have won, the secret listeners have at least their own private satisfactions: that they played a constant role in the war, and that without their quick-wittedness, focus, and good humour in the face of sometimes unimaginable pressure, that war would have been very much more difficult to win.
2 Reporting for Special Duties
Not everyone had an aptitude for the work of the Y Service. At the most fundamental level, it required, as one veteran says, ‘a sort of flexibility of the brain’. For some Y Service operatives, the various skills required of them seemed mysteriously innate. For others, it was a matter of months of very hard training. The training itself partly resembled a linguistic crash course, with high-speed Morse as the language; and partly a futuristic introduction to a mysterious new world of radio waves, and the physics of atmospheres and ionospheres. For many young women, the latter was one of the most appealing aspects of the role. There was something immediately liberating about the chance to demonstrate proficiency in what had previously been a male arena.
Many young women, such as Pat Sinclair and Betty White, who joined the Wrens – the Women’s Royal Naval Service – as fast as they could, almost flaunted this skill. First, there was the patience required as they sat down at short-wave receivers and went through the process of trying to find the correct German frequency, transmissions being made from Europe in this case; then there was the laser-beam focus required as the German operator began tapping out Morse and the young women, armed only with pencils and specially lined pads, swiftly wrote out the letters as they heard them, simultaneously translating from Morse to the ordinary alphabet.
Not everyone had this skill. One veteran recalled in the early stages of the war a young officer in France frantically taking down an enemy transmission and having to note down the actual dots and dashes as he heard them; not a great deal of use as they could so easily merge and be misread.
The other crucial qualification was an almost boundless enthusiasm. ‘Civilian wireless operators were called Experimental Wireless Assistants,’ noted Maurice de la Bertauche. ‘Many of the younger members had been recruited from grammar schools and trained by the War Office.’1
But for others, it was not even half so formal. On the Sunday morning of 3 September 1939, as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain broadcast to the nation that it was at war, there were those who knew instantly how they wanted to do their bit.
‘I had left school in August 1939, just before war broke out,’ says former Wren Marjorie Gerken. At the time, she was living in Richmond, Surrey, with her family. Very quickly, she had got an administrative job in the civil service. ‘On that September 3, we really thought that the German bombers would be coming immediately. Not that there was any panic. My family already had an air-raid shelter. And it happened that shortly after Chamberlain gave his speech, the sirens actually did go off. But we didn’t actually go into the shelter at that point – we all stood in the garden, listening for aeroplanes.’ Marjorie knew absolutely that she wanted to go into the Wrens, and she also knew what she wanted to do. For as it happened, when she had been in the Girl Guides, she had learned rudimentary Morse code. She had to wait a while before she got her wish. But when she did, she was thrown right into the heart of the Y Service operation.
Elsewhere, all sorts of different skills were being sought. In her memoirs of the war, Miggs Ackroyd recalled: ‘My father heard they wanted German speakers at the Admiralty. So I went along and was briefly interviewed by a man, not even in uniform, who said I would do and gave me a ticket to Dover a few days hence.’ At this stage, Miggs did not actually realise she had enlisted in the Wrens. It was only when she met up with her colleagues on the south coast that the urgency and secrecy of the role became fully apparent.
Elsewhere, Jay McDonald lived with her family in Tobermory on the Hebridean Isle of Mull. She joined up at the age of nineteen with a vague idea of being a physical education instructor. But after some interviews, she was funnelled into quite a different line. ‘We were sent to a basic training camp at Dalkeith,’ she says. ‘They were sorting out who could be drivers, and so on. Well – I was never going to be a driver. I was just so unmechanical. As part of the process, they gave us bits of Meccano to assemble. I couldn’t even put two bits together.’ The testing went on, this time angled more towards intelligence. Jay McDonald had found something rather more suitable to contribute to the war effort. ‘I was picked out as a wireless operator, which was a good thing,’ says Miss McDonald with a dry chuckle now. ‘After all, it was better than being a cleaner – or orderly, as they were called – and better than being a cook. On the scale of things, wireless operator was a very good thing to be.’ A skilled thing, too: one which would require months of training. She was dispatched at once, with about twenty-five others, to a remarkably agreeable set-up on the Isle of Man.
Meanwhile, joining up for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, the WAAFs, German-speaking Peggy West was swiftly inducted into the hermetic world of RAF Kingsdown in Kent; there she discovered she was to be working alongside an extraordinary team of people from across Europe. ‘Volunteers who had moved to the United Kingdom from the occupied countries wore their Austrian, Czechoslovakian, Polish, Dutch, Belgian, Norwegian, Greek, and French “flashes” proudly on their shoulders,’ she recalled.
We were trained in wireless telegraphy to use Morse code and become known as W/T operators. We were also introduced to radio telegraphy with its use of plain-language intercepts, to become R/T operators, and then shown the intricacies of obtaining line bearings for use in Direction Finding Units . . . After all that, we found to our surprise that we had become ‘Instant Sergeants’.
The work was, of course, absolutely top secret, and conducted with pleasing incongruity from one of the very many country houses that had been requisitioned for the war:
Arriving at Hollywood Manor in Kent, the RAF ‘Y’ Service Headquarters, we learned of a network of highly secret radio stations and small direction finding units whose frequencies were tuned to the German Luftwaffe. These stations stretched from Montrose in Scotland down the east coast and round southern England to Strete in Devon.
Moreover, the work they were to do required an unusual level of immersion: ‘Inside the tightly secured radio intelligence sections,’ she said, ‘primarily German was spoken, thought, and written. Our reactions had to be those of the enemy.’2
For Vivienne Alford, the recruitment procedure had a similarly linguistic slant. ‘I went up Whitehall to the Admiralty,’ she wrote, ‘to be int
erviewed by a young man who actually conversed in German. I’d given up trying to find out about the work and was prepared to settle on the basis of living conditions. “Did I mind being in remote places with only a few people?” Just the thing for me.’3
For some, Y Service work entailed rather more physical jeopardy than simple ‘squad drill’. There was an affable young radio buff called Bill Miller, whose wireless war was swiftly to develop into an extraordinary and quite unexpected series of espionage skirmishes in the Mediterranean. Yet it all began quietly enough. ‘As a boy, [Miller] was fascinated by short wave wireless, then in its infancy,’ wrote his friend and colleague Geoffrey Pidgeon, who collected Miller’s story. ‘He learned Morse code, and spent hours copying ships’ wireless messages and constructing simple short wave radio receivers. It was his hope some day that he would become an amateur wireless operator and eventually open his own amateur wireless station.’
And so it was that Miller’s enthusiasm was brought to the attention of the authorities. ‘When he registered for military service in 1938, aged 19, his wireless and Morse code qualifications were noted . . . he was enrolled into the 1st London Divisional Signals of the Royal Corps of Signals.’4 The young recruits were taken to Eastbourne. The next three months were taken up with military training and also, as Pidgeon notes, learning Morse by flag and by Aldis lamp. What was to follow was rather more involved and colourful.
A few recruits, such as Joy Hale, specifically wanted to work in the field of cryptography. ‘When I applied to join the Wrens, I stated that I would like to be a coder,’ she wrote. ‘I had been good at Algebra at school and had plenty of patience.’ But her straightforward wishes did not apparently seem to coincide with those of the Navy. The authorities were altogether more interested in Hale’s proficiency in German, acquired both at school and following an extended stay with a German family. ‘Consequently, when my call-up papers eventually came through stating that my category was to be “Special Duties”,’ she wrote, ‘it meant nothing to me. I just assumed that I was being assigned to some special form of coding.’
Hale’s determination was shared by Londoner Pat Sinclair, who as a young woman was working for the electricity board – a reserved occupation – when the war broke out. ‘My one ambition was to join the Wrens,’ she says now. ‘It was very glamorous. And I decided I wanted to be a wireless telegraphist even though I knew nothing at that time about Morse code.’ Mrs Sinclair did not waste her time, though; before joining up, she ensured that she taught herself the rudiments of the code so that she wouldn’t be diverted into other war duties. Her heart was set on it. And this single-mindedness was to fix the course of her life.
Other, less immediately obvious candidates were spotted. Elizabeth Mashall remembered with terrible clarity the embarrassment of her own bid to join:
I attended an Officers Selection Board in London. I only just made it at the appointed time. I was the last to be interviewed and had watched Wrens emerging from interviews lasting about 15 minutes. ‘Five queen bees,’ they gasped, ‘all firing questions.’ I went in and was asked the usual short preliminary questions. Then, ‘Why did you join the Wrens?’ I sought wildly and unsuccessfully for a suitable answer and then, to my horror, blurted out the truth. ‘Because I was told I would never get in, ma’am.’
The response to this, apparently, was a combination of shock and suppressed laughter.
But Mrs Mashall’s abilities were being noted elsewhere. She had also written a letter to the Admiralty, stressing her expertise in German and pointing up ‘carefully chosen’ personal references. Days later, she received a telephone call, and instructions to report to the Admiralty for a chat. Outside the building, a naval officer quietly took her to one side and said ‘Können Sie Deutsch sprechen?’ To which she replied ‘Ja, ich kann ganz gut Deutsch sprechen.’ The naval officer had heard quite enough. ‘You’ll do,’ he said.5
Just as the cryptanalysts of the Government Code and Cypher School had, from the mid-1930s onwards, tasted the air and made preparations for the coming war, so too did the section of MI6 concerned with wireless interception. Thanks to firms such as Marconi, wireless technology had advanced a great deal since the 1920s. But this new science had a more homely element too: radio was a hobby pursued with almost holy zeal by boys and men across the country, many of whom learned how to rig up their own receivers.
For military intelligence, the coming conflict would place a great deal of emphasis on pioneering technology. The science of communications had, in the space of fifty years, changed beyond recognition. The nineteenth-century innovation of telegraphy – and the subsequent submarine cable network – had opened the way to the transmission of messages and intelligence at previously unthinkable speeds. Marconi’s ingenious development of wireless technology – in part an act of spirited piracy, yanking the idea from under the nose of several more eminent scientists who were working on the same lines – was recognised as having revolutionary potential.
The British Army had adopted early wireless apparatus for use during the Boer War. This, though, was not a success. There was the suggestion that its failure was due to inexpert operators’ inability to understand exactly what they were doing, or the finer points of tuning.
But the technology grew easier to use, with more focused, delicate tuning, better calibrated transmission and reception, and even a limited capacity for portable use; understanding the vast potential of such developments, the military commands in Britain and Europe were scrabbling to stay ahead of one another, especially in the period leading up to the Great War. The British established radio stations across the country; so too did the Germans.
For some young civilians, the science of the wireless was hypnotically fascinating. And for William Le Queux, one of the period’s most popular novelists, the technology was irresistible as a futuristic plot device in his many spy thrillers. In 1909’s Spies of the Kaiser (now a hilarious as well as politically incorrect read), our heroes are following the activities of agents in Hull, and in the south London district of Sydenham. What can be the connection between the northern docks and the leafy southern suburban hills? It is, as our heroes discover, the cutting-edge art of wireless telegraphy; the enemy agents in Hull are relaying the movements of ships in the North Sea back to their colleagues down south. The installation of their secret equipment – half given away by the discovery of yards of cabling in an old Clerkenwell warehouse – is a diabolical technical triumph.
The notion, in the early years of the century, of treacherous spies using secret transmitters to send intelligence back to Germany was indeed so powerful that le Queux – along with countless others – seemingly came to believe it in real life. There was, in the Edwardian era, a widespread fear that the Germans were plotting an invasion of Britain, and le Queux took to the popular press elaborating his conviction that undercover agents were establishing radio stations right the way along England’s coast, the better to purvey stolen secrets.
It was also in 1909 that the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) (later to become known as MI6, to mark the connection with the homeland security service MI5) was founded, and with it came long and serious investigations not just into lurid spy rumours, but into the potential of the new technology.
The serious question was to do with security. On the eve of the Great War, the government took precautions in case le Queux’s fantasies turned out to have some basis in fact; it ordered the immediate closure of amateur wireless stations. The official government communication read: ‘Remove at once your aerial wires and dismantle your apparatus.’ On top of this came the strict Defence of the Realm Act: ‘No person shall, without the written permission of the Postmaster General, buy, sell, or have in his possession or under his control any apparatus for the sending or receiving of messages by wireless telegraphy, or any apparatus intended to be used as a component part of such apparatus.’
The earlier scares had their knock-on effects too. There were some amateur radio enthusias
ts whose hobby had been noted by suspicious neighbours who went to the police with their suspicions of German espionage – and after the Defence Act was passed, anyone found even with a long-disused bit of radio kit was liable to face prosecution.
Traffic was, of course, encoded. And as the First World War escalated, the Navy was to prove most innovative in this new field. It set up a special listening post in Hunstanton, on the Norfolk coast near King’s Lynn, through which German wireless traffic coming from across the North Sea was received. The coded messages were then relayed with all haste to an establishment termed ‘Room 40’, whose interception of these German coded messages played a significant part in the Battle of Jutland – although, as Bletchley veteran Ralph Bennett argued, the Navy’s use of the intelligence was so hampered by outmoded procedures that the battle ended up at best as a draw. Bennett also noted that this slowness on the part of the Navy was not really to change until the late 1920s, when a young Lord Louis Mountbatten advocated a proper wireless interception service in order to eavesdrop on potential enemies in the Mediterranean.
‘Room 40’ was the First World War equivalent of Bletchley Park. It was also the immediate forerunner of the Government Code and Cypher School. Here, in dusty and labyrinthine Whitehall corridors, were gathered a blend of naval officers and freshly recruited academics – notably Alastair Denniston and a brilliant classicist down from Cambridge, Alfred ‘Dilly’ Knox. Once the Room 40 operatives had received the messages, they would set to work unravelling the complex codes; and then would pass the resulting decrypts to intelligence. What is striking now is the low-key, almost improvised nature of this operation.
The Secret Listeners Page 2