The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  The War Office was very keen on this level of expertise. Not least because, while waiting for further interception stations to be established, it needed experienced and skilled listeners to monitor any kind of illicit broadcasting. The man at the Ministry co-ordinating this voluntary effort was Lord Sandhurst.

  Much like his RSS colleague Brigadier Richard Gambier-Parry, Sandhurst had a jovial side that would manifest itself in comical newsletters sent out to the Voluntary Interceptors. In these, he would refer to himself as ‘T W Earp’. He once wrote a morale-boosting poem – aimed at the radio specialists, with all their frequently impenetrable jargon and acronyms – that concluded:

  If you can dodge the blinking German Army

  Or copy AOR through thick and thin

  And you can copy VIOLET’s QRX’s

  You’re a better bloke than me so

  BUNG IT IN!

  Indeed, certainly in the early stages of the war, the (sometimes very young) Voluntary Interceptors were rather more adept at the work than many operatives either in the services or the Foreign Office. Like the computing whizz-kids of today who seem to have an instinctive aptitude for the technology, a youthful generation of radio fanatics had swiftly mastered this new and fast evolving science of valves and coils and receivers. Certainly, young Ray Fautley – who was required to do all this on top of his demanding day job, and a stint in the Home Guard too – took to it with relish. Even the extra tasks laid on by the War Office.

  ‘There was a whole lot of stuff: the responsibility I got for designing – aged eighteen – a set of coils for a transmitter which the War Office wanted. It had to be manufactured out of components that were to be found in any radio factory used for making radio wireless sets.

  ‘From that time on, I knew exactly what type of wire to use for any particular frequency. I proudly presented the senior engineer with the set, and he used it.

  ‘I didn’t want to let him down, I was going to do this job. Even though I had no idea what to do to start with. It’s stuck with me ever since.’

  When he started as a VI, Ray Fautley found that the Radio Security Service was to issue him with a kit. First came the receiver itself, which was to be secreted within the Fautley front parlour. ‘I had made my own set,’ he says. ‘But then they loaned me a thing called the AR88. Now that really needed two men to lift. I couldn’t lift it myself now. It weighed an absolute ton.’

  Together with this cumbersome equipment, older than the sleeker HRO receivers that were coming in, was paraphernalia that would not have seemed out of place being given away with a boy’s comic of the day. ‘I got a parcel, with message forms and the log sheets, and stamps. And there were some lovely envelopes stamped “Secret” in red – and some slightly larger plain envelopes and some gummed stickers marked PO Box 25, Barnet, Herts, which I used to stick on the plain envelopes.

  ‘All my logs went inside the “secret” envelope, and then that was put inside the other one. All very cloak and dagger.’ The very idea of ‘PO Box 25, Barnet’ is a tribute to the Post Office of that era. Is it remotely possible to imagine trusting such correspondence to today’s service? ‘But this is how the Voluntary Intercept Service operated,’ says Mr Fautley. ‘Eventually, there were about 1500 to 1600 of us – all over the UK.’

  Indeed, according to wireless veteran Pat Hawker, the system evolved piecemeal, with a spirit of improvisation about it:

  Throughout the early war years, hams (including at least one woman) were recruited on a regional basis. A Captain in the Royal Corps of Signals was put in charge of each section . . . Many radio amateurs holding pre-war licences, who also belonged to the Radio Society of Great Britain, received a letter from Lord Sandhurst. The amateur was then subjected to a security check by the police and was interviewed by the Regional Officer . . . the V.I. was enrolled after signing a declaration under the Official Secrets Act . . . The V.I. couldn’t, of course, explain why he was unable to take part in duties such as fire-watching or the Home Guard because he didn’t have any time to spare. Sometimes a small room in the house was used as the listening post or . . . a shed in the garden, suitably blacked out.3

  Like many young radio enthusiasts, Ray Fautley had already learned the intricacies of Morse code. ‘I learned from my colleague at Marconi’s when I was an apprentice in 1935 because when he knew I could already do a bit of Morse, he brought a Morse key in and an oscillator and a pair of earphones.’ The aim was to improve Fautley’s ability and, crucially, speed. ‘In the lunchtimes, he used to send me Morse messages out of the newspaper, just plain language, and in three weeks I was doing twenty words a minute, much to my amazement and to his.’

  Until the war, Fautley had never made use of his skill. But now it was very much called on. As well as doing a full day’s work, the Voluntary Interceptor was expected to go home in the evening, have some tea, and then put in two hours of concentrated radio work, five nights a week. Fautley settled into it quite quickly.

  ‘One of the first things I found when I started listening was that there was a consistent signal which I heard every night every time I was on exactly the same frequency, and [which was] quite obviously machine-sent Morse. Perfect spacing, perfect lengths to dots and dashes, you couldn’t imitate it because it was so perfect. It used to rattle along at twenty words a minute.’ Everything Ray copied had to be in block capital letters, which was harder than transcribing in normal, flowing handwriting. ‘The reason I had to copy everything in block capitals was because if it was done in longhand, you could get confusion between Us and As, Vs and so forth.’

  Even in these early months of the war, Mr Fautley was gaining both valuable expertise and passing useful material on to the top secret PO Box in Barnet, north London – not that he could ever know it as he took down the coded messages. Of the station that was sending automatic Morse, he says, ‘I sent it in with the log and they came back and said: “This you can use as a frequency marker.”’ In other words, it was a German frequency that he could not only monitor but use as a fixed reference for tuning to others. ‘And so on my calibration mark of 0 to 100, I knew exactly what that frequency represented. That helped me calibrate the whole scale.

  ‘Automatic Morse is the same, whatever machine sends it. It’s regular, exact. A human being does not send regular, exact Morse.’ The irregularity of the human touch, however, could itself be of terrific strategic value to the listeners. The individual rhythms of those operating the telegraph keys, tapping out those ‘dit dit dahs’, were very distinctive. As a result, if you could recognise the style of a particular German Morse operator, you would know you had hit the correct frequency.

  And so it was that Mr Fautley began slowly to identify many different German operators simply by their individual styles of transmission – their ‘fists’. Once a German radio operator could be identified by his own unmistakable style, the listener could home in on his individual quirks and working habits; small slips in operating procedure which on the face of it wouldn’t mean much – but which allowed the codebreakers a way to crowbar their way into ciphers. Slips such as the repeated use of a girlfriend’s name as a test, or simply the use of ‘Heil Hitler’ at the end of every message.

  ‘Every operator is slightly different,’ says Mr Fautley. ‘They may be similar but they are never exactly the same. When I send Morse, the dashes I send are probably not all exactly the same length. I was listening to a particular station and it had a three-letter call sign, and I copied all that down. And what amazed me was at the end of the transmission, they quite often sent [the numbers] 7-3. Now that’s amateur radio parlance for “best wishes”. In any language.

  ‘I thought: “This must be a German amateur operator sending that.” Because if this was actually the German military and his officers had seen that going out . . . he’d probably have got court-martialled. Anyway, on the same frequency, at the same time, the station would come up with different call signs. Still three dashes but different. But the fist was the same
. So I put on my log: “same operator”.’

  Indeed, as the war progressed, many Y Service operators formed a strong impression of their German counterparts: like themselves often youthful, with that same zeal for the science of the wireless. Behind all the elongated dots and dashes were oddly recognisable human beings. Obscene though the Nazi regime was, there did not seem to be many cases of Y Service operatives feeling terrific animosity towards their immediate German equivalents. In a few cases, there was respect.

  As Mr Fautley settled into his grinding though fruitful listening sessions, his anonymous superiors in Barnet were very pleased with his efforts and – pleasingly – felt that he should know. ‘They came back with “Well done” because this helped them enormously. All this stuff was being card-filed.’

  And Mr Fautley was not alone in doing outstanding work; as a whole, the VIs succeeded in picking up – often on very faint, hard-to-hear frequencies – some golden intelligence. Any messages from such an important source obviously gave vital clues to operations, tactics, strategies, manoeuvres. In the early stages of the conflict, the Voluntary Interceptors – and senior analysts at Arkley View in north London such as Hugh Trevor-Roper – became so good at identifying certain operating procedures that those very procedures gave the cryptographers at Bletchley Park some of the first clues they needed to smash their way into the Enigma codes.

  VIs would sometimes overhear the German operators discussing changes in codes, and telling each other about cipher updates in order to keep each other up to speed. As a result, the garrulous German wireless operators were helping Bletchley Park to keep up to speed as well.

  The Abwehr codes were to prove particularly useful to the Arkley View analysts; as the conflict progressed, they were able to focus on these in detail, thus yielding invaluable information about the enemy’s entire communications systems. And, thanks in great part to the Voluntary Interceptors’ perceptiveness in distinguishing between different German operators, other advantages were gained. Against the grain of national stereotypes, German radio operators were much more gossipy than their Allied counterparts; when establishing contact with each other, they were much more prone to casual chattering. This very chatter was as individual as fingerprints. And the practical use of such information enabled staff at Arkley View to record systematically on index cards the details of each operator, where roughly they were based, and the sorts of military manoeuvres that they were reporting on. According to Geoffrey Pidgeon:

  Box 25 received up to a thousand log sheets daily from V.I.s and full-time interceptors. These had to be examined to identify new Abwehr services and to sort the familiar ones into their allotted groups . . . If the operator sent in a previously identified station the details were sent to the relevant Group Officer, located in the next hut, who would then advise the operator whether it was ‘already covered, thanks’ or ‘still wanted’ . . . A large wall map was kept in the Group hut with coloured wool stretching between points showing the location and working of the various stations. To prevent a casual visitor from seeing the extent of British discoveries, this map was covered with a curtain that was activated by an electric motor.

  It was not just ‘fists’ that were of tremendous use to the Barnet crowd. ‘Another useful aid in identifying stations which changed their call signs regularly . . . was by noting the peculiar and tuneless notes which some of the primitive transmitters produced.’ Metaphors for these notes, heard in the background, included ‘a croaking frog, a fly in a bottle, a clucking hen, an Epsom salts note and a painful and pathetic note’.4

  The country was divided up into regions, each allocated to an officer who made it clear to the VIs that 100 per cent accuracy was of the essence. Nevertheless, the officers also tried to ensure that two or more VIs would cover certain frequencies, so that if the odd mistake was made, it could be checked against the other VIs’ transcriptions.

  There was also what might have been seen as healthy competition with other listeners – particularly the radio operatives of the General Post Office. Used to working only with the highest quality signals, GPO operatives were rather stumped by the fainter sort that the VIs became so expert in following. One RSS official commented: ‘We have continually wiped the eye of the Post Office over it and I am very anxious that we should wipe it cleaner.’ Indeed, by March 1940, when the Germans made their move into the Low Countries and France, it was the VIs who succeeded in hearing agents in those countries being sent secret messages to alert them to the coming invasion.

  Away from the excitement and the achievements of Arkley View, life in Barnet was occasionally rather exasperating for the high-minded fox-hunting aesthete Hugh Trevor-Roper. His leisure hours would ideally be bound up either with his passion for wild countryside or his equally strong love for the classics, but his attempts back at home to concentrate on scholarly pursuits or even work on his amusingly self-conscious and ornate diaries would be thwarted by the garrulous landlady of his billet, who frequently attempted to engage her young lodger with lengthy monologues concerning ‘theosophy’, feminism, the ancient secrets of the Great Pyramid, the significance of dreams, the legends of Atlantis, and the possibilities of a new psychic dimension. Trevor-Roper’s Radio Security Service workplace was thus not merely a satisfying outpost of intelligence, set aside from the venomous bickering of MI5 and MI6; it was also invaluable sanctuary from a talkative landlady.

  In the meantime, Ray Fautley’s early training – and his natural love for the medium of radio – ensured that his initiation into the realm of secret listening was reasonably straightforward (even if he was later mistaken for a spy, as we shall see later). For many others, including the thousands of young women drafted into the effort, the process was more trying.

  Owing to family connections, Shirley Cannicott (née Gadsby) found her initial experience of wireless interception rather more glamorous than the rough and ready training that immediately followed. She was keen to do her bit, she had languages, and her father knew someone with Admiralty contacts. This resulted in an interview with Lady Alexander, wife of the First Lord of the Admiralty. ‘It was quite an experience to go in by the front gate of Admiralty in Whitehall,’ wrote Mrs Cannicott, ‘and after polite enquiries made by a liveried porter, to be conducted along long, low-ceilinged corridors, lit by anciently-shaped lamps.’ After this, she was required to visit ‘the citadel’, the great concrete mass on the side of Horseguards Parade, where she sat a test. Having passed, in the following days she found herself dispatched to north London:

  I was sent up to Mill Hill where we were given – was it a week or two weeks? – very perfunctory training.

  We were never given any instructions about the ‘insides’ of radios or anything of that kind . . . just a brief chat on what a radio wave was and what it could do . . . Headphones on, set on, swivel the dial ever so slowly forward and back, forward and back, overlapping a portion of the dial each time, until the whole sweep was covered . . . to hear a noise, a voice, something other than the swish of ‘radio silence’. We were a generation of young who had done this same thing nightly on our parents’ wireless sets, searching for foreign stations with dance music late into the night after Auntie BBC had closed.5

  For Sybil Welch, the culture shock was rather greater. Leaving Glasgow University to sign up for her new duties in the Wrens, she found herself being sent to the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. As she wrote:

  This training course was a somewhat unnerving experience. It seemed a long way from Goethe, Grillparzer, Hebbel, and other pillars of German literature to the deep baritone voice of Lt Freddie Marshall shouting: ‘Achtung! Achtung! Feindliche Zerstorer and Steurbord!’ This, he taught us, was the sort of thing we might hear from a German E-Boat near the English coast, and which we would have to intercept and send to our nearest intelligence centre.6

  Even for young women from London – where one might somehow expect slightly greater insouciance – the experience of being pulled into the vortex of war w
as disorientating and unsettling. In early 1939, Iris Sugg – together with her friend Betty Miller – had recently left school. They found work as clerks in the Post Office headquarters at St Martins le Grand. As war broke out, Mrs Sugg recalls, ‘a circular was passed around the office asking for female staff to apply for training in the “Post Office Wireless Service”, which was vital for the war effort. Betty and I decided we would fill in the application forms.’

  They applied, attended interviews, and passed; then they were given a rather curious briefing. After having the importance of the Official Secrets Act impressed upon them, the two young women were additionally told ominously that ‘if the war did not go well, and the very worst happened, we would not be associated with the Post Office, we did not exist.’ This clearly had quite an effect on their youthful imaginations, but they pressed on.

  ‘Soon we were passed on for training in London, learning the Morse code and radio procedure,’ recalls Mrs Sugg. ‘We were now qualified “wireless operators” and waited for our postings.’ As it happened, the two young girls were not required to travel far; twenty-five miles at most. Even so, they were still daunted; this was an age, as many veterans testify, when girls in particular were seemingly less worldly than their modern-day equivalents. Travel was a rarity, as indeed was straying far from family. ‘The great day came telling us we were posted to St Albans and enclosing rail passes and other documents,’ says Mrs Sugg. ‘On our arrival there, we were to be met by a local police constable who would find a billet for us. Thus two teenagers who had never been away from home before were off on an unknown adventure to help the war effort.’

  The billeting procedure was striking enough for the two young girls. In the company of a ‘fatherly’ policeman, they were taken to a local housing estate. The constable then simply started knocking on doors, asking the houses’ occupants how many bedrooms they had, and whether those rooms were occupied. A few householders during the war years would happily fib in the face of officialdom, for fear that the adult billetees or child evacuees – complete strangers both – would turn out to be unruly, dirty, infectious, flea-ridden or completely uncontrollable. The policeman had to knock on quite a few doors.