The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  We sit and twiddle our young lives away

  We twiddle all night and we twiddle all day

  They say it’s for victory, we wouldn’t know

  But search every frequency, high, medium, low

  We fiddle with knobs, adjust Audio Gain

  But somehow we know it will all be in vain

  For do what we will, Activity’s nil.

  She went on to give an evocative verse account of the gruesome working conditions:

  The wind howls around us, the hut fills with smoke

  Our eyes are red-rimmed, we splutter and choke

  There are things more heroic and valiant by far

  But it’s our contribution to winning the war.

  There is something poignant about even a verse that is meant to be comic. For part of the tension of the job – and one of the causes of the occasional nervous breakdowns suffered by the operators – was the idea that despite listening to beeps, fast and slow, for hour upon hour, one might hear nothing of consequence.

  Added to this were occasional misunderstandings with local people. Mrs Margery Medlock, then a Wren based in Scarborough, remembers her own particular resentment. ‘We worked in a three-watch cycle of duty. For the midday watch, two “United” single decker buses could be seen waiting outside of our hotel to transport us to the country. I well recall someone writing to the local newspaper to complain: “Why is it, that at the height of the war, the Wrens, every afternoon enjoy being taken on a picnic?”’

  Mrs Medlock’s response to this is still salty: ‘Some picnic!’

  The work was highly concentrated; the women worked ‘8 hour marathon sessions transmitting coded signals by teleprinter and other machines on a direct line to Bletchley Park. We had special machines for U-Boat and E-Boat bearings, and three Western Union cable lines to the United States.’ Yet, despite the up-to-the-minute technology, and in quieter periods, it was difficult during the more humdrum shifts for Mrs Medlock or any of her colleagues to know the precise value of the contribution that they were making. For them, it was a matter of sitting in inhospitable, remote places, and having to concentrate at unholy hours on monotonous signals. They did not even have the solace of listening to voices.

  But they were also key when it came to the fast developing art of direction finding. This, in broad terms, was a method by which the positions of U-boats and other vessels could be tracked down via their radio signals; it was a form of triangulation. And the Wrens and others at Scarborough were soon at the centre of the effort. As Y Service veteran and wireless expert Peter Budd now says, they were at the very heart of the conflict:

  ‘Direction finding in the Atlantic was responsible for as many U-boats being sunk as radar – possibly more. Imagine an escort vessel: when it transmits, the signals either go up to the ionosphere, or travel for eighty miles – what we call a ground wave.’ Importantly, so too did the signals of a submarine that had surfaced. ‘If you were on a frigate escorting the convoy and you heard a U-boat – because you were listening out for it directly – then that U-boat would also be heard from Scarborough.’ But for the Huff-Duff operatives, it was a swift, skilled business. A U-boat would – obviously – spend as little time on the surface as possible, and transmit any necessary messages with super-brisk efficiency. In other words, the listeners would have to be fast to get a lock on the vessel’s position before it dived back down into the deep. The Allied escort ships and the Scarborough operatives would both get a fix on the U-boat signals bouncing off the ionosphere and between them be able to effectively plot a position.

  It wasn’t necessary to know the content of the U-boat messages – although for the Scarborough operatives sending this material back to Bletchley, some communications turned out to have terrific value, as they enabled Admiralty to plot direction and progress, thus ensuring that convoys could take evasive action in good time. However, it should also be borne in mind that HF/DF operators were monitoring a vast expanse of the North Sea. Their senses and reactions had to be acute. ‘The U-boat starts sending a weather report or convoy sighting report, and if you’re a good operator, you can tell from the strength of signal that there’s a U-boat on the surface transmitting,’ says Mr Budd. Then, ‘it’s all about accuracy and a race against time.

  ‘And it was the job of those at Scarborough to warn all the shore stations around the country. They developed the ability – via the breaking of Enigma – to be able to tell the Admiralty where the U-boats were going, what their position was.’ To take a random example, says Mr Budd, ‘the Admiralty would know that four U-boats were going to follow Convoy U81. And they would warn the convoy that there was a wolf pack closing in on them. So the convoy would change direction.’

  There was an ironic twist that gave these lethal cat-and-mouse games an edge of even greater jeopardy. ‘The Germans had broken the British codes before the war,’ says Mr Budd. ‘So you’d have the situation of us intercepting the information that the wolf pack was coming – and the convoy changing position as a result – but then the Germans would tell their naval HQ that the convoy was changing course. And then our interceptors would hear that.’ In some cases, a grimly farcical circle developed: the enemy instantly gathered that the Allies had somehow sensed their threat (though, crucially, the Germans did not believe that the Allies had cracked Enigma) and taken evasive action. The messages went back and forth. ‘And it went on until Bletchley Park was able to convince the Admiralty that the Germans had broken our codes – something they initially wouldn’t believe.’

  Because, for ordinary recruits, the absence of information or feedback made the work all the harder, the commanding officers of some stations shrewdly used a mix of psychology and humour to lighten the atmosphere. Anne Stuttford recalled of the Forest Moor station in Yorkshire: ‘Our lieutenant, Hancock was his name, fashioned a medal. It was a hideous thing made of cardboard with red squiggles on it and a red ribbon. As one of us found a missing group [lost frequencies], so the medal was stuck on her [radio] set. So fierce was the competition for this medal, it could have been made of solid gold . . . I wonder if Hancock realised what a clever ploy that was, so many spirits kept up by a small circle of cardboard.’

  But at Beaumanor Hall (the courtyard of the nineteenth-century house was adorned, bizarrely, with a ship’s figurehead depicting Admiral Cornwallis, which had for some reason been transported there all the way from Chatham Docks), the young women and men were slipping into a way of life that, although free of immediate hazard, put its own pressures on morale.

  For those of a slightly more sophisticated background arriving from London – even a London completely blacked out – there was a dread that the provincial acres of Leicestershire would prove unendurably dreary. One officer in a letter to his wife expressed the forlorn hope that there would at least be ‘a billiard table’. His arrival late at night surprisingly provided a lift to his morale after he ingested a quantity of tomato and pilchard sandwiches, coffee and two whiskies. Then, taking in the house, decorated in what he considered questionable taste, he began to see the possibilities for fun; and that even though the duties would be intense and focused – with several cryptography officers setting up their operations base in an antique bathroom, with a board across the bath – the property itself held out some possibilities of country-house party pursuits such as tennis.

  For a serious young man like Chris Barnes, brought up in Kent and having been given months of Morse and wireless training at Fort Bridgewood (a base near the Royal Dockyard at Chatham), Beaumanor was not an immediately attractive proposition, even though he found that he had been posted there with a great many other intelligent young chaps from his part of the world, apparently gathered in with terrific zeal by a Kent educational committee. ‘We were mainly from Chatham, Rochester, Gillingham and Maidstone. I was a little bit further out at Sittingbourne . . . There were quite a lot of older people at Beaumanor when we got there, they’d worked before in Chatham and Chicksands and also the Post
Office. So when we – a younger lot – came in, there was quite a sharp age gap. And there were very much senior ones in charge.’

  But the wartime Midlands lacked a certain something. ‘I found myself dumped in Loughborough, which was not the most cheering of places,’ says Mr Barnes with a small laugh. ‘In those days, it was a bit run down – it had been a bell foundry place that had gone over to munitions during the war, and for me, it was a bit of a shock after coming from rural Kent.’ Happier amid bucolic tranquillity, Mr Barnes set about fixing the situation. ‘Soon after that, I moved to Woodhouse Eaves. I’ve always preferred living in villages. And immediately started on shift work.’

  There was no breathing space, and the rotas were unforgiving. ‘It was intense. You sat down at a receiver, with a pad in front of you, and you struggled to hear the often very weak signals. Which were then fed to Station X.’ This was the shorthand intelligence term widely used for Bletchley Park (though the actual Station X was in reality a tiny MI6 radio room in the house’s attic, next to the water tank). ‘We didn’t know anything about Bletchley Park at that time,’ says Mr Barnes. ‘And you struggled to read these messages. You vaguely knew where they were coming from but you didn’t know what they were about at all.

  ‘You were normally given the frequency because you were watching specific tasks. Some people on each watch were trying to find them, but most of them were specifically listening to targets that they knew would come up at certain times. The most important thing we tracked was the U-boats . . . I think we knew that they were U-boats, but we didn’t realise the importance of it.’ They also listened in on ‘military structures in France and on the Russian front’.

  ‘It was straightforward, but it was arduous, and required patience and perseverance. The main problem was interference. Artificial noise, and sometimes deliberate noise, because the Germans jammed the signals.’

  Mr Barnes’s need to live somewhere other than a grey, nondescript town went rather further than aesthetic fastidiousness; he badly needed a strong contrast in his leisure hours in order for him to be able to shake off the work and to rest properly. The village of Woodhouse Eaves certainly had the tranquillity he was looking for, not to mention a homely little pub to which he and his great friend Ted Sandy would repair, making pints last for hours, much to the vexation of the landlord. Indeed, the only real drawback of the place was that Messrs Barnes and Sandy were not popular with the locals; because their work was highly secret, they could not breathe a word even to their landlady about their role. As a result, the villagers merely saw a pair of able-bodied young men not in uniform, and seemingly without any adequate explanation for this state of affairs.

  ‘They didn’t like us much,’ says Mr Barnes. ‘They thought we ought to have been in uniform. Our landlady didn’t like Ted and me much anyway. There must have been some compulsory billeting going on in that area simply because there were so many of us. And the villagers as a whole: you had to keep very quiet. The secrecy was just as tight as it was at Bletchley Park.’

  There were obvious consolations, though, especially for a keen walker such as Mr Barnes. ‘It was lovely country. You never think of Leicestershire as being a very beautiful county but round the Charnwood Forest, it was.’

  In a wider sense, another dread for Beaumanor operatives, in common with other listeners around the country, was the irregularity of the work itself. Even though the hours were absolutely rigid, the radio traffic fluctuated and on some days and nights there would not be much to listen in to. ‘Repetitive Strain Injury had not at that time been discovered,’ wrote Maurice de la Bertauche. ‘On many occasions, one might spend the whole eight hour watch doing absolutely nothing except searching on a specific frequency.’ He recorded a rueful poem on the subject:

  They also serve who sit and wait

  I serve, my trousers shine like plate.

  ‘Night duty was tolerable if one was busy,’ he added, ‘but interminable if there was no wireless activity . . . occasionally, a sadistic, childish trick was played upon any [wireless operator] who dozed off. Some diabolical fiend – probably one of the younger members – would withdraw his headphone jack, plug in his own headset, and search around to locate some insufferable signal, preferably a noisy teleprinter.’ The jack would then be half-replaced and the set volume wound up to maximum. The prankster would wake the victim – who would be in such a panic that he would swivel round, wonder about the noise on his headset and plug the jack in properly. Then he would ‘spend the rest of his shift scraping his brain off the ceiling and walls’, added de la Bertauche with unkind relish.15

  Joan Nicholls’s experiences on the quieter shifts at Beaumanor tended more towards the caring and sharing. ‘We used to play noughts and crosses, do crosswords, tell our life stories, and plan our futures; and some who were particularly naive would be told the facts of life, especially when marriage was looming.’16 Such talks, however, had to be held with a close eye on the door. Anyone caught gossiping on duty would be severely reprimanded.

  Rene Pederson also remembered the Herculean efforts necessary to stay awake during Beaumanor’s quieter shifts. ‘The night duty was a devil as very often we had not had much sleep before midnight and sometimes had in fact been out on the town in the evening,’ she recalled with admirable candour. ‘I think we all smoked. I can remember burning my elbow to keep awake once at least.’

  Arriving at Beaumanor at a rather more senior level in 1940 was Hugh Skillen, who had already been through military training at Sandhurst and inducted into the world of intelligence. ‘I was sent to see Major Crankshaw who was to become an authority on Russian affairs after the war,’ wrote Skillen (indeed, Edward Crankshaw gained invaluable experience of Soviet affairs when in 1942, he spent weeks in Moscow negotiating with paranoid military officers about the sharing of certain aspects of Y work; after the war, he wrote books on Russian history). ‘He told me nothing about the work I would be engaged in, apart from making it appear quite mysterious, and he accepted me for training in the Y service.’ Skillen’s introduction to the service, as it turned out, was brilliantly, Britishly comic.

  He was first posted to No. 1 Special Wireless Group at Harpenden. ‘I was to be met by a black car at a railway station . . . but for some reason, probably the train running late, there was no black car when I arrived and I had to go to the postmaster at Harpenden to ask for a secret location as I had only PO Box No. R100 as a reference.’ Happily, the postmaster was perfectly well aware of the top secret location in question. It was Rothamstead Manor, and it was here that Skillen was acquainted with the ‘Y Handbook’, in which, as he said, ‘I felt considerably lost.’ After this came his transfer to Beaumanor.

  It was still early days, and the place was a little on the quiet side. ‘The big house was empty and a lone teleprinter chattered away from time to time with no operator in sight.’ In a moment of boredom, Skillen ‘sat down at the keyboard of the teleprinter wondering if it was connected at the other end. There must have been someone on duty at the other end because when I began to type “the quick brown fox” . . . the typist at the other end began a conversation with me. This was my first acquaintance with a teleprinter and I used to practise for a few minutes each evening . . . and the operator would chip in again at the other end.’17

  Not long after, Skillen was transferred to nearby Chicksands Priory, where he was to fall in with some startling and colourful company.

  5 The Blitz and the Ghost Voices

  For a young Voluntary Interceptor like Ray Fautley, the Blitz was not merely a time of terrific apprehension; it was utterly exhausting. Throughout this period, there was an unspoken expectation that life simply had to stumble on, as normally as one could manage. So young Fautley’s nocturnal VI duties continued, even as the bombs were falling from the night sky. Yet it is striking that it would not have occurred to Fautley to do otherwise, and this was not for reasons of virtue. For him, as for everyone else, such things passed beyond a conscious sense of
duty and somehow became ingrained, second nature.

  And there was one day – rather than night – in which Fautley was extraordinarily lucky to escape with his life. He was now employed at the Philips radio factory in Balham, a few miles south of Westminster. ‘I was in the canteen – I was doing a bit of fault finding on the R107, an army receiver,’ he recalls, quite cheerfully. ‘I was sitting there, working and having my lunch about midday. No air-raid siren noise or anything – yet the next thing I knew, I was lying flat on top of a young lady.

  ‘I was covered in plaster dust, brick dust, broken glass and money. What had happened? A small bomb had landed only fifteen feet from me. Luckily for me, there was a brick wall between. On the other side of the wall was the drawing office, and it killed two draughtsmen outright. The blast took me off my seat and smashed me right through the glass kiosk where the girl was taking the money. I finished on top of her.’

  Luxuries such as dignity were in short supply during the Blitz. ‘It was a bit frightening,’ Mr Fautley says drily. ‘After we stopped coughing and the dust settled, we searched around and found what money we could and put it in a tin. It was a mess. And then – back to work. From one till six! No counselling or anything in those days; it was just a bomb. Everyone had bombs.

  ‘We both got up and dusted each other down and felt all right, nothing broken, all OK.’

  But the postscript illustrates vividly what urban populations were expected to live through during that time without complaint.