The Secret Listeners
Page 34
That one ghastly mistake aside, we see in Trevor-Roper’s wartime work the seeds of what would become the keynotes of his lively academic career: both a ferocious talent for interpretation (either of Abwehr codes or of seventeenth-century economics) combined with a gleefully waspish attitude towards those who might have been considered his elders and betters.
Elsewhere, as Bletchley Park was gradually wound down after the end of the war – its functions transferring first to Eastcote in Middlesex, then to the new GCHQ, which was taking shape in Cheltenham – so the Y Services were consolidated into a new form to face the fresh challenges posed by the Cold War. In Beaumanor, the group of ATS girls and civilians may have been gradually disbanded, but a dedicated rump were to stay on. In the late 1940s, the establishment, now known as War Office Radio Services, began recruiting again. One man who ended up there had been actively seeking wireless operating work since the end of the war – in the interim, he had taken a welding job – and Beaumanor’s new life was a source of delight. The only setback was that the numbers of women had dropped dramatically. The job – that of receiving Morse, never sending it – made him feel in one sense ‘half an operator’; nonetheless, it was a very specialised skill that brought its own satisfactions. And the work was exactly the same as those during the war had been doing, with one notable difference: ‘The only thing that had altered was the target.’
There was another element of continuity: discontent over low pay. Military signals operators knew that they were being paid substantially less than the civilians working alongside them, who were on civil service grades. In spite of that, the place fostered an atmosphere of camaraderie and the listeners’ target was to remain the same for a number of years until, finally, Beaumanor came to the end of its natural life. Now, it fulfils the role of a luxury conference centre.
An establishment not too far away that remains firmly clandestine to this day is Hanslope Park. Alan Turing spent some time there in the months after the war working on his voice-encryption idea, ‘Delilah’. And in the aftermath of VJ Day, it was decided that a certain amount of Y Service work would be consolidated there in the form of the Diplomatic Wire Service. This branch was to be at the centre of a web of communications between British embassies around the world, as well as transmitting key BBC World Service programmes. A number of its other functions remain classified even now.
Hanslope Park’s most recent public mention was as the establishment that harboured secret documents to do with Kenya in the years before Britain’s withdrawal. The association immediately reawakened old images of the British establishment’s fetish for secrecy, and of mysterious requisitioned properties surrounded by barbed wire in which the darker arts of intelligence gathering were practised.
As the history of GCHQ makes abundantly clear, both the importance and the secrecy of the listeners remained an unchanging factor in the new geopolitical landscape, where NATO’s central aim was to prevent Soviet Russia from overrunning western Europe. There was some continuity in terms of personnel; after his stewardship of Bletchley Park, Commander Edward Travis was promoted to a wider role in the new organisation. Later directors of GCHQ who had served at Bletchley (and at RAF Chicksands) included Eric Jones and Arthur Bonsall, who back in 1940 had watched the work of the ‘human computors’.
In the early post-war years, Britain had plenty to offer as an ally to America; not least all those out-stations across the world in British colonies and dominions. The British had reach where the Americans had none. Come the 1950s and 1960s, this was to change; but even as it did, so did the technology of the listeners. We were moving from a radio age to a computer age; encrypted communications in Morse were becoming as outdated as the telegraph itself. Now satellites in space floated around the earth, beaming messages back and forth. The art of interception had to keep pace with the technology of transmission.
But all this helps to bring into focus the remarkable achievements of the war years, and the dedication of all those thousands of young men and women. In the digital era, it is very difficult to imagine sitting down with pencil, paper, a clunky radio set, and listening to the monotony of Morse signals for six or even eight hours at a stretch. Imagine the time it takes to travel from London to Scotland by train, and then imagine sitting in one position for the same length of time – very often in the middle of the night – concentrating ceaselessly on the fuzzy noise coming through the ether. At the very least, to do so requires exemplary self-discipline, to say nothing of a certain mental hardiness and lightness of humour.
For some Y Service veterans, the music of Morse can still be heard occasionally today; chiefly in old black and white films. Whenever a scene in one of those films involves Morse, veterans may find themselves automatically clicking back into it; without any effort, they can make out all the different letters, even after seventy years. It is also a source of amusement when the old films, as they quite frequently did, got the Morse wrong.
The old skill is worn with pride, and with good reason: not everyone was able to deal with Morse, particularly at the speeds demanded by the Y Service. For all the young women at Flowerdown who relished their work, quite a few were forced to drop out: candidates who were highly intelligent yet not quite nimble enough, and unsuited to the intense pressure.
There is another dimension too: that of class; many of the young women enrolled into the WAAF and the Wrens and the ATS came from working-class backgrounds. As such, before the war, their opportunities had been very limited. The war changed this: many female Y Service veterans recall not merely the pride of their achievements, but also how their expertise saved them from menial duties such as cooking or driving. Of course, everyone had their role to play, and no disrespect is intended to the fine women and men who undertook the less glamorous duties with energy and good humour; but for the Y Service veterans, there was the knowledge, which like the codebreakers they had to keep secret for decades afterwards, that they had made an active and vital contribution.
Then there were those in the service who were quite simply way ahead of their time. Think of Aileen Clayton and her extraordinary war: a young woman in her early twenties moving from Egypt to Malta to Algiers. Straightforward courage in the face of danger is one thing: the straightforward gumption to also face the ingrained hostility of men who believed that women had no place in the theatre of war was another. Much as it is assumed that the 1960s and 1970s ushered in a revolutionary period of feminist emancipation, the truth is that women like Aileen Clayton were some distance in front; and the challenge they issued was borne out of the simple burning desire to do their duty.
For the men, too, there was an element of escape from what might otherwise have been a life cramped by lack of opportunity. To be a Special Wireless Operator was viewed by many as a genuine privilege. After so many of them passed through the initial social comedy of the training camp at Butlins in Skegness, with the partitioned beds to prevent them ‘getting at one another’, there was the voyage out into that wider world. Many Y Service veterans acknowledge that they were among the lucky ones: they were spared the horrors of capture in the East, the carnage of the Normandy landings. And as they sailed down the Suez Canal, or travelled on terrifying clifftop railways through India, or suffocated in the heat of Aden, or froze on the steel-grey waves of the Arctic, they had a grandstand view of history. From Baghdad to Palestine, from north Africa to Sicily, they were active witnesses, faithfully recording and reporting the countless signals that accompanied the ebbs and flows of the conflict.
And though not many of them would pursue wireless work in their later lives, the Y Service also left many with a deep residual love for the medium. Voluntary Interceptor Ray Fautley, who had carried out his duties from his parents’ front room as a young lad, now has a study filled not just with wireless equipment, but other wonderful memorabilia from the height of the radio age.
Some old habits, even if they had to remain secret, were stubborn. My grandfather never lost his interest
in radio, and indeed in translating Morse; on quiet evenings, he would plug his headphones into his radio set and start jotting in a meticulous hand. My grandmother would always make the same observation as he sat there: ‘This is your captain speaking.’ Now Morse is a dying art, superseded by the digital age; a language that came and went within the space of a century. No one will ever again acquire that fast-fingered, fast-thinking skill that the Y Service veterans mastered. Yet to hear Morse now – in those excerpts from old films – one is struck by how hypnotically musical it is; the high-pitched dots and dashes representing every state from calm to panic and desperation.
Like that of Bletchley Park, recognition of the vital work of the Y Service was a long time coming, and for many, a great deal too late. In 2009, veterans received a commemorative medal, together with a letter from Prime Minister Gordon Brown (‘a friend of mine got hers and was furious,’ says Pat Sinclair. This was on the grounds of political disapproval and dislike of Brown. Mrs Sinclair, on the other hand, was thrilled to have received her citation from a Labour Prime Minister).
While the story of Bletchley Park is one of extraordinary ingenuity in the face of implacable mathematical conundrums, the story of the Y Service is more about furious dedication, great technical skill, brilliant accuracy and above all, patience and endurance. As one veteran has remarked, their work could only start when the enemy himself started work: and then they were required to perform at dazzling speeds with minds concentrated like laser beams. And as other veterans have pointed out, this was not a job for older people; even those in their mid-thirties were liable to burn out swiftly under the weight of the pressure. But for eager teenagers and young people in their twenties, the brain was supple enough to cope; and after their arduous shifts, they were equally good at seeking out the fun and the laughter that would shake all of that weight off.
Theirs is not quite the story of the course of the war being changed by one single factor. But were it not for the amazing technical efforts – the Special Liaison Units, the stations, all those encoded messages relayed with such care – then the codebreakers of Bletchley Park would have had very little to go on. All the boffins, all the brave young Wrens sailing out into dangerous oceans, the intrepid agents out in the field, hurrying from border to border in an effort to stay ahead of the enemy . . . and this is to say nothing of those thousands of preternaturally focused young women, permanently damaging their hearing for the sake of doing their duty – it was their combined efforts that made the revolutionary leaps of Bletchley Park possible.
More than this, they dutifully kept the secret as closely as any of the Bletchley codebreakers. But even as the secrets of Bletchley were unveiled in the 1980s, a great many Y Service operatives modestly kept their counsel, sticking to the Official Secrets Act they had signed. Happily, though, unlike the more compartmentalised denizens of Bletchley, the various branches of the Y Service were adept at keeping each other in touch and ensuring that their own memories continued to burn bright; they might not have revealed to their nearest and dearest exactly what it was that they did, but among old comrades, they could keep those unique recollections fresh. Ray Fautley is just one of many veterans to be in constant communication with his colleagues; Many Y Service veterans still telephone each other on an almost daily basis, and though the old Morse skills are still there, other veterans are also hooked up via email and the internet.
Possibly due to their numbers – and because of the extraordinary adventures that so many of them had – the various branches of the Y Service seem to have been better at organising reunions over the years, giving a sense of community and remembrance denied to many who had worked at the more secretive Bletchley Park. And when reunions were not possible, there were lively newsletters, filled with cartoons and poems and memories and all the latest news on members. Even if no one else knew, they did; and they knew that they had good reason to be very proud.
So there are a great many reasons why this great unsung multitude of Y Service veterans deserve – finally – to step out from the larger shadows of Station X. The melancholy truth, of course, is that there are now not so many of these brilliant people left. But they should be commemorated properly, as having played their parts in one of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century.
Notes
1 Tuning in to the Enemy
1 Maurice de la Bertauche’s memoirs of his time in the Y Service can be found in the Imperial War Museum’s collections
2 Reporting for Special Duties
1 de la Bertauche, Imperial War Museum
2 Peggy West, address given to the 2003 Australian War Memorial history conference ‘Air War Europe’
3 Vivienne Alford in Gwendoline Page, ed., They Listened in Secret, George R. Reeve Ltd 2003
4 Geoffrey Pidgeon, The Secret Wireless War, UPSO 2003
5 Elizabeth Mashall in Page, They Listened in Secret
3 The Human Computors
1 Peter Gray Lucas in F.H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp eds, Codebreakers, Oxford University Press 1993
2 West, address to 2003 Australian War Memorial history conference ‘Air War Europe’
3 Pidgeon, The Secret Wireless War
4 Pidgeon, The Secret Wireless War
5 Shirley Cannicott in Page, They Listened in Secret
6 Sybil Welch in Page, They Listened in Secret
4 The Listeners at Large
1 Lucas, Codebreakers
2 Lisa Ison in Page, They Listened in Secret
3 Daphne Baker in Page, They Listened in Secret
4 Imogen Ryan and Elizabeth Agar in Page, They Listened in Secret
5 Daphne Baker in Page, They Listened in Secret
6 Aileen Clayton, The Enemy is Listening, Hutchinson 1980
7 Ronald Lewin, Ultra Goes to War: The Secret Story, Hutchinson 1978
8 Frederick Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret, Purnell 1974
9 Ralph Bennett in Hinsley and Stripp, Codebreakers
10 Hugh Skillen, Knowledge Strengthens the Arm, Hugh Skillen 1990
11 Skillen, Knowledge Strengthens the Arm
12 Memo in the National Archives, HW14 series
13 Memo in the National Archives, HW14 series
14 Hugh Skillen, Spies of the Airwaves, Hugh Skillen 1989
15 de la Bertauche, Imperial War Museum
16 Joan Nicholls, England Needs You: The Story of Beaumanor Y Station, Joan Nicholls 2000
17 Skillen, Knowledge Strengthens the Arm
5 The Blitz and the Ghost Voices
1 Clayton, The Enemy is Listening
2 Imogen Ryan in Page, They Listened in Secret
3 Jean Campden in Page, They Listened in Secret
4 Memo in the National Archives, HW14 series
5 Skillen, Knowledge Strengthens the Arm
6 Memo in the National Archives, HW14 series
7 Skillen, Spies of the Airwaves
8 Harold Everett in Skillen, Spies of the Airwaves
6 Heat, Sand and Ashes
1 Henry Dryden in Hinsley and Stripp, Codebreakers
2 Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly, To War with Whitaker, Mandarin 1994
3 Clayton, The Enemy is Listening
4 Barbara Skelton, Tears Before Bedtime, Hamish Hamilton 1987
5 Skillen, Spies of the Airwaves
6 Clayton, The Enemy is Listening
7 G.A. Harries quoted in Skillen, Spies of the Airwaves
7 A World Wide Web of Intelligence
1 Ron Charters, writing for the Tel (s) (Telegraph Signals Association) newsletter, 1994
2 Pidgeon, The Secret Wireless War
3 Pidgeon, The Secret Wireless War
4 Harold Everett in Skillen, Knowledge Strengthens the Arm
5 Joan Dinwoodie in Page, They Listened in Secret
8 Feuds, Farce and Panic
1 Elizabeth Mashall in Page, They Listened in Secret
2 Harold Everett in Skillen, Spies of the Airwaves
3 Memos in the Nation
al Archives, HW14 series
4 Harold Everett in Skillen, Spies of the Airwaves
5 Report in the National Archives, HW14 series
6 Communication in the National Archives, HW42 series
7 Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Wartime Journals, I.B. Tauris 2012
9 Wilder Shores and Secret Missions
1 Hugh Denham in Hinsley and Stripp, Codebreakers
2 Peter Elphick, Far Eastern File: The Intelligence War in the Far East, Hodder and Stoughton 1997
3 John Boylan in Skillen, Knowledge Strengthens the Arm
4 Clayton, The Enemy is Listening
10 This is No Holiday Camp
1 Cynthia Grossman, interviewed by the BBC in 2003
2 Dafydd Williams, interviewed for Bedford Museum
3 Miggs Ackroyd in Page, They Listened in Secret
4 Vivienne Alford in Page, They Listened in Secret
11 Storms in the Desert
1 Rosemary Norton in Page, They Listened in Secret
2 Clayton, The Enemy is Listening
3 Countess of Ranfurly, To War with Whitaker
4 Clayton, The Enemy is Listening
5 Memo in the National Archives, AIR29 series
6 Harold Everett in Skillen, Spies of the Airwaves