The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  ‘One weekend, this chap who was with us was petrified. He said he’d seen a white ghost. We said “Aahh, get out of it.” But he was serious, really frightened. I never saw anything – I slept too soundly. But funnily enough, some time later, there were stories from other people saying they’d seen the ghosts of French prisoners dressed in Napoleonic costumes.’

  When his demobilisation came through, Mr Hughes was approached to see if he might be interested in doing work for the nascent GCHQ. Mr Hughes gave the matter careful thought. But immediately after leaving the Army, he had got married; the GCHQ job would have involved, as he says, a lot of ‘embassies’ and the requirement to be out of the country for at least five years. He had had enough of voyages for the time being; so he returned to his former employer, the Post Office, staying there for the rest of his career.

  For young Chris Barnes, who had been drafted into Beaumanor as a civilian wireless operator, the end of the war ironically brought his introduction to life in the Army. ‘On VE Day, I think there was a 24-hour party in the Beaumanor canteen, running continually.’ A few weeks later, when the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, ‘I was due to be drafted for India in the Army.’ The end of the war brought about a change of destination, though Mr Barnes still got his chance to serve in uniform. ‘I was posted – among other places – to Harrogate – now the training college, that was Forest Moor.’ This was followed by the chance to go abroad. ‘Then I went to Cyprus, so I did the better part of two and a half years in the Army. But not when there was any fighting going on.’

  For some, even though the transition back to the sorts of lives they had led before was reasonably easy, they still hankered for the freedoms they had enjoyed. Having been a wireless telegraphist in Colombo after working in a Weybridge mill as a lad, was Victor Newman disorientated by the return? ‘When we came back to England, some of us were sent on to HMS Flowerdown – and we finally got demobbed in September 1946.’ So his military career had continued for a year after the end of the war. ‘I never did that kind of work again, never worked with telegraph or wireless. Instead I went into agricultural work, and worked on farms. I worked on the farm for the rest of my life. But the knowledge of Morse – you never forget it. It’s absolutely in there, still. I might not be quite as quick at it as I was, but it is like riding a bike, it’s something you never lose once you pick it up.

  ‘The thing I missed most about Colombo was the swimming in the sea. Obviously you missed your mates after demob, and also, after years in the services, you had to start thinking for yourself. With the forces came regulations. Afterwards . . .’

  And what of Peter Budd, who had spent eighteen months amid the dazzling beauty of the Cocos Islands, and then an exhilarating spell in Karachi? What would his native Bristol have looked like after all of that? As it happened, he was able to take a slightly longer voyage home; his duties were not yet over, but nor was his capacity for amusing adventures. The process of demobilisation was a sort of extended tour and indeed an extended education for a very young and – in some ways – naive man.

  ‘If you can imagine the most beautiful French provincial town you have ever seen, this was Algiers,’ says Mr Budd, almost with a nostalgic sigh, thinking back to the early autumn of 1945. ‘At that particular time, there were more Europeans there than natives. And so we would wander round all afternoon buying bottles of wine, hanks of bananas . . . And you’ve always got an old sailor in a group – I mean, someone thirty-five or so. One day, this old sailor said, “You’ve got to go to the Blue Moon. It’s up the Casbah.”

  ‘Now, the Casbah had been out of bounds to the thousands of troops in the place throughout the war, but now you could go. So one afternoon, we went through these narrow little streets, and there was the Blue Moon. We went in – it had the longest bar I had ever seen. We were all sitting up there. Suddenly a door opened at the other end and about twelve ladies came out, in dressing gowns, and I thought, that’s funny, it’s only four o’clock. Very innocent. Never having talked to a woman for two years.’

  Indeed, it is almost impossible to grasp now exactly how much of a culture shock this must have been to young Peter Budd. As he recalls, many young people back then were younger in a sense than their equivalents today.

  ‘One of these twelve ladies came up to me,’ he says, chuckling at the memory. ‘She said, “Hullo, cherie, you buy me a drink.”

  ‘I said “Maybe.” Well, of course, I did. And I had a great shock because her dressing gown was undone and that was the first naked woman I’d ever seen in my life. I was nineteen and a half years old.

  ‘Anyway, at the far end of the bar, the other men began to peel off one by one with these ladies and as they did, they would pass all their bottles of wine and hanks of bananas down the line – and of course I was right on the end.

  ‘The petty officer next to me said, “Budd, I’m sorry to do this but you’ve got to stay here and look after this lot.” And I sat there with this stuff. What a night.’ In one crucial sense, though, Budd had had a narrow escape, even if romance had eluded him. Only the next morning, thanks to their excessive consumption of drink, did his comrades’ suffering really begin.

  Even before that, getting back to his ship had been complicated by grog rations. ‘Before the evening had started, everyone had felt so sorry for the duty motorboat crew (the designated drivers, as it were) that they’d all given them drinks, half bottles of wine et cetera. So when we got back from the Casbah to the dock, the motorboat crew was so roaring drunk they couldn’t actually find the ship that we were berthed on. It was the only one anchored in the bay, all lit up. Half the crew weren’t there.

  ‘And as it happened, I didn’t really mind having had to sit at the end of the bar because next morning, on board the ship, there was a long queue outside the sick bay of people who got so drunk, they hadn’t taken the precautions they should.’

  Back in Britain, even for Wrens the winding-down process was protracted. At HMS Flowerdown, for instance, Marjorie Gerken and Pat Sinclair found that they were required to stay quite a few weeks after the end of hostilities. Obviously the airwaves were by then relatively quiet, so there was the question of how to keep all the youngsters occupied. ‘All that time after VJ Day, they kept us busy and gave us little courses,’ says Mrs Gerken. ‘And we still had entertainment. But although we were happy, we did want to get home.’

  When she got back to London and returned to her administration job in the civil service, a curious silence fell on the subject of the last three or four years of her life. Because of the Official Secrets Act, she was forbidden to discuss her work. But there is also a sense among many veterans that even if they could have done, the subject never seemed to be raised; there was a feeling that people simply did not want to talk about the war. And so those years were quickly consigned to a hazy twilight. ‘After a few weeks, I went back to the office,’ says Mrs Gerken. ‘No one had any idea of what we had been doing in the war. My parents never knew. My husband Norman’s oldest brother was in the regular air force, Fleet Air Arm – and Norman never told him what he did.’

  ‘After VE Day, we just carried on,’ says Pat Sinclair. ‘May 1945, we were all hooray, hooray, down into Winchester, dancing. Then, in August 1945, we were all up to Leicester Square, dancing. But I was stationed at HMS Flowerdown until March 1946. They must have kept us occupied. We still had the routine, of going on shifts, of going to the canteen.’

  Her husband Peter was based at the time in Laindon, Essex, and he recalls the complex procedure of trying to telephone his sweetheart from a public call box and enlisting the sympathy of the operator when he did not have enough change. ‘It took so long to be demobbed because they did it according to date of birth, length of service, whether you were married, had children,’ he says. On top of this, ‘they had to give out civilian clothes and it took some time before all that was available.’

  His wife laughs proudly. ‘I wasn’t given civilian clothing. I was a Leading Wren a
t the end.’

  For Peter Budd, after years abroad, with his closest family having no idea where he had been, settling back in was a long process: the Y Service had not quite finished with him yet. After the experience of living in paradise, this was perhaps for the best: a period of decompression before emerging into the pervasive grey and pinched poverty of post-war England. ‘We sailed back, we came to Portsmouth and we were home,’ says Mr Budd. ‘And then I was sent to HMS Flowerdown, and found myself working on intercepting Russian naval communications. I knew Scarborough was the big intercept station but I didn’t know about Flowerdown. And that was the end of my naval career.

  ‘I was at Flowerdown for a matter of months and then I was demobbed. In our branch, they didn’t ask us to carry on because no one knew what anyone was going to do when the war was over. They were only just starting to think about Russia as a Cold War enemy rather than an ally. The barrack to Devonport had “Joe for King!” written on the door.’ Joe was Stalin. ‘It was very much that way during the war . . .’

  There were unexpected bonuses, one of which was the prized American HRO radio set that Mr Budd had had sent on from Karachi. In a tribute to an apparently indefatigable postal service, the machine finally materialised; Mr Budd turned the van driver around and had the thing sent on to a prospective buyer who had shown great interest. ‘A fortnight later, I got a cheque for £25 – and that cheque paid for my engagement ring two years later.’

  There was one other financial matter hanging over Budd’s head: the money advanced to him while he was working in Karachi. Mr Budd was sure that the debt would at last be noticed by someone in authority. ‘When I was in Plymouth barracks waiting to be demobbed,’ he says, ‘an announcement went out over the tannoy – such things could terrify you – “Budd report to the Pay Office at the double!” I thought, my God, they’ve found out about all my money.

  ‘When I got there, there was a very young lieutenant paymaster. He said: “I notice from the records that you haven’t been paid for a year.”’ This was not the twist that Mr Budd had been expecting. ‘Well of course, this was the money for when I had been on the Cocos Islands,’ says Mr Budd. ‘The paymaster said, “I can let you have half of it now and the rest next month – will that be all right?” What could I say? To this day, when the doorbell rings, I expect to see two naval policemen come to arrest me.’

  Then the grind of post-war life set in. ‘I worked for British Overseas Airways. I joined them just before the war. And then to get a promotion – which meant my wage increased from five pounds a week to five pounds two shillings – I went to work in London at their headquarters, occasionally going down to Heathrow.’ The airport was not at that time quite the endless megapolis it is now: ‘At Heathrow then, there were two tents: arrivals and departures. A third of the tent was curtained off and there were three armchairs, and that was the VIP lounge. And there were duckboards going out to the concrete runway.’

  Yet even with the prospect of marriage and good, interesting work, it was impossible for Mr Budd not to think back to his extraordinary wartime experiences. ‘Life was very different in England in the immediate years after the war. Shortages were terrible. Food rationing was worse than during the war. The winter of 1947 was unbelievable. Obviously the poverty, the desolation in Europe was terrible, in Italy it was bad as well. But it was bad here too . . . I had lodgings in south Ealing, full board. I lived in a house with a widow and her daughter. There were shortages of everything, especially consumer goods. Purchase tax was ninety per cent on luxury goods. Having said that, everyone was so relieved the war was over. People went to Butlins and thought it was wonderful . . .

  ‘I wouldn’t think about the Cocos Islands when I was up to my eyes in business and young children but that was an experience that has been with me all through life and I can never forget – it was a life-changing experience. To find yourself swimming in a sea full of marine life and worrying about whether you’re going to have your leg bitten off by a shark . . . to go to this little island . . . was amazing. What an experience for someone of that age, never been abroad, or mixed, never been to the tropics, never been cast away on a desert island.’

  For Geoffrey Pidgeon, who was now nineteen, away from the secret workshops of Whaddon Hall and in uniform with the Royal Corps of Signals out in India, news of the end of the war did not cause exultation. ‘On our arrival in Calcutta, we were given the first news of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima,’ he recalled, ‘without comprehending the meaning of “atomic” or the devastation it had caused . . . VJ Day was celebrated thankfully, rather than wildly, since we were uncertain as to what the atom bomb was and sobered by the sheer number of casualties.’

  There was a lot of winding down to be done. The Y Service in India was gradually dismantled and Mr Pidgeon was among those transferred to Singapore for a few more months. Here he was reunited with the Y Service operative, Wilf Lilburn, who had got him into the whole thing a few years back. Again, was this a life that Pidgeon wanted to pursue into a new, chillier era of espionage? The answer was no: like many, Mr Pidgeon had been proud to play his part, from assembling secret wireless sets for agents at Whaddon Hall to manoeuvres in the Solent and the voyage out to the Far East. But real life was back at home; his mother had inherited a bathroom business, and she was keen for her eldest son to come and work in it so that he might take the reins. Nonetheless, he now looks back at his war with needle-sharp clarity. And in common with many Y Service veterans, his lively intelligence and wit give Geoffrey Pidgeon the appearance of someone fifteen years younger. Were these veterans perhaps fortunate enough to retain that ‘flexibility of the brain’ that, according to Bob Hughes, they all needed?

  20 The Legacy of the Listeners

  ‘Some people did get earache and ear problems in later years,’ says Marjorie Gerken. ‘Recently I went to have my ears tested and told them that I had worked with headphones throughout the war. But they told me that my hearing condition was more down to age!’

  Nevertheless, all those years of listening with furious concentration to faint signals against an all-pervasive background hiss must have had some effect. ‘We had heavy headphones, but they were soft against the ears,’ says Mrs Gerken. ‘Sometimes when signals were good, you could wear the headphones pulled forward a little on your head, a little in front of my ears, so that they would not just be resting in one place. In some ways, you became automated yourself.’

  According to Betty White, however, the after-effects of those years of work could be more insidious and unexpected: ‘After the war, a few of us had what you might call a relapse. One day, I was at the shops with my mother and I just passed out. The doctor I saw put it down to what he termed nervous debility. It was to do with the body getting used to normal rhythms and sleep patterns again.’ Of course, the doctor in question had to diagnose her without knowing what sort of work she had been doing. ‘Lots of us had something in the way of complaints,’ she says.

  There was another source of post-war discontent: frustration. Even though he enjoyed his work, one aspect of it slightly annoys Bob Hughes to this day: ‘Of all the years we were out there, in the Mediterranean, we Special Operators never got any feedback about our work. Of all the work we did, we never knew what the results were. We only knew when these books started coming out in the 1970s. Other than that: nothing. The officers may have got told something but it was never relayed back to us.’

  But those years had a profound impact in wider senses too. Not in the obvious ways, like career paths – as we have seen, following demobilisation, a great many Y Service operators returned to their old interests and jobs, from farming to the civil service to the Post Office – but in subtler ways. Peter Budd, for example, had not merely lived through a terrific adventure: without realising it, he had developed a capacity for self-reliance. This helped him enormously as, some years after the war, he went into business for himself. This capacity was also apparent in an extraordinary motorbike trip that he and a coup
le of other friends undertook around shattered post-war Europe.

  The same might be said for Jean Valentine. The experience of being transported across the oceans into a wholly unknown world had given her a taste of splendour; both she and her husband later found the pinched greyness of austerity London too cruel a contrast, and they spent a great many years abroad thereafter, from Burma to continental Europe. At a time when foreign travel was a rarity for the majority, Jean and her husband were extraordinarily cosmopolitan. Of course, Jean had been a forthright soul since her Scottish girlhood; but as with Peter Budd, the nature of her experience taught her to open her eyes to the wider world.

  Hugh Trevor-Roper’s endless quarrels and tussles both with his intelligence bosses and with the Bletchley Park authorities culminated in exquisite vindication at the end of the war; it was upon his shoulders, and not those of the colleagues for whom he had so little time, that a terrific opportunity fell. Just weeks after VE Day, Trevor-Roper was posted to Germany to interrogate Nazi prisoners. Also working there was one of his friends in MI6, Dick White. The two met in an abandoned Schloss. The shattered continent, with the Soviets poised to brutally acquire so much of it, was febrile with rumours. Many of these concerned Hitler; he had not died in the bunker at all, it was said, but had been spirited out and had escaped to the west. It was decided that Trevor-Roper would be the man to lay this ghost once and for all. He visited Hitler’s bunker and interviewed those who were close to events at the fall of Berlin. To the helpless rage of Trevor-Roper’s enemies, he then turned this mission into a book, The Last Days of Hitler, which was published in 1947 and became an instant bestseller. His academic colleagues continued to fizz with resentment for decades afterwards – not least because Trevor-Roper was so venomous about the work of others. So, in 1983, when he committed the blunder of authenticating the so-called ‘Hitler Diaries’ for the Sunday Times, the exultation when the documents proved to be fake made for a gruesome spectacle.