‘The club colours became navy blue because a set of shirts was acquired from London Scottish (a long-established rugby club) – in those days, the club had to apply to the Board of Trade for a supply of clothing coupons to buy kit which was then re-sold to the players.’2
Soccer was not neglected; a football team at Eastcote was soon assembled. It was called FOSA, an acronym for ‘Foreign Office Sports Association’. Once again, the rather wonderful facilities at Swakeleys were an enormous help. ‘The team competed in the Harrow, Wembley and District League,’ states the club’s history. (Incidentally, it might be noted that the club – these days in Cheltenham, along with its GCHQ members – is still going great guns.)
Another Eastcote veteran, RF Churchhouse, had fond memories of the cricket matches that were played against other government departments. In one such match, he recalled, he was close to a personal triumph, but was sadly rather let down by his wicket-keeper who missed a crucial catch. The wicket-keeper in question happened to be Hugh Alexander, who had clearly taken some time off from chess championships.
The summer brought tennis matches too; it hardly needs to be added that given the hunched, focused nature of the work that the Eastcote team was doing, any opportunity for physical exertion was gratefully taken up. Veteran Russell Barnes recalled fondly not only all the sporting activity but a reasonably lively evening life too. There were other enthusiasms, of the cultural variety. Eastcote had its own jazz club; a measure of the youthfulness of the general atmosphere. Indeed, according to Russell Barnes, jazz was a serious passion for many. His fellow signals operatives, he said, included Alexander Bennett, who was to become famous for his founding involvement with the Ballet Rambert, and Roger Hancock, later to become the showbusiness agent for the Daleks (and of course by extension their creator Terry Nation).
Swakeleys did not host all the escapism: at Eastcote, a social hall had been set aside in the complex for the codebreakers and it was here that their own jazz bands sometimes performed. At a nearby venue, meanwhile, professional jazz musicians were invited to play. A little later, a young Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth were among them.
There was another rather startling perk for these Eastcote operatives: and that was free tickets to see shows in the West End. (You can only wonder if today’s GCHQ operatives enjoy a similar bonus.) Naturally, in the 1940s, such tickets would not have been at the astronomical prices that we see now: theatre was still entertainment for the masses, as opposed to a rare treat. Nonetheless, a journey from the Eastcote HQ on the Piccadilly Line down to Leicester Square and Covent Garden brought a range of diverting possibilities. RF Churchouse recalled on one occasion how he took himself to the Royal Opera House, and happened to do so on an unusually foggy evening; it was not too long into the performance when the stage and the auditorium were dense with the industrial fog that had seeped in from outside.
The housing situation in those rationed days of the late 1940s was never ideal; taking lodgings in peacetime was psychologically different to doing so in wartime, when the entire country was mobilised and had a sense of a common purpose. The areas of Ruislip, Pinner, Harrow and Wembley were, in the post-war years, rather on the quiet side; the younger Eastcote operatives found themselves living with landladies who were forced to scrimp and save, and who would also have had extremely strict ideas about maintaining standards of decency. The chances for illicit romance back at one’s lodgings would have been vanishingly rare; and in terms of spiritual uplift, this was an age of yellowed, low-voltage lighting, carefully rationed coal, even more carefully rationed food and domestic sobriety. A couple of Eastcote veterans recalled how their landladies – good-hearted but unstoppably nosy – were always desperate to find out exactly what it was that they were doing at the vast establishment. The operatives were instructed never ever to mention the phrase ‘signals intelligence’; the best thing, they were told, was simply to cover themselves with the explanation that they were working for the Foreign Office.
Yet this was also the plus side of the work, for civilians and military alike: the adrenalin shot that made each successive day uncertain and exciting. Those who worked at Eastcote knew that they were closer to the heart of the nation’s vital secrets than anyone else. The dissolute Oxbridge aristocrats of MI6 might have considered themselves superior in this respect, but the altogether more classless atmosphere of Commander Travis’s Eastcote was there at the true core of the fast-freezing Cold War.
Indeed, there were early outbreaks of trade union representation among the signals operatives. Given the crucial nature of their work – and the growing suspicions in the 1940s and 1950s of Communist subversion and entryism – it seems surprising that any such thing was allowed. Later, it certainly was not, as became famously and rancourously clear in 1984 when Margaret Thatcher’s government banned unions at the Cheltenham HQ. Back during the war, secret listeners working in the huts at Beaumanor Hall who were appointed as union representatives were there mostly to make sure that the working conditions were tolerable; the stress of working all through the night on such painstaking work should not, they reasoned, be added to with factors such as inadequate ventilation or lack of heat.
The key to it was the nature of wireless interception work – it was tough and debilitating and the operatives were fierce about ensuring that their best interests were being looked after. There was the occasional suggestion from the authorities that a staff association might be preferable to a union; that grievances could be raised with such a body without any fears of subversion. But this idea was never taken seriously.
Certainly in the Attlee years, there was a growth of what would these days be regarded as militancy, in the sense of workers standing together to get what they wanted off their managers. It was an essential part of the post-war settlement: having worked so hard to preserve the security of the realm, the workers in turn felt they deserved better treatment and better pay.
Added to this, the wireless interceptors in particular tended not to have been drawn from the pools of Oxbridge middle-class graduates (left-leaning though many of them were in that era) but from more ordinary backgrounds. They often came from families that had seen directly how the rights of manual workers could be trampled in the absence of unions to stick up for them. Away from the relative luxury of London, there were occasions when representation was rather urgently needed. Throughout the war (and indeed before it), a naval base at the Yorkshire coastal town of Scarborough had been monitoring signals traffic at sea; come the end of the war, the traffic that was being followed – and passed on to the codebreakers – was from Soviet craft. The work was not the problem; the raw conditions inside the base were. It was (and is) a little way outside of town, on the site of the old Scarborough racecourse at Irton Moor. There was a bomb-proof bunker in which many people worked; and when it rained, those people – no matter how ‘bomb-proofed’ they were – also ended up getting wet. (Things are rather more comfortable these days; the base recently received a visit from the Prince of Wales.)
Another interception base that carried on throughout was Forest Moor, just outside Harrogate in Yorkshire. Londoners in particular seemed to find working at the base a shock. There were others who – in the latter stages of the war when young men were still being called up – approached it with a sardonic sense of humour. Christopher Barnes, a highly skilled secret listener who had been based in Beaumanor, Leicestershire, now found himself drafted in 1947 to Forest Moor, and in uniform too, far from the relatively genteel conditions of civilian life. He wrote to his former colleagues in the Beaumanor magazine: ‘Now we are back at the old grindstone again, this time at “F.M” [Forest Moor] instead of “BMR” [Beaumanor]… The disciples of Karl Marx, Beethoven, Churchill, Patience Strong, Kipling and Aneurin Bevan cannot be stilled by khaki and the night air of Yorkshire is rent by their arguments just as once was that of Leicestershire. The same faces are there and their personalities have not changed much either.’3
In a later numbe
r, Barnes was doing his best to be stoical. It must be remembered that despite all the vaulting leaps ahead in terms of codebreaking technology, the work of these signals operatives still involved being able to track faint signals, in difficult and sometimes stormy conditions. They had to follow them, and then to transcribe at tremendous speed and with needlepoint accuracy the messages being sent in Morse. Barnes noted that the chief difference was the lack of women; in his previous posting at Beaumanor, men and women had worked side by side throughout the war. Now, in Yorkshire, he wrote, ‘we are… a Stag Party, a fact often lamented by the Don Juan element among us.’ There were still flickers of cultured civilisation though, amid the ‘beds in a straight line, kit blancoed, brasses polished, uniform toe-nails etc.’ There was a Choir and Music club and Harrogate offered up ‘weekly record recitals’ at the Hydro. ‘Those preferring more cosmopolitan pleasures… are to be seen in less respectable Leeds,’ wrote Barnes. ‘Others ramble on the glorious Yorkshire Moors (I had to promise to say something complimentary about Yorkshire… these dour northerners are sensitive about their county.)’4
Beaumanor itself, after a brief post-war lull when numbers (most notably among the demobbed women) had dropped dramatically, picked up again rather smartly from about 1947. Morse expert Kenneth Carling was there during that period, when he and his young colleagues understood the shifting new focus of their work. ‘Recruiting for new operators started,’ he wrote, ‘and a gradual flow of fresh recruits came into the job. Nearly all of these were ex-services, with varying degrees of competence in wireless operating. Most certainly they were all male and so the interesting mix of the war years disappeared, which certainly was a shame.
‘My own case is typical of those joining in this period,’ he continued. ‘I had done my National Service in the RAF and had trained as a wireless operator. Radio communications work suited me and I found it very interesting. At the end of the 28-week course in Compton Bassett, I was posted to RAF Miho in Japan with the British Commonwealth Occupation Force… I enjoyed the travel, my year in Japan, and the point-to-point radio operating… when my [demob] came up in 1947, I found myself in civvie street back in the UK and unable to find any job associated with radio operating, and finally finished up as a welder. But I continued to seek work as a radio operator and eventually an ex-Forces employment association pointed me in the direction of Beaumanor.’5
As a general point, this was a period when the British government, essentially bust, was trying to rein in spending; but the point about the re-invigoration of Beaumanor (and of course Eastcote too) was that this new independent intelligence service, born from the triumphs of Bletchley, was convincing the prime minister and senior figures in Whitehall that the fast-developing science of signals intelligence and electronic surveillance was the only way in which a technologically alert enemy might be kept at bay. Added to this, the nascent GCHQ also took advantage of one thing of which Britain did have a surplus at that time: young men who were simply obsessed with radio and communications technology.
‘Beaumanor had its own local training establishment,’ wrote Carling, ‘and most people only needed a couple of weeks to familiarise themselves with the peculiar necessities of “Y” work. Some spent a couple of weeks at the nearby Royal Signals camp, Garats Hay, to bring their Morse copying speed to 20 words per minute before going on to the Beaumanor course. This was when the penny dropped. New entrants realised there was not a Morse key in sight. The job was receiving Morse and receiving Morse only… we would become specialists in receiving Morse.
‘The trainees went from the training room in “J” hut to the main set room where they polished up their new-found skills on what would later be called on-the-job training. We knew it as “double-banking” and would sit side by side with an older, more experienced operator to learn and/or be corrected when mistakes were made. It was a good and practical way of learning the ropes.’6
There were some immediately pressing issues that caused resentment: not technological, but relating to pay. The new recruits at Beaumanor were a mix of military and civilian, and it soon became apparent that the civilians were getting paid rather better than the soldiers. It became a matter for the union representative, one Fred Philips, to start chewing into. Mr Philips had been at Beaumanor for a while and was apparently skilled in discussing such matters with the authorities. There were elements of culture shock for young Kenneth Carling too. Recruits got to live at the house, which was a rather beautiful 19th-century effort set in modest parkland. But the accommodation – which was priced at 2s 6d per week – was a long way from being luxurious.
‘A typical room would have four beds, with a wardrobe or cupboard allocated to each occupant’s “bed-space”,’ wrote Carling. ‘Bedding was army-style: three hard uncomfortable “biscuits”, two pillows, maybe a pillow case and three rough blankets… The living was rough but for half a crown a week could be considered good value. Redeeming features included plenty of heat [which incidentally was not to be sniffed at during one of the century’s most bitterly cold winters in 1947] and big bathrooms with unlimited amounts of piping hot water. And, one extra special bathroom decorated in green and with several larger-than-life nudes on the wall. Had they been painted by an ATS artist?’7
Otherwise, life in some ways for these secret listeners was quite hemmed in, not least because the pay was so modest. ‘Food was obtainable at the canteen and eaten in the grandeur of the spacious dining room,’ recalled Carling. ‘But there was not much to spend on food – or anything else out of a weekly wage packet of £3. So eating became a luxury. Living includes other important things and one had to allow for the necessities of life such as cigarettes, beer, bus fares to and from Loughborough, the cinema and last but not least, the famous dances at Loughborough Town Hall. Once in a while, for a special treat, and if prudent, a bus ride to the big cities of Leicester, Nottingham or Derby might be afforded.’8
The work itself, though the ‘targets’ for interception were new, was pretty much the same as it had been throughout the war; it required, among other things, a preternatural level of patience. As Carling and others have noted, there could be a lot of sitting around, straining to hear or follow anything in the white noise of the atmosphere. Their work could only start when their opposite numbers – Soviet radio operatives, now, rather than Germans – started their own shifts. But the interceptors had to be constantly ready and alert and, it goes without saying, with every bit as much devotion as that shown by their wartime predecessors. The young men at Beaumanor, at Scarborough, and at other out-stations dotted around the country, were now focusing not so much on a threatened invasion as on securing Britain’s national defence and survival in wider terms against the backdrop of a world constantly on the edge of fresh slaughter.
Their work was not glamorous, but this system was diabolically effective, partly thanks to the ideas of Bletchley Park’s great organiser Gordon Welchman. Such an abundance of communications traffic had provided the Bletchley Park – and now Eastcote – directorate with a view of the enemy that was almost like a panopticon: incredibly wide, seemingly able to see into every corner. Men like Christopher Barnes and Kenneth Carling were listening in to different divisions of the Soviet military machine, from all the different regions within Eastern Europe to which it was being deployed. The messages they intercepted, all the traffic that was then analysed, gave the authorities up-to-date intelligence on movements and redeployments among the Soviet armed forces.
At the start of the Cold War, this was what the Americans did not have in such depth: the sheer depth of Morse experts with headsets, working in night-time rooms thick with the rich smell of hot electronics and cheap tobacco, ears ringing with the white noise of the atmosphere. Even if codes were not immediately broken, the sheer range alone of messages intercepted was a treasure trove.
The prospect of future nuclear jeopardy would have particularly preyed on the minds of those working at another out-station a little further west: RAF Chea
dle in Cheshire. At an 18th-century property called Woodhead Hall, the focus had moved from spying on the Luftwaffe to listening in to the Soviet Air Force. Actually, there had been – at a very low level – quite continuous monitoring of (unencrypted) Soviet signals from Cheadle throughout the war as well. Even though breaking into secret Soviet codes had been suspended for the conflict, straightforward un-encrypted communications were still quietly intercepted, as indeed the Soviets would in turn have intercepted un-coded Allied traffic. Scarborough, too, had a very small team listening in to unencrypted Russian transmissions throughout. The reasoning – very far from being cynical – would have been this: although Stalin was an ally, the fact was that before the war, he had not been, and the codebreakers had played an important role in seeking to counter international Communist subversion. Realists, not cynics, would have been able to divine that when the Allies won the war, the peace would not bring some miraculous flowering of capitalist/Communist harmony.
Meanwhile, RAF Cheadle and Woodhead Hall played host not just to skilled interceptors, but also to a range of workshops as well, there for work to be carried out on new equipment, in the manner of Q’s laboratories from the James Bond films. GCHQ itself has proudly commemorated the man who set the station up just before the war started, and who then oversaw its development and evolution as the war went on. William Green Swanborough is one of those extraordinary figures, like Nigel de Grey, who spans a period from the First World War to the 1950s, with all the world-changing codebreaking technology that period brought.
William Swanborough had been a ‘Self-Trained Radio Operator’ with the Royal Engineers in 1918; the inter-war years saw him voyaging to Sudan with the RAF and setting up intercept stations for the Service’s then chief Lord Trenchard. Swanborough travelled out to Estonia in the 1930s, on first sight a rather abstruse place for an intelligence expert to go to share codebreaking and intercept knowledge. But it was of course to do with Estonian proximity to 1930s Soviet Russia: what Swanborough was after was a regular flow of intercepted Soviet traffic being sent on by the Estonians.
The Spies of Winter Page 13