The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  ‘I got back home – I was living in North Cheam then, tube from Balham to Morden, then got a bus – and when I got in, my mother took one look at me and said: “You’re filthy! What have you been doing?”

  ‘I said, “Oh, we had a bomb at work.”

  ‘And she said, “Oh, you’d better go and have a bath. You look awful.”

  ‘I got my five inches of water, because that’s all we were allowed during the war. I started to undress and I got a nasty shock – my underclothes were soaked in blood – mine. It was very frightening. It had all dried. There were lacerations everywhere. I hadn’t noticed anything because I had a jacket on.

  ‘Every item of clothing I wore that day ended up having to be destroyed. They all had fragments of glass in them, even the shoes. After all this, I got in the bath, and thought to myself: “What’s that in my back?” I shouted to my mum, asked her to come and have a look and see what was wrong. She came in and said “You’ve got chunks of glass sticking in your back.”’

  With a practicality that some might now find rather gruesome, Mother took direct action. ‘She pulled these chunks of glass out and I screamed – because boy, did that hurt. She got six bits of glass out of my back. With muscley bits. It bled when she pulled these fragments out. Frightening, the way it might have gone. But I didn’t bother going to the doctor. It all healed up, I heal quickly . . . I had never felt it before because I was leaning forward when working.’

  Mr Fautley was young; and he had both a sense of obligation and a burning love for the role that he had been assigned. So, as the raids continued, his work tuning into those faint German frequencies went on. Yet, he insists, there was nothing unusual about that – the miracle of the capital was that everyone kept trudging on, as though the bombs were little more than a trifling inconvenience.

  ‘London was burning, every night. Yet the post office was still able to deliver. They wouldn’t now. Everybody was working. They wanted an end to this blessed war. Some were saying it would be over by Christmas 1939. Of course it wasn’t. I used to go out to Croydon Airport to watch the dog-fights, the Spitfires. And then if you saw something falling, you ran. Looking back, I realise now how unique the situation was.’

  Unique, and galvanising too. Early in the evening on which the London Blitz had begun – 7 September 1940 – future wireless operator Betty White was at the Holborn Empire, watching comedian Max Miller perform; for some reason, either those inside failed to hear the air-raid warning, or it simply did not get through. Seventeen-year-old Betty and her companions were aware of some noise, but, as she says now, ‘we thought it was distant thunder.’ It was only when everyone emerged from the theatre and heard the terrible sound, some five miles east, of the old docks being bombed, that they realised what it was.

  At that time, Betty was working in the civil service and was obliged to continue to do so even as her office was evacuated to the seaside resort of Bournemouth in Dorset. Eventually, though, in the face of the relentless onslaught – not just the bombs in London, which saw her parents’ house flattened (her parents, miraculously, survived) and a tram on which Betty was travelling ‘clipped’ and tipped over, but also the unexpected fighter attacks on Bournemouth – Betty and her sister became desperate to join up. ‘I volunteered for the Army,’ she says. ‘I was told, no, they’re not taking anyone. So then I took an IQ test for a place with the air force.’ But the authorities looked at the impressive result of the test and instantly decided on a different course for Betty, especially when she answered in the cautious affirmative to the question: ‘Can you stay awake all night?’

  Another crucial factor was that Betty’s brother had, a couple of years back, taught his little sister Morse code. It was clear where Betty White was needed most.

  In Caterham, Surrey, young Geoffrey Pidgeon and his brother had watched the Battle of Britain being fought above their heads; but one particular day, when a local airfield was bombed, settled the matter as far as their father was concerned. Having himself been drawn into the secret wireless world at Whaddon Hall in Buckinghamshire, he was determined that his family should join him, even though the billeting space in Stony Stratford was uncomfortably tight.

  After a journey from London crammed into a car, the family were introduced to their new hosts. ‘We were all packed up with the Crows. The Crows said, “Your bedroom is a big one, Mr Pidgeon. You have to have you and Mrs Pidgeon in the big bed, and your three boys on the floor.”

  ‘So there were five of us in one room. And we stayed there – I think we were only moved out around the time of the Coventry raid. Because thanks to the successes with Enigma, and the Bletchley recruitment, the area was filling up like wildfire. Billeting was jammed all round the town. You couldn’t get a hotel, you couldn’t get in a billetor’s home.’ But finally came a rare opportunity. ‘Joyce Crow worked for a builder – Cowley and Sons – and they had just refurbished a flat over a butcher’s shop in Stony Stratford High Street,’ says Mr Pidgeon. ‘It was supposed to be for Mrs Canvin, the butcher’s wife. But she didn’t like it. So it was given to us. Thirty bob a week, I think it was.

  ‘It was fantastic! Mother and father had a room. Older brother had his own room, and younger brother Trevor and I had a room. And there was a lounge and a kitchen/dining room. So – how lucky we felt, when everyone else was crammed, doubled up. We got moved into somewhere that was almost palatial.’

  But the move away from Caterham public school was also to change the gravitational pull of Geoffrey Pidgeon’s life, bringing it closer to the exquisite intricacies of the secret work of Whaddon Hall.

  The Blitz was, for others too, a very effective catalyst. It propelled a sixteen-year-old GPO telegraphist, Robert Hughes, into the war. He was too young to be conscripted but the nightmarish destruction all around led him to request ‘early call-up’.

  Mr Hughes had left school at fourteen and gone to work for the Post Office; this gave him a skilled grounding in the science of wireless telegraphy. He lived with his family in London near the City Road, Islington, a district that was particularly badly hit. ‘The bombing there was horrendous,’ he says with feeling. ‘At one stage around that time, I had a goitre, a great lump on my throat, and I had to go to Barts Hospital.’ This was situated near St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘My ward was three floors up. One night there was a tremendous air raid. The staff pulled our beds away from the walls. The beds were bouncing with the bombing. Next day I just walked out, went walking round the City.’ It was a kind of aftershock. ‘My father came to visit the hospital, saw the empty bed . . . well, they couldn’t find me anywhere. That bombing went on every night for six months.’

  Despite the trauma being inflicted upon both the city and its inhabitants, there was a genuine effort to keep things moving as normally as possible. But the nightly onslaughts also triggered a potent blend of rage and helplessness, as young Hughes and his colleagues were expected to operate in the Stygian darkness of unlit winter evening streets, the bombers like angry hornets above their heads.

  ‘There were bombs all night but we had to go to work all day,’ he adds. ‘In the post office, we worked eight in the morning till eight at night, twelve-hour days, delivering government telegrams. And you’d go out in a complete blackout. They never gave us torches. We knew the streets but we didn’t know the numbers. It was pretty intense.’

  This led to his request to join up immediately. It was granted. And this young man who had scarcely even left London was soon to find himself sent off to the Mediterranean, not only to experience a world more vivid than even those he had seen on the cinema screen but to live a life that could be as hilarious as it was hair-raising. It all started prosaically enough, however, within the grounds of Butlins holiday camp in Skegness, where he and hundreds of other young lads were sent for their basic military training. After intelligence tests, Mr Hughes was marked out to be a Special Wireless Operator. He had originally put in for a naval position. And here it was.

  Then, after
a transfer to the more intensive and technical training centres in Brighton and Eastbourne, came the harder months: the focused learning of Morse. ‘We were trained for very high speeds – twenty-eight words per minute,’ says Mr Hughes. ‘The original intention was that they were going to recruit men thirty years old or thereabouts to be Special Operators – but they found that they couldn’t hold the high speed for any length of time. Because the brain’s not so adaptable or flexible as it is with eighteen-year-olds.’ In fact, he arrived in Alexandria in Egypt to find a couple of the older operators still there. ‘They must have discovered after the first influx that they would be better trying out younger men. Twenty-eight words per minute is quite a speed. And obviously,’ Mr Hughes adds drily, ‘you couldn’t ask the German operator for a repeat of the message.’

  On the south coast at Hawkinge, the relentless autumn campaign of bombing was also having a profound effect on personnel. Aileen Clayton recalled:

  During the long and busy winter of the Blitz, I became so weary that the time eventually came when I had to ask my doctor to prescribe Benzedrine to keep me awake while on watch and sleeping pills to knock me out if and when I did get a chance to rest. Living as I did mainly on a diet of black coffee and cocoa, the dark circles under my eyes made me look like a panda bear and yet I hated to go to my billet in case I missed any of the action.

  And, as she recorded, the intensity of the situation understandably took its toll on other officers:

  One day, when the bombing and the shelling had been rather noisier than usual, one of the men in the unit cracked under the strain. I was senior WAAF on duty . . . and I could see that one or two of the girls were already on the verge of tears. Lack of sleep and the constant bombing were beginning to tell, and I could feel that hysteria was not far off. I had to act quickly, and so for the first time in my life, I slapped a man across the face hard, and several times. It had the desired effect. Unfortunately the hysterical man was my senior in rank.1

  The Blitz throughout the autumn of 1940 was spreading to every major port and city in Britain. Though London received the heaviest bombardment, cities such as Southampton and Plymouth were also subjected to horrific damage, possibly intensified because they were very much smaller than the capital.

  ‘I was posted to Plymouth with six or eight others to operate a teleprinting room in the naval fort at Egg Buckland . . .’ wrote Wren Imogen Ryan, ‘we spent a certain amount of time chatting to our friends in other teleprinting rooms scattered along the English coast, chatting to the people in the plotting room next door to ours, doing the Times crossword.’ But this amiable atmosphere soon gave way to something rather sharper. As Ryan recalled with a certain wryness: ‘Air raids began in Plymouth a few days after we arrived and made life frightening and uncomfortable for a bit. As our quarters on the Hoe were uninhabitable, we were told to find our own digs where we could, and this did lead to enlarging one’s experiences quite a bit. I, for one, had never met an alcoholic before, and found it quite alarming.’2

  Others were equally matter-of-fact about the risks. Fellow Plymouth Wren Jean Campden recalled:

  Among out-standing incidents would come being bombed out of our quarters . . . the night before I was due to be posted to Dover. It happened in the middle of the night, there was a fearful noise, the building shook, plaster and bits of glass flew around and we were ordered out into the road where there was an enormous crater where a bomb had landed . . . I proceeded to Dover the following day where I found my suitcase full of fragments of glass lurking among my clothes, also that I had picked up an appalling cold from standing about in my night-attire the previous night.3

  For Ray Fautley, tirelessly tuning in from the front room of his parents’ house in south London, there was another sort of hazard to be faced than falling bombs: that of other people misunderstanding exactly what he was doing. ‘My listening period was usually from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. for four or five nights every week, and so I told my girlfriend, Barbara, that it would be best if we only met at weekends. That didn’t go down very well at all because I wasn’t allowed to tell her why.

  ‘Even so, one Wednesday evening, Barbara called at my house with one of her girlfriends, and my parents foolishly let them in.’ It should be recalled that even though Mr Fautley’s parents had had a brief chat with the bowler-hatted man from the Radio Security Service, they still did not know exactly what their son was listening in to. And when the young women walked into that front parlour and saw Mr Fautley crouched over the half-concealed wireless set, jammed into the bureau, they immediately leapt to a terrible conclusion . . .

  ‘I was concentrating on writing down what I was receiving,’ says Mr Fautley, ‘and then they came in. I don’t know who was most shocked – the girls or me! I babbled that I was doing some tests at home for Marconi’s, but the look on their faces indicated that they didn’t really believe a word of it. My girlfriend clearly thought that I was a spy!’ Indeed, so convinced was she that she immediately took her friend, dashed out of the front room and out of the house up the street. Mr Fautley was obliged to give chase. ‘I had to stop her because I knew she was looking for a policeman. But even then, I still couldn’t tell her what it was that I was doing. Well, what could I say? Many, many years later – when Barbara was my wife – I was finally able to tell her what I had actually been doing.’

  Ironically, though, Barbara might have found out much sooner had she paid close attention to the Daily Mirror, which during the Blitz inadvertently gave the game away about the Voluntary Interceptors on its front page. Given the well-worn maxim ‘careless talk costs lives’ – plus the need for absolute secrecy when it came to monitoring messages delivered via the Enigma code – this clumsy and inadvertent breach of security was astounding.

  ‘Spies Tap Nazi Code’ screamed the Mirror’s 1940 headline, with the byline ‘By a special correspondent’. ‘Britain’s radio spies are at work every night,’ declared the article. ‘During the day, they work in factories, shops and offices. Colleagues wonder why they never go to cinemas or dances. But questions are parried with a smile – and silence. Their job isn’t one to be talked about.’ Except by the Daily Mirror, it seemed. The ‘correspondent’ added: ‘Home from work, a quick meal, and the hush-hush men unlock the door of a room usually at the top of the house. There, until the small hours, they sit, head-phones on ears, taking down the Morse code messages that fill the air.’

  One such volunteer helpfully provided a quote concerning the expressions of gratitude he received from his secret headquarters. And astonishingly – given the extreme lengths to which Bletchley Park had gone to keep the nature of its work secret – the volunteer seemed quite happy to burble on: ‘Naturally we have no idea of the codes used by German agents. But it is a great thrill to feel you might be getting down a message which, decoded, might prove of supreme importance.’ According to Nigel West, this colossal security blunder caused ‘tremendous agitation at Bletchley’.

  Unsurprisingly so. By this stage, Bletchley Park codebreakers had made substantial headway into the seemingly impossible task of taking the Enigma codes apart. But if the Germans – who considered Enigma completely unbreakable – were ever to learn of this triumph, they would instantly increase the complexity of their encryptions, sending the codebreakers back to the very start. The repercussions would be incalculable.

  The story is just one illustration of why there was anxiety among so many codebreakers and wireless operatives that matters of the gravest secrecy might be blurted out by accident. As the Daily Mirror had proved, it was all too easy to do. A later memo, sent out by Bletchley’s director Edward Travis to personnel in all stations, stated:

  It would be a reflection on your intelligence to suppose that you do not realise that spies may, and indeed do, exist in this country; and that an idle piece of boasting or gossip on the part of any one of you may reach circles outside of your control whence it may be passed to the enemy and cause, not only the breakdown of our successful e
fforts here, but the sacrifice of the lives of our sailors, soldiers and airmen, perhaps your own brothers, and may even prejudice our ultimate hope of victory.

  Travis cited a couple of examples that had recently been brought to his attention; instances when the gossipers in question were lucky not to find themselves facing criminal charges and had only avoided doing so thanks to his personal intervention. One woman ‘employed in responsible duties disclosed their nature within her family circle, thinking no doubt that the secret was safe there . . . What she had disclosed in the family circle was repeated by one of its members in mixed company, actually at a cocktail party, whence it was duly reported to me.’ And though she and other transgressors escaped prison, the stress ‘and humiliation to which these proceedings will have subjected them and their families, no less than the realisation of the dangers to which they have exposed their country will no doubt be some, if not equal, punishment’.4

  As to Travis’s dark warnings of spies being at work in Britain, this was the assumption within the War Office even before the war had begun, and the Radio Security Service throughout had been diligently seeking out any such elements. As it would later transpire, the department attended to this job with great success, although there were never quite as many spies as Whitehall had feared. Indeed, there appear to have been more agents passing information to the Soviets at that stage than to the Nazis.

  Nonetheless, tremendous care was required and the Official Secrets Act applied universally across the Y Service; for even though the Germans would of course understand that the Allies were working to the very highest standards of wireless interception, they would be sufficiently confident in the complexity of their codes to keep up an unrestrained flow of traffic. So while they knew the messages were being picked up, the Nazis continued to believe that any communication encoded through Enigma would remain unreadable.