The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  The secrecy was almost glamorous for those who worked at Bletchley Park; it was less so for those who worked in the out-stations. This was particularly the case for the young women who listened in to encoded Morse messages from aircraft and shipping, and whose role was simply to send on these random jumbles without any proper idea of their significance. It was difficult for some to feel motivated, since on the face of it, they seemed to be little more than invisible cogs.

  This may well have been one of the factors that were to lead to so many upsets at RAF Chicksands as the war progressed: a combination of the monotone, anonymous nature of the work, and the fact that the women could release none of that pent-up frustration because they were forbidden to discuss what they were doing. For Hugh Skillen, though, the atmosphere in the earlier days at Chicksands seemed more conducive than other places he had passed through, including Beaumanor. Chicksands Priory was, he wrote, ‘a delightful old house’ with a dining room from which an old carp pond could be seen. ‘The legend was that carp had been there for centuries since the time of the monks.’

  Skillen was rather taken with the small officers’ mess. ‘There was a fine table at which a dozen could have been seated very comfortably but we were usually four in number at lunch or dinner. At the head of the table was a Rear-Admiral or some very senior naval rank . . . opposite me was a young, very attractive Wren officer, who was [the Rear-Admiral’s] secretary or aide-de-camp.’

  There was also a figure who would later go on to find global notoriety in the Cold War. ‘On my right was a handsome debonair lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps: Guy Burgess. After dinner, we sometimes played darts in the mess, Burgess and I with the Wren, and Burgess and I would go to a pub in the evening for a quiet drink.’

  Those drinks took place on days off. Skillen’s colleagues, though, would endeavour to make his lonely nocturnal tasks a little more bearable. ‘When I was Night Duty Officer, the butler would place a plate of beef sandwiches on my desk covered with a silver tureen. But I was to be disappointed more than once to find that [Major Jolowicz] had given them to his Alsatian. At any rate, there were only a few crumbs left on the plate.’5

  A number of wireless operatives and Auxiliary Territorial Service girls (the ATS was the women’s voluntary army, the equivalent of Wrens and WAAFs) found a sometimes attractive element of chaos at Chicksands. The historic nature of the building had – when they considered their work – a pleasing incongruity. ‘The Priory – its quiet and peacefulness – the formidable figures that parade its corridors, rings around their arms and under their eyes,’ wrote an ATS satirist in a staff magazine. The anonymous comedian continued:

  Legend has it that a nun, who did what none should have done, wanders through the grounds in the not-so-still of the night. I understand she didn’t live long enough to become a Mother Superior . . . I doubt whether our presence within its walls will go down in history, yet surely history has been made for I cannot recall having heard where the two women’s services [the ATS and the WAAF] have worked in such close co-operation. Many thought it impossible, but the age of miracles is not past, and women do not have their claws out all the time.

  The modern world had caught up with the Priory: ‘There were long aerials stretching for hundreds of yards in the direction of Libya and Egypt,’ wrote Skillen. There was also a growing card index, slightly less innovative, though no less effective. But tension had begun to boil in Hut 6 of Bletchley Park over the quality of the material being sent from Chicksands. A memo in the archives from August 1940 points up ‘the new and relatively inexperienced Air Force station at Chicksands’, going on to underline acidly:

  We have compared the actual decoded messages taken both by Chatham and Chicksands on the same day and we find that Chicksands made in all from two to three times the number of errors made by Chatham . . . Moreover, the more coarsely graduated dials used on the Chicksands sets impose an additional handicap on their operators, making it difficult for them to distinguish between different groups, and also making them more liable to imagine different groups when in fact only one is concerned.

  It wasn’t just a matter of airwaves filled with different code groups from multiple branches of the German war machine. Apparently small matters such as the dials were actually crucial, for various reasons. For instance, on the popular American HRO receivers, which came to be used throughout the Y Service, the dials were intricately and exquisitely engineered along with the radio’s other complex components – a labyrinth of ‘spring-loaded split-gears’ and other tiny parts. The result of this was pinpoint dial accuracy, especially vital if an operator had subsequently to find the same frequencies again. And it went beyond a merely technical issue. The work was already demanding enough: in an already pressurised atmosphere, the damage to morale caused by having to work with equipment that was not up to the job could have been crushing.

  A little later, Group Captain John Shepherd, who had just returned from Africa suffering from yellow fever, was told that he had inherited command of Chicksands. The prospect was painted for him in bright colours; he was told by a friend at the Air Ministry: ‘It’s a diverting job with 2,000 acres of shooting.’ Chicksands monitored Luftwaffe signals from north Africa and much of Europe and, a little later, the Russian front; it also transmitted messages – disguised in the form of sonnets or even simple greetings – to Allied secret agents working in France. So the complexity of its work could not be underestimated.

  But Captain Shepherd wasn’t told of a vast reorganisation which was turning the place upside down and creating tremendous ill will. As he was to recall:

  Colin [his friend] had not told me that an embryo operation there already had to be expanded something like ten times by the day before yesterday . . . we built a camp for airmen – and airwomen – and a technical site to replace the spooky old Priory, and we trained a thousand or so wireless operators to provide Bletchley with some of the enormous mass of German Air Force high-grade ciphers.6

  One did not have to have supernatural foresight to anticipate that there might be personnel problems. A number of the WAAF recruits trained and sent to Chicksands were as young as seventeen; many had never before lived away from home, and the initial conditions were at best primitive. ‘At first they had to share billeting, ablution and latrine arrangements with the men until two self-contained and separate living camps were constructed,’ wrote Hugh Skillen.

  Among all staff, the paramount need for accuracy – whatever the state of the Chicksands equipment, or indeed the state of morale – was not some matter of abstract perfectionism; lives depended upon it. As Skillen wrote:

  Even far removed from the battlefield, many suffered from stress because of the exacting and precise nature of their duties. While an Intelligence Officer in the field might have a recurring nightmare that he had missed an enemy tank strength – a routine report of prime value to the Allied commander . . . the wireless operator suffered from nightmares that he had slept in, had been late reporting for duty, or had missed his rendezvous with his opposite number on the Morse key on the enemy side . . .7

  But equally, these nightmares were not in vain. In May 1941, the staff of Chicksands played a key role in the symbolically momentous sinking of the German battleship Bismarck. After a lengthy cat-and-mouse pursuit in the freezing waters of the Atlantic, the ship’s captain, Admiral Lutjens, broke radio silence on the morning of 25 May. It was the listeners at RAF Chicksands who picked up this crucial transmission. And it was from this that, ultimately, it became possible to deduce in which direction the vessel was heading. The desperate pursuit continued, and the Bismarck once or twice managed to swerve past the British vessels. But by the morning of 27 May, the British – who, after the Chicksands transmission, had never quite lost the battleship’s position – closed in and delivered the final blow.

  RAF Chicksands is not alone in being able to claim credit; for according to wireless veteran Peter Budd, whose own war consisted of tracking Japanese submarine
s, the young women based in the station at Scarborough were also instrumental in running the great vessel down, and indeed, might have got there before everyone else, were it not – avers Peter Budd – for blunders made higher up with the information that they had provided.

  ‘They had Bismarck on radar. They knew exactly where she was, they were shadowing her,’ Mr Budd says. ‘But then they’d lost her. No one knew where she was. Then the admiral in charge of the Bismarck broke radio silence for an hour to send messages back to Berlin and everywhere. Can you imagine those operators in Scarborough – fifty of them who normally get just seconds to hear any kind of message from a German vessel – hear someone transmitting plain language? All the direction finding stations around the Atlantic – Britain, Iceland, Newfoundland, Ascension Island, west Africa . . . attained perfect positions.

  ‘Scarborough sent this information to the Admiralty, the Admiralty sent it to the Commander in Chief on HMS Anderson Home Fleet. The position was apparently given to an RN’s navigating officer – and then he transposed it on the wrong chart, 200 miles north of where it was. The whole home fleet turned around and steamed away from the Bismarck. I’ve always wanted to know what happened to that bloke. The most perfect fix that had ever been given to anyone.’ Not that anyone at the Scarborough base could have known. In contrast to Chicksands, life there continued as amiably and high-spiritedly as it had done before.

  Some miles away, the listening station of Beaumanor, part of the War Office Y Service, was developing its own distinct character as a community. ‘Much of this must have stemmed from the isolation brought about by the inability to talk about their work, even to spouses or close relatives,’ recalled veteran Philip Blenkinsop. ‘It is also apparent that the mixture of social backgrounds contributed to the atmosphere of the place. Equally clear,’ he added tartly, ‘is that the quality of intellect was considerably above that of a conventional military unit . . . largely because of the need for technical skills.’

  ‘The personnel [to begin with] were male civilians,’ wrote Hugh Skillen, ‘radio operators recruited from the Royal Navy, the Merchant Navy and the Post Office . . . If he possessed the necessary skills, [an operator] would be rewarded at the rate of 80/- per week . . . and then by annual increments to 96/- as an Experimental Wireless Assistant.’

  Because of the War Office designation, Beaumanor became referred to as War Office Y Group or – in one of those acronyms so beloved by the military – WOYG. The staff knew themselves as ‘Woygites’. ‘Other terms in common use at the time,’ recalled Blenkinsop, ‘included “Beaumaniacs” and “Manor Beaus” for some of the more dashing male members.’

  There were three types of Woygites. First there was the Army. Then there were the ‘Hard-Cores’, or Experimental Wireless Assistants, dressed in civilian clothes – despite being part of the forces – and billeted in and around the local villages. A few single operators found accommodation in the old manor itself.

  Finally, as the establishment grew, ATS girls were drafted in and billeted en masse in several large houses around the area. Two such young ladies were Mrs Gladys Earle and her sister Hazel Webbe, who received their initial ATS training in 1940 in the Butlins Ocean Hotel in Sussex. They were both asked by the authorities if they had ever seen a typewriter. When both answered in the affirmative, they were told that this made them ‘born teleprinter operators’. The first time they actually clapped eyes on such a thing was at the next stage of training in Chatham.

  Judging by the more exuberant magazines and newsletters that they managed to put out, this mix of people proved from the start to be both lively and cheerfully cynical. Like their intellectual counterparts at Bletchley Park, the team at Beaumanor had a music society, staged their own concerts, and even had their own version of the Proms. And again like Bletchley, the manor house found an alternative use on a regular basis as a ballroom dancing venue.

  But all this was vital, says Beaumanor wireless veteran Chris Barnes (himself a civilian there), because otherwise the intense nature of the work could have had a corrosive effect: ‘You had to relax – you had to shut it off completely.’ First of all, this meant going straight home to bed after a shift to ensure proper sleep. The rest of the time, it was very important to get involved socially.

  ‘The other activities that you did formed an important part of contrasting with the work,’ Mr Barnes says. ‘There was a rambling club. There was a cycling club. There was music appreciation, which definitely introduced me to classical music.’ The latter society was run by musician Harry Dodd, himself a ‘Woygite’, and Mr Barnes has fond memories of both Dodd and his music appreciation group. There were ‘not very many members, probably only about 20, but that included a number of lifelong friends that I made.’ Each meeting would start off ‘with a chap introducing the piece’ – the music that they were to listen to and discuss at that session – then ‘playing it on an old record.’ Dodd contributed an article to the Beaumanor magazine in which he gave a delightful potted history of the orchestra. ‘Several of the leading British symphony orchestras pay frequent visits to Leicester,’ he advised, ‘and a number of Woygites often take the opportunity of hearing a fine orchestra “in the flesh”, an experience which the broadcast concert or the gramophone recital, however enjoyable, can never replace . . .’

  As Chris Barnes explains, ‘It was culture, and we needed it.’

  In addition to music, there was dancing: unlike Bletchley Park, which seemed to be teeming with ballroom experts, the Beaumanor crew were unskilled enthusiasts. To this end, dancing classes were arranged, and taken by a staff member happy to be known as ‘Victor Silvester’ Carrington. ‘The social life was very important,’ says Mr Barnes. ‘Without it, the intensity and monotony would have got us all down.’

  Unlike the more cerebral Bletchley codebreakers, the Beaumanor community was also extremely sporty. Active football, hockey and rugby teams were formed almost immediately. And, as Philip Blenkinsop noted after a conversation with a former ATS girl there, ‘life was more Radio One than Radio Three . . . More informal entertainment seems to have centred around The Pear Tree, The Curzon Arms and other local hostelries . . . A major product of Beaumanor in those days was gossip . . . Liaisons, both innocent and otherwise, undoubtedly took place and the wives of (wireless operators), often living far away and not knowing the nature of their husbands’ work, must have felt grounds for concern.’

  As (then) Corporal Harold W. Everett of the Intelligence Corps recalled, there were also moments of high comedy. All the wireless work, he observed, was ‘housed in a very big country mansion and was as closely guarded as any present-day atomic weapons research establishment’. As a result, the local people, from Leicester and the surrounding tiny villages, would sometimes speculate fruitlessly on the nature of the work being carried out there. One line of thought – prompted by the forest of tall radio aerials – was that each and every aerial was directly connected to a British secret agent, and it was from Beaumanor that these brave spies were receiving their instructions. Another local rumour heard by Everett was that the house was being used as Rudolf Hess’s prison and interrogation centre and that he was tortured for information there ‘on a daily basis’. ‘I doubt between all of us, we should even have got a toenail each,’ reflected Everett on this idea.

  The secrecy was extended, magnificently, to the most inconspicuous of tradesmen; on one occasion, the large old house, with its smoky, spluttering fires, urgently required the services of a chimney sweep; and a local gnarled old figure duly presented himself at the gates. It fell to Everett to shadow the man as he carried out his tasks. There was a terror that, left alone in a map room or operations room, the sweep might see things that he was not permitted to see; only with Everett there could he be safely kept from a temptation to nose around.8

  Everett clearly found this episode very amusing, although with a moment’s reflection, we might wonder if the military paranoia was actually quite justified. For the presence of
the military, together with all the aerials, would indeed have made Beaumanor an intriguing prospect for a spy.

  In a wider sense, though, we might only refer back to the spy fictions of William le Queux (or the ingenious detective stories of G.K. Chesterton) to find the source of the notion that the man you were least likely to notice – chimney sweep, milkman, postman – would be exactly the figure for such an agent to disguise himself as. In any event, as Everett noted, after being tailed all over the house and then escorted to the gates, the chimney sweep ‘waved me goodbye and hurried off no doubt to the local pub to share the joke with his cronies. But no matter,’ he concluded wrily, ‘Britain had survived another critical test. Like a nun’s habit, the sheets remained unlifted.’

  In contrast, when other figures – superior personnel and VIPs – paid visits to Beaumanor, the panic was less about security than about tidying the place; filing papers and scooping up the tea things, which were frequently left lying about as if in some students’ common room. But for all the apparent chaos, the seriousness of the institution was never compromised. Indeed, perhaps surprisingly, the actual conditions in which the operators worked were to become the source of union trouble. Tea things left lying around were one matter: but other forms of carelessness could make life distinctly uncomfortable.

  ‘The union made representations about conditions in the huts,’ says Chris Barnes. As at Bletchley Park, much work at Beaumanor was carried out in plain wooden huts in the grounds, which were apt to be stuffy in the summer and freezing in the winter. ‘Those huts were pretty terrible sometimes. The ventilation was very poor. There was inadequate heating. And in those days, everybody smoked and that made ventilation dodgy. But I suppose that as a result of those union representations, things were improved.’