The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  ‘There was always something going on at camp,’ continues Mrs Gerken. ‘Hockey. Very good amateur dramatics. Ballroom dancing was my thing.

  ‘Now the Americans always had dances. And they would send a note out, saying that so many Wrens could come, and that those who wanted to should put their names down. Well, there was always a lot of competition. Although we had transport into town, the Americans were based a little out of the way, so they would come and fetch and carry us in their lorries, which is how we got to the dances in the blackout.

  ‘One reason it was such an intense competition to get to these dances was that old – but very true – cliché. The Americans had all this food and all these supplies,’ continues Mrs Gerken, laughing. ‘They had tinned fruit and tinned ham. And chocolate. Our own ration was one tiny little bar a week.’

  ‘And they had little guide-books to teach them how they were to speak to the English young ladies. How they were to behave . . .’ adds Pat. Of the dances, she says, ‘we were very chaperoned. I assure you, it was only cupboard love, because they would give us tins of peaches . . . a pair of silk stockings. They lavished us with all this stuff – but they were very nice lads.’

  Chocolate and tinned peaches were one thing. But romance of a more lasting kind was to come to Mrs Gerken during the night shift at Flowerdown. ‘The boys did a different watch system: we did four watches a day, they did three, so with all the changing rotas, it might be some time before you saw the same sailor again. One Christmas, my husband-to-be, Norman, was on watch with me. He was a Liverpudlian, though he didn’t have much of a real Scouse accent. We couldn’t talk because we were working. But at one point, he did manage to ask if I would go to the film show, and whether he could sit next to me? And when we did go, I did sit next to him.

  ‘He walked me back to the huts. The officer of the watch came round but there was always a little time to be together. The second time we saw each other – well, we only knew each other’s forenames so now we asked each other’s surnames. He told me his: Gerken. I burst out laughing. In the end, he had to show me his paybook as proof.

  ‘So we went ashore –’ the constant use of naval terms was a source of good-humoured fun – ‘we went to the cinema, we went walking – there was lovely country.’

  Although Mrs Gerken is now sadly widowed, her marriage, like that of her friend Pat, was forged in this most apparently un-romantic of scenarios. But, as she says, there was quite a lot of it about. Betty White, who also met her husband, Charles, at HMS Flowerdown, naturally agrees. Indeed, the story of how Betty and Charles came to be an item illustrates perfectly how wartime romance had a certain sharpness to it, an edge borne out of proximity to danger.

  They met at a time when Betty was starting to work on the complex Japanese codes. ‘The petty officer told me that our section was taking two new sailors,’ says Mrs White, ‘and could I show them how everything worked and where everything was. One of these sailors asked for tea – and I explained that it was the sailors who made it. Then this man simply turned to me and said, “We will go out tonight.”’ The memory of this extraordinarily direct approach still makes Mrs White laugh fondly; and despite the abrupt chat-up line, they did indeed go out. ‘We went to the cinema in Winchester,’ she says. Because of the war, and their different duties, they were sundered for a while. But afterwards, when they both found themselves working in London’s Square Mile, they caught up again with ease, married and enjoyed a great many decades together.

  ‘As to romances generally? They were very easy,’ says Marjorie Gerken. ‘There were umpteen romances going on. Two great friends of ours, they married. But remember,’ she adds insistently, ‘we took it slow, even in wartime. There was no sleeping around. No fear. At that time, all we wanted was letters – it was all letters, that was the only way we could really communicate with each other. When I met Norman, I’d had different boyfriends and I was still writing to six. As with the Americans: all we really wanted to know is if they had got home all right.’

  In a wider sense, that, of course, was the abiding undercurrent of the conflict: a pervasive dread and anxiety for all those men out there, the constant, desperate hope that they would ‘get home all right’. This was particularly the case for men sailing with the Atlantic and Arctic convoys. There was the ever-present razor edge of jeopardy; the merciless German destroyers, the invisible U-boats in their wolf packs. And this was without mentioning the ordinary hazards of sailing in violent seas, in weather so cold that the eyes could freeze over. Those who went through such experiences found that the later reunions had a special resonance.

  The Y Service operatives who worked from these vessels did an extraordinary job under unimaginably testing conditions. What can surprise now is the fact that some of their recollections are full of such good humour. Gordon Copson, writing in the Tel(s) magazine a few years ago, recalled his own time aboard HMS Keppel, an ‘ageing destroyer, which had been converted into a destroyer escort vessel’. The working conditions were almost insanely claustrophobic. ‘The Direction Finding office was little more than 4ft 6ins x 4ft 6ins and comprised of a shelf’ for the wireless equipment. Every time a depth charge was fired, the fuses in the equipment would blow. Every time a 4.7 gun was fired, a ‘tongue of flame’ from the flashback would come down the corridor – and so the wireless operator learned to keep the door closed. There was so much surplus electrical equipment on board that on one occasion, in heavy seas, Mr Copson tripped over some loose wiring on the deck and almost went into the sea. Any time he attempted to fix the aerial near the rear funnel while the ship was steaming, he would come down looking like someone doing an ‘Al Jolson impersonation’. Yet, as he concluded: ‘Ah, happy days!!!’

  There was little of this black humour for veteran Vic Stock of Chelmsford, working in the direction finding cabin of a vessel that was part of a group ‘sweeping the sea areas south of Ireland’ for German submarines. ‘I only heard the din and had to guess the sight . . .’ remembered Mr Stock, ‘quite suddenly the ship started racing at full speed and in no time at all came a sickening crash, the ship coming to a sudden stop and listing to starboard.’ Mr Stock hurried out from his listening station to see what was going on and what greeted him was a scene of chaos and unforgettable horror. The ship had rammed into a surfacing submarine; ‘flames were licking around the conning tower’ and screams could be heard from within the vessel. ‘But nobody was coming out,’ wrote Mr Stock. ‘They were jammed in for keeps.’ Slowly the ship was disentangled from the submarine, and there was still no way out for the German submariners. Their vessel sank to the ocean floor, its crew helplessly trapped within.

  The dangers of life in the middle of the rolling icy ocean were often utterly unpredictable. Y Service veteran Tom Goff, who was with HMS Byron, remembered that just after they had escorted a convoy to Murmansk, the ship’s captain, who had been fighting illness but not admitting to it, suddenly collapsed – it was appendicitis. They were a vast distance out in the north Atlantic; the chances of getting him all the way back to land before the appendix exploded seemed remote. The only thing was to get a doctor out to the ship. Goff signalled to the escort group commander. But, as he wrote, it ‘would soon be dark. Snow showers reduced visibility to a cable. There was heavy cloud. We were rolling like a pig . . . and there was said to be a shadowing U-boat reporting our position from astern of the convoy.’ As the signals operative, Goff found himself co-ordinating an extraordinarily tricky operation, plotting the position of the boat carrying the doctor who had been sent across.

  Even then, as the captain rolled in agony, in his efforts to board the ship in the swelling waves the doctor himself was swept overboard and almost keel-hauled; receiving a cracked skull, he fell profoundly unconscious. Goff, feeling increasingly helpless, realised that the only thing was to try and keep the captain’s temperature monitored; he had heard that sudden fluctuations meant that the appendix was about to rupture. Somehow, with the aid of anti-inflammatory pills, th
e captain was kept as comfortable as possible; indeed, when the doctor eventually came round three days later, he pronounced the man out of danger before diagnosing himself and returning to his own sickbed.

  Throughout the incident, and thanks in part to the menace of the shadowing U boat, Goff had to dutifully maintain a radio silence. When HMS Byron eventually came close to the Orkneys, he gratefully took to the airwaves again and by the time he was sailing past the Hebrides, he felt profound relief. The offending appendix was removed in Belfast.1

  Back on land, Wrens such as Marjorie Gerken were keenly aware of what was happening out on the oceans, not least because some of the men who had sailed them spent short periods of recuperation at HMS Flowerdown. For this reason, Gerken had little sympathy with the Wrens at base who seemed to be constantly agitating for higher wages. ‘There were a few girls there who were sometimes quite militant about money – “why shouldn’t we get the same money as lots of others,” they would say – but we didn’t have to go on these terrible convoys,’ says Mrs Gerken now, with some feeling. It wasn’t just the sailors at Flowerdown; during her brief posting to the far north of Scotland, Marjorie had seen at first hand some of the survivors pulled from the dagger-cold seas after their ships had gone down. The sight evidently haunted her. For this reason, she and her great friend Pat were always grateful for the congenial nature of existence aboard HMS Flowerdown. They were fully cognisant of the fact that life out in the wider world could be brutal.

  Their colleague Betty White was to know – a great deal better than most – just how brutal; her husband-to-be Charles had himself been a wireless operator on several convoys. The first, in 1942, had involved 100 ships, with just four escorts. The German U-boat wolf pack found them and, as Mrs White says now, out of all of them, ‘there were just two ships left sailing.’ Charles White was one of the lucky few to survive. When he eventually was sent to HMS Flowerdown, says Betty, ‘it was almost as a rest thing. The sailors still worked, but it was intended as a sort of recuperation from the convoys.’

  Invigorating as the off-duty atmosphere at HMS Flowerdown was, Pat Sinclair and Marjorie Gerken knew that they were here to give their fullest efforts to the tasks that they were faced with. Both of them now cite the advantage of youth. But one also had to have an aptitude, as demonstrated by Betty White. And both Pat and Marjorie were confident that they were very good at what they did.

  ‘As to the work: we were extremely well trained,’ says Mrs Gerken. ‘But not everyone suited it. One girl really couldn’t carry on. She was the first university-educated girl that I had ever met – back then, for so many girls, you might have been extremely bright but you wouldn’t get to go to university. But with this work, she somehow just couldn’t do it. Whether perhaps it was because her mind was so active . . . Morse – it’s automatic. Yet by contrast I didn’t ever find it boring. I found that the watches went by very quickly.’

  There was also a clear sense of where the lines of authority had been drawn. ‘With orders and hierarchy, I was always able to fit in, and do everything that we were told to do,’ says Mrs Gerken. ‘Pat was different – she would say why should we do this, why are they asking us to do that? – and I would just tell her, well, we’ve got to. You have to accept it.

  ‘We did lack sleep,’ she continues. ‘If you went on at midnight, you were supposed to have a sleep beforehand. But if there was a dance or a film show and it happened to fall in that part of your rota – well, you couldn’t go off camp, you did have to stay there, but you missed your sleep. Equally, with different shifts, you might try and get a sleep before midday, but that was difficult to do. I always found it difficult to go to sleep at those times. When we hitch-hiked back up to London, I’d catch up on my sleep there.’

  Pat Sinclair too recalls that there were a few women who could not handle the intensity of the work. But she herself found it rather stimulating. ‘We were given different frequencies. We were in front of a raised dais where two people sat and issued stuff to us. And also we had civilian chargehands. They supervised us and collected up our messages – we were given pads, and a pencil . . . so we sat there with our earphones on and you were told what frequency, and you had to try and find it. You twiddled the knobs and sometimes you’d get a clear signal, sometimes it was very difficult or it moved slightly.

  ‘If you took down messages from one of the German naval establishments, they would send very, very fast.’ But in the midst of that chilly, mechanistic efficiency, these operatives also found surprising shafts of humanity. Before the German sailors started transmitting the encrypted messages, the man going off shift would have a short conversation – also in code – with the man coming on; little more than light exchanges but all picked up perfectly by Pat Sinclair and her colleagues. ‘They’d come in and you got so used to the sound of how they sent messages,’ says Mrs Sinclair. ‘They’d say, have you been busy, or what’s the weather like? Some little chat. Then the person would get down to sending his messages.

  ‘And somehow you felt that you knew them in a way because you got familiar with the sound of how they sent these communications. You could recognise the style.

  ‘Once they started, you took it down, four letters, five letters. Then the watch charge hand would come round, and he would collect up the papers and take them off, and the only thing I knew was that they went to a place called Bletchley Park. I think they used to send them by motorbike. All you knew was where the messages were being sent from, that is what you were there for, to locate.

  ‘There were rows and rows,’ Mrs Sinclair continues. ‘I don’t know how many altogether but there must have been fifty or sixty – sailor/Wren, sailor/Wren. That’s how we sat, mixed, all doing the same job. Then for a time I used to be on the dais myself, with a man called Dave Biggard. I suppose we were giving out new things as we were told to do, giving more paper, and generally overlooking and supplying.’

  If you imagine an exam hall now, the conditions would not have been so very different. ‘Because you didn’t get up and walk about,’ says Mrs Sinclair. ‘You sat there. And no way could you ever miss a watch. Oh, it would be dire consequences. I only once missed a watch after I had been playing hockey with sailors – it was sailors against Wrens. This big fair-haired sailor hit the ball and it landed on my foot, and do you know, I still feel it. I just couldn’t walk. So for two days, I was given permission not to come on watch. Otherwise you did not dare even to be late. Cold, flu, you just got on with it.’

  And in keeping with other Y Service operatives, no matter what part of the world they happened to find themselves in, the nocturnal hours were the most gruelling. Pat Sinclair recalls that the routine took a little getting used to – especially the business of trying to catch a few hours’ sleep in broad daylight before going on to a night shift. But, like so many of her colleagues, Pat was young and adaptable: ‘You went on at 8 p.m. and you were there till 8 a.m. so that was twelve hours.’ That is a long time to be sitting listening out for encrypted Morse messages.

  ‘I never really found it difficult, can’t recall any hassle. If you weren’t all that busy in the middle of the night, you sat there. In the breaks, you’d have a sandwich and you’d gossip to your neighbour. You never wandered about. You stayed put. I’m afraid people smoked. I started to smoke.

  ‘I came home on leave and my mother said to me, “Since you’ve joined the Wrens, you’ve changed – and I don’t like the changes!” I was puffing away. I started just because there was nothing else to do in the middle of the night. I couldn’t read a book, I couldn’t take my knitting down to the watch room. I didn’t even do knitting then, even if I could have taken it down.’

  And if the work ever got too repetitive or tedious, the everyday dramas of life at Flowerdown occasionally proved spectacularly diverting. Even for a camp of that size, there was, it seems, an unusually rich diversity of life to be found there; sometimes of an almost transgressive nature.

  ‘We did have one fellow, a s
ailor, a bit funny, I suppose,’ says Mrs Sinclair, ‘and we called him “The Prowler”. We were very worried because he went around stealing stuff off our washing lines, and snooping around. In the Nissen hut, I had the top bunk and behind me was a little window. One night, I woke up absolutely petrified because something had landed on my bed. I thought it was The Prowler. It was actually a cat. It had come through the window. Oh boy, had I been scared!’

  So the girls rigged up a string in the hut. ‘The idea was that we could capture him if he walked in while we were sleeping. But I said, “No, we can’t do that, because whoever comes in there is going to break their neck.” So instead we reported him and they transferred him to somewhere else.’

  There was also the occasional outbreak of theft: ‘We had this girl billeted in our hut, but she wasn’t in our watch, and she was on duty when we were working and vice versa,’ says Mrs Sinclair. ‘It was creepy – we’d come back from watches to find that our chocolate rations were disappearing. By the beds, we had little chests of drawers, and I remember hiding my bar of chocolate in between my underwear in my drawer. No normal person would have found it.’ But the chocolate vanished nonetheless. ‘I was completely shocked because whoever the thief was, they had found it. You know, if you left it out on the side, you could understand it being pinched. We couldn’t say anything about stealing – we simply said to the petty officer, look, it’s interfering with our sleeping because when we’re coming off duty, she’s going on, could she please be put somewhere else. So that was the end of that little episode. The thieving stopped. It couldn’t have been anyone else.’