The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  Then one woman told him that her husband was serving abroad, and that she only had one small child and four bedrooms. According to Mrs Sugg, the policeman said ‘Right. These two young ladies will be billeted with you and you will be hearing from Social Services about your payment.’ She remembers, ‘The owner had no choice. We were force-billeted and the policeman’s job was done.

  ‘Mrs Haymer – for that was our host’s name – was super. She became a second mum to two bewildered and frightened teenagers and we stayed with her during our posting at the radio station at Woodcock Hill, St Albans.’

  Spring 1940, and in the Surrey household of eleven-year-old Geoffrey Pidgeon, the family had been much impressed by the advent of two mysterious yet cheerful billetees – Wilf Lilburn and Bob Chennells, young men engaged in unspecified war work to do with wireless technology. The pair were friendly, polite and well mannered, but the nature of their work – and their frequent absences – was shrouded in secrecy. One day, Geoffrey got a clue as he walked into Lilburn’s room to tell him that he was wanted on the telephone. ‘He’d got an ordinary wooden Philco [radio] set, wooden frame, fretwork on the front. He’d turned it round and he’d taken out a handset,’ says Mr Pidgeon. ‘And he was talking to someone. I looked at that – I was astonished, I sort of backed off. All they said was that they were working in the wireless station.’ Actually, it was a great deal more than that; they were right-hand men of Richard Gambier-Parry and in those early days of the war, they were running extraordinarily risky missions back and forth across the Channel.

  ‘These two chaps were coming and going a lot – sometimes they would be there and sometimes they would be away for a week,’ continues Mr Pidgeon. ‘Wilf disappeared one week and when he came back, my mother said to him: “Oh, have you been back to London?”

  ‘“No,” Wilf said, simply, “I’ve been to Holland.”

  ‘Now of course at that time the British Expeditionary Force was there. My mother said to him, “How did you get into Holland?” After all, there were destroyers up and down the Channel. But it was just a throwaway line. It just came out. Then I realised.’

  Lilburn and Chennells were running replacement wireless sets to agents in the field. They were going back and forth, through Bordeaux, Belgium and Holland, and then returning to the ordered, calm simplicity of Caterham.

  But their very presence in the Pidgeon household was to have a transformative effect, not least on young Geoffrey himself. At that time, his father, the owner of an upmarket West End ticket agency, was also carrying out his duties as an ARP warden. ‘Wilf and Bob had to go,’ says Mr Pidgeon. ‘But then weeks later, in April or May 1940, Bob Chennells phoned my father and asked if he would like a job with their organisation.

  ‘None of us knew what it was apart from something to do with wireless. Father was asked to go to 34 Broadway, near St James’s Park. When he got there, he was taken into a room and there were components of a wireless set: condenser, resistor, valves – and he had to name the various parts. And they said, “All right Mr Pidgeon, you’ll hear from us.”’ As it happened, Pidgeon’s father was a skilled amateur radio enthusiast who had built his own sets. The work was an ideal fit.

  ‘He had to give references,’ adds Mr Pidgeon. His father was in the unusual position of being able to supply references from an extraordinarily gilded source: in his professional life, he had regularly escorted relatives of Queen Victoria – residing at Kensington Palace – to the theatre, having arranged the seats for them. ‘You can’t get more impressive than that, can you?’ says Mr Pidgeon. ‘So father – about a week or so later – had a letter saying would you please travel to Bletchley Park and when you get there, phone this number and you will be met. He was also told to catch a certain train, which he did. He was driven in a Packard to Whaddon Hall and there was Bob and Wilf. He was asked if he would like to run the wireless stores, which were in their infancy, for the organisation. And he said yes.

  ‘It was a civilian job. But then of course Dunkirk had happened – this was now early June. The country was in a terrible state. Troops were coming home. Every regiment under the sun came up a gangplank. And so father was quickly fixed up in a place called Stony Stratford. He was billeted with a family called the Crows.’ Not long after this, the Pidgeon family would find themselves at the heart of Britain’s top secret wireless operation.

  4 The Listeners at Large

  The Nazi war machine was tearing its way across western Europe: and to many in Britain in the summer of 1940, the fearful question was when – not if – those same forces would cross the narrow strip of sea that separated the country from its deadly enemy. The British Expeditionary Force, caught hideously by surprise when the Germans made their lightning advance through France, had been forced into a retreat that was dressed up to look like a pyrrhic victory. But Dunkirk if anything underlined the apparent vulnerability of the nation. Not one country had yet succeeded in standing in the way of Hitler’s forces. Was Britain really prepared to do so, all alone?

  On top of this, recalled Bletchley codebreaker Peter Gray Lucas, signals ‘were read during the land campaigns of 1939–40 but it is unlikely that they yielded any usable intelligence. The only recollection that survives is the excitement among the computors [at RAF Cheadle] when a corrupt signal that they had rendered as “harass refugees” was read out in a BBC bulletin.’1 Clearly the term ‘harass’ was early evidence of the shocking ruthlessness of the enemy. But on this occasion, the computors, normally so efficient, had got it wrong. The signal had in fact stated ‘protect refugees’. However, it was too late, recalled Lucas; it was out there. And the BBC did not broadcast a correction.

  Further to the south of England, however, the Y Service was to notch up one vital victory; and that was the crucial support that it supplied throughout the Battle of Britain. As Sir Arthur Bonsall pointed out, the Wrens based at RAF Kingsdown in Kent, and at the tiny listening stations dotted along the coast, were providing the sort of intelligence about bomber formations – the scientific advance of radar was still very much in its early days – that was to prove utterly invaluable. The Bletchley Park official history states:

  Information from the Home Defence Units . . . using German-speaking WAAF and Wrens staff on high frequency radio intercepts from the pilots and their ground controllers, was sent direct to the local RAF commands as well as a HQ Fighter Command at Stanmore . . . With growing regularity and accuracy as the battle proceeded, the organisations exploiting the Luftwaffe signals traffic [were] able to give advanced information about the purpose, type and scale of the enemy’s attacks.

  Lisa Ison had just completed her Wrens special duty course and was dispatched to the listening station at Dover. ‘A very slow journey as the train kept stopping as there were dogfights overhead,’ she wrote. ‘The Battle of Britain was in full swing.’ She described ‘watching German fighters shooting down the barrage balloons over Dover Harbour, which looked like fun. Another time seeing the elite Goering squadron flying back very low over the cliffs, close enough to be able to see all the markings on the planes – even the pilots’ faces.’2

  Some tiny coastal out-stations were to be very fondly remembered by the Wrens who had worked in them. In 1940, Daphne Baker was sent to Dover as a cipher officer. In the early days, in a small room on Marine Parade, life was good fun – not least because she was able to see friends, and her parents only lived a few miles away. But then came Dunkirk, and suddenly Dover was at the centre of the evacuation. ‘The nights were clear,’ she wrote. ‘The harbour was so crammed with vessels of all sizes that you couldn’t have dropped a pebble between them, let alone a bomb.’ She was among those who helped the soldiers off the little ships, and noted how they walked ‘like automatons’; clearly the men felt that this was a defeat, rather than the triumph it would later be portrayed as. But for Daphne, this was where the war acquired deadly seriousness and urgency, with the odd extraordinary moment of redemption.

  ‘We were on nig
ht watch,’ she wrote, and reports of sinkings were pouring in, including the ship of the husband of a fellow cipher officer. ‘We whisked the signal away so that she couldn’t see it but were heartbroken for her. Early in the morning there was a sudden scuffle and a figure in a French blue smock burst into the cypher office and clasped this girl to his bosom. I don’t know how many times he’d been sunk and picked up that night, but there was her husband, and one happy ending.’3

  Imogen Ryan was posted to Harwich after an incongruously idyllic summer of 1940 in which her Suffolk garden ‘burst with fruit and vegetables’. Even in that moment when the Nazi threat was at its sharpest, she recalled that life at Harwich was ‘fun’. ‘Most of the people I was lucky enough to be working with were highly intelligent and very good company and we were, of course, all “Nice Girls”,’ she wrote. ‘This is to say we all came from comparatively comfortable backgrounds and conformed to the current rules of good behaviour.’

  For others, there was a curious mix of fresh sea air with a grandstand view of the Battle of Britain, and the Blitz that followed. Elizabeth Agar was posted to Portland Bill in Dorset and found herself working in a small cottage:

  It was up a hill about one hundred yards from the road – a struggle with suitcases and provisions. It looked out to sea on three sides. There were rocks to climb and the walks along the cliff were glorious – walks spoiled by the strict requirement that we take our tin hats and gas masks with us . . . on one occasion, I remember our cook coming back from a walk during which a low-flying aircraft had let loose a burst of indiscriminate gun fire. She got down behind the only available shelter, a small gorse bush. She came back very shaken, saying, ‘I didn’t know which end to put my tin hat!’4

  These exposed coastal positions brought all sorts of hazards. With Dover having gained a deserved reputation as ‘Hellfire Corner’, Daphne Baker’s small team was moved to an abandoned lighthouse nearby at South Foreland, no longer working because a cliff had collapsed almost on top of it. They also operated, higher up, from a nearby empty windmill, which gave a wide view across the Channel. ‘In those early days it was terrible to see our ships being sunk by Stukas and Dorniers right in front of us,’ she wrote. ‘We were stuck to our sets listening on the aircraft frequencies, and I was relieved to see that mine wasn’t the only hand that shook as we wrote.’

  And there was the terrifying matter of enemy fire. ‘By now the shelling had started and for several reasons we came in for a lot of it,’ wrote Mrs Baker. ‘Firstly a lighthouse and a windmill made a good practice target even if the Germans didn’t know we were there. Secondly, if Dover Harbour was being bombed, ships would scurry out as close under our cliff as possible.’5

  The nature of the work acted as a sort of alert in itself. In one coastal station, a Wren intercepted a message stating that her hut was being targeted, and indeed that the missile had already been launched, which gave her and her colleagues about half a minute to get out. The projectile fell short – but the fright was comprehensive.

  For those who lived in Dover, the shelling became almost a matter of macabre routine; with the German guns just eighteen miles away across the water, and with the strategic importance of the port and its military HQ, the townsfolk became almost inured to regular explosions, as well as the incendiaries from air raids. There was a local shelter but many were wary of using it, fearing that the ground above might be hit and everyone within buried alive. According to one local woman, many townsfolk instead favoured ‘the caves’, the network of tunnels that ran beneath Dover Castle.

  As summer gave way to autumn, Elizabeth Agar, in her Portland Bill eyrie, faced ever more hazard from German bombers. She wrote in her diary: ‘I was in Weymouth with a couple of others in the car and on the way home, the sirens went . . . I was driving, and we had just got on to the road across Chesil Beach when the planes came to bomb the oil tanks at the other end. Once on to this narrow road, turning was impossible and stopping unthinkable . . .’ She drove on through the dark with only her side-lights, in a state of terror. This gave way to a moment of pitch-black comedy as she was then pulled up by a sentry, who refused to let her continue as a result of an unexploded bomb: her reaction was one of wild indignation, as it meant reversing, and going back all the way into Weymouth in order to pick up the necessary pass documentation from her superiors. Bullets and incendiaries were one thing; the grinding wheels of British bureaucracy were another.

  Aileen Clayton, based in Hawkinge on the south coast, recalled in her brilliant book The Enemy is Listening some of the curiously intimate relationships that the listeners would develop with the German pilots with whom they had become familiar:

  The pilot of one of the aircraft engaged on . . . perfectly legitimate reconnaissance, had become quite a friend of ours, and we quite frankly looked forward to him ‘coming on the air’ to give his reports. His callsign, I remember, was ‘Amsel Eins’. He assumed that we were listening, and he would chatter away to us in English. ‘I know, you English listening station, can you hear me?’ he would cheerfully declare. ‘Would you like me to drop a bomb on you? Listen – whee! – boomp!’ and he would chuckle into his microphone.

  ‘But war makes the most savage demands, and the day had to come when we were instructed to let No. 11 Fighter Group know . . . a flight of Spitfires [jumped] him, and he was shot down in flames. He was unable to get out and we listened to him as he screamed and screamed for his mother and cursed the Fuehrer . . . We heard him all the way down . . . I went outside and was sick.6

  In those febrile months, there would inevitably be panics that the Nazi invasion was already under way. Up at Sleaton Sluice in Northumberland, Jane Fagg and her colleagues were given a ‘mother-of-pearl revolver’ to be on the safe side; on the Isle of Wight, the listening Wrens had been given blue overalls in case of emergency – in the event of the Germans landing and taking over, they could pretend the listening station was an orphanage. A curious idea – yet in Dover, Daphne Baker recalled an even more bizarre back-up plan that she had received in the form of an official directive: in the case of the Nazis landing, she was to walk to Bristol from Dover, taking with her a tin of tuna fish as sustenance.

  Elsewhere, Geoffrey Pidgeon’s father had been spirited away to Buckinghamshire and Whaddon Hall to begin his confidential radio work, but the rest of the family were still living in what was fast becoming an extremely hazardous zone; in Surrey, the war was being fought directly over their heads. After a few close encounters with German bombers, it was clear that the Pidgeons would have to join their father as quickly as possible, even though for them, as for all the other boys of Surrey and Kent, the pyrotechnics in the blue skies were hypnotic. ‘Biggin Hill was bombed,’ says Mr Pidgeon. ‘We were in a triangle – Croydon was about six miles north, Biggin Hill was about five or six miles east. And the runway at Kenley was less than two miles from our house. So when the German fighters were coming back, they were right over our heads, a hundred feet up. There were dog fights were going on overhead.

  ‘On Thursdays, our mother worked in a mobile first aid unit – an old single-decker bus. And after one battle, they went to Croydon. There were a lot of injured – and killed I suppose. The bombing was pretty bad. Our house was hit but not very much. Shrapnel, a dozen big holes.

  ‘Also we were very close to the newly built Caterham bypass, and they were trying to bomb that, and the roundabout was a perfect spot, because all the communications went through there. When the bombing stopped, we went out in the fields behind, with all the bomb holes, and smoke, and we collected bits of bomb. The bombs had hit a gas main the other side of the bypass and that was shooting a forty-foot flame in the air.’

  Not long after that, the family joined their father near his clandestine work in the Midlands countryside.

  For those who concern themselves today with the security of electronic communications, it is noteworthy that the government had been taking a keen interest in the interception of messages even in the earli
est days of radio. ‘The Official Secrets Act of 1920 had required all cable operators to supply copies of their traffic to the British Government,’ wrote Nigel West, GCHQ chronicler. At the time, this would largely comprise telegraph communications. Any intercepts that were then deemed to be of potential use to the security services were copied and distributed. The mighty company Cable and Wireless, which by the outbreak of the Second World War operated almost half of the cable network crossing the planet, was assiduous in passing material on. Alastair Denniston, the director of Bletchley Park, declared: ‘Between us and the companies, there has never been any question as to why we wanted the traffic and what we did with it . . . I have no doubt that the managers and the senior officials must have guessed the true answer but I have never heard of any indiscretions through all these years with so many people involved.’

  The shock of the Nazi assault on western Europe was concentrating military minds, especially in the case of the anticipated assault on Britain. In terms of interception, Y Service personnel had already ventured into the field, and across the Channel.

  One such officer was Kenneth Maynard, whose ability with wireless technology had already been spotted. Although he has left no diaries, his daughter Alison Trelfa picks up the story of the first part of his extraordinary war: ‘My father was an only child and tended most of the time to amuse himself. His main hobby, when a child, was as an amateur radio enthusiast. He spent hours communicating with other enthusiasts from all over the world.