The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  Everett and his colleagues were then transferred to another ship for the next leg of their increasingly exotic journey:

  We had no duties, the weather was glorious and the sea calm. I remember lounging in a chair on the foredeck in the hot sunshine reading a book I had found on board and watching the flying fishes. One day we were hit by a tropical storm – lightning of an intensity I had never seen before. Some chaps stripped off and enjoyed a refreshing shower in the cascading rain.

  They arrived at the Gold Coast, where ‘we were reminded that the Empire “on which the sun never set” was still a reality, as demonstrated by the sight of Government House with the Union Flag waving proudly from a flagstaff’. The voyage continued around the west coast of Africa, until finally it was time for a spell on a flying boat, which took Everett and his colleagues over the ‘dark green impenetrable mass’ of the jungle, a sight that he found ‘unutterably sinister’.4 By the time he arrived in Egypt, this quick-witted, good-humoured young Englishman was almost a citizen of the world.

  Another young man who had his eyes opened to a hitherto unsuspected world during a voyage through the Mediterranean was eighteen-year-old Victor Newman, who hailed from Weybridge in Surrey. After Mr Newman’s months of training in the arts of interception, he was at last to set sail with twenty or so of his squad on board HMS Gambia. This voyage to the Far East took in pit stops that he remembers with almost lurid clarity even now.

  ‘We stopped off very briefly in Gibraltar, and then Alexandria. We only had about five hours ashore in Alexandria.’ This was enough time to establish the sort of English presence – young men in a tight-knit group – that is greeted with wariness by so many Mediterranean bar owners even today. ‘There were five of us in a gaggle, and we walked around the place, and then we realised we had to get back to the docks so we got this horse-drawn buggy and it took us down to the docks. But we didn’t have any money. A terrible argument ensued with the driver when we told him we didn’t have any money. The sergeant at the gate had to get involved.’

  Nor did the tale end happily. ‘The driver didn’t get any money,’ says Mr Newman, with a shade of remorse in his voice.

  ‘Then we sailed through the Suez Canal,’ he continues. ‘We sailed the Red Sea and for some reason, we hove to for a while there. We were told then that we could go swimming if we wanted, so we did – swimming in the Red Sea!’

  Meanwhile, a bus was sent to pick up Harold Everett and his fellow operatives from a transit camp on their arrival in Cairo. It took them to MI8 HQ in Heliopolis. Everett had been travelling for weeks. But, as he wrote, ‘I was not destined to stay there very long. Many journeys lay ahead of me in many countries. My odyssey had really only just begun.’

  Throughout the late autumn of 1941, the drums of approaching battle were sounding ever louder in Malaya and the Far East. The British colony of the Malayan peninsula held much that the Japanese needed: not merely was it in an excellent strategic position, it was also a land rich in rubber and metals – Japan of course lacked so many vital resources of its own. In order to fight a war successfully, to have a land such as Malaya within its grasp would have been invaluable.

  According to various accounts, only a very few within the British ranks understood exactly the nature of the threat to Malaya and Singapore; and these few were countered by stubborn colonial diehards who waved away any suggestion of imminent danger. Nor, from the wireless interception point of view, was there any concrete clue as to the enemy’s intentions. Certainly the listening station and Special Liaison Unit in Singapore were tracking messages to do with an ever more restless Japanese navy, while contending with ever-shifting ciphers. But even a decrypted message cannot always convey clarity. In some cases, the Japanese navy disguised the meaning of their communications by assigning certain operations code words from weather reports. Thus if a cryptographer were to receive a naval message that apparently said simply ‘Westerly winds, rain’, they could not be expected to guess that ‘winds’ and ‘rain’ were special terms used to denote the British, and Japanese intentions towards them.

  For a young woman hailing from a quietly prosperous English provincial town like Norwich, Singapore was not an easy posting. Even without the looming catastrophe to come, this part of the world offered a great many challenges. Joan Dinwoodie had signed up for the Wrens and undergone the usual wireless telegraphy course, as well as lessons in rudimentary Japanese. Then came the voyage, which was punctuated by more than one fraught episode. ‘I shared a cabin with three other girls,’ she recalled. ‘A few days after leaving, we were attacked by a Focke Wolf aircraft. Expecting to be sunk, two of us rushed back to our cabin and ate a whole box of Black Magic chocolates, as they were so hard to get.’

  Then there was the station at Singapore itself:

  The working conditions . . . were dreadful. We worked in four hour watches in wooden huts with no windows and very little ventilation. It was extremely hot and humid and the perspiration ran down our faces, arms, bodies and into our shoes. Personnel from all three services worked together gathering and intercepting Japanese naval signals, coded and plain language signals and passing them on to Bletchley Park . . . One of the thunderstorms that were a regular afternoon feature blew four of the wireless sets and killed two of the Chinese coolies. After this we were double banked with experienced operators and had to adjust to Morse as the Japanese sent it.

  It had to be admitted, though, that life was not unremittingly grim; such colonies held out a few exotic consolations. ‘Although we were working very hard in difficult conditions and with different watches we still managed to have a very full social life,’ remembered Mrs Dinwoodie. ‘We visited the hotels – namely the Adelphi, the Rex and of course Raffles for dancing and dining. We visited rubber estates, toured [the city of] Johore Bahru, attended a Tamil wedding, and the Tiger Balm Botanical Gardens.’ These, it must be reiterated, were experiences that would never before have been open to young women from such a background; in years past, only the very rich would have been able to tour and take their leisure in this way. Joan Dinwoodie was among the very first women from a more staid middle-class background to see such things.

  We also swam, played tennis and sailed whenever possible. We also went to the cinema and some of the films we saw included, ‘First Love’, ‘Edison the Man’. During this time I met a Royal Air Force pilot named Rich and we started spending a great deal of our free time together. On one of our outings, on the 4th December 1941 we visited King Albert Park where Rich proposed to me.5

  Tragically, the change in the air could already be sensed. Even before 7 December – the day when Japan launched the lightning, murderous assault on Pearl Harbor – everyone from the Wrens to the commanders was almost subliminally aware of a gathering feeling of oppression and menace. As Joan Dinwoodie remembered:

  The Japanese air raids were now becoming more frequent and it became very obvious that as we were the only intercept station in the far east that the authorities could not risk us being captured so we would soon have to leave. At first it was suggested that we would be sent to Australia but this changed and we were told that we would be going to Colombo in Sri Lanka (Ceylon).

  Yet when Japan struck Pearl Harbor, it did so with an aggression the breadth of which had scarcely been imagined. The American fleet was almost completely destroyed. There had also been attacks on other US Pacific strongholds. And throughout Malaya and in Singapore, Japanese air raids had begun to increase in both frequency and ferocity.

  In late December the decision was finally taken to remove the Far East Combined Bureau from Singapore; as Joan Dinwoodie said, it was shifted to Colombo in Ceylon. Memos in the archives reveal that there had been a great deal of heated debate, illuminating both the limits of communications technology and the extent to which certain aspects of the war were a matter of discussion, and indeed of miniature power struggles. Not only were the three services constantly jostling for primacy, there were also cliques within cliques in
intelligence; the wishes of Bletchley Park operatives, for instance, straining against those of military intelligence. Even with Japanese fighters strafing Singapore, and the countdown to the invasion ticking by, there had been quarrels about what to do with the wireless interception services, and where best to send them.

  ‘It was clear,’ states one document for the attention of Bletchley Park’s deputy director, Nigel de Grey, ‘that following the outbreak of war with the Japanese, the Sigint party at Singapore would have to evacuate somewhere . . . [some] thought Australia would provide better facilities . . . An emergency meeting of the “Y” committee was called in London and the question of Melbourne was raised.’ Also on the table was the possibility of relocating to India, to join up with Captain Marr-Johnson’s Y operation. And what of Kenya, and the out-station site at Kilindini in Mombasa?

  Australia continued to seem the most attractive option; but this idea was stymied by the certainty that ‘communications between Australia and the UK were likely to go at any time and it would not be possible to get any raw material either “to” or “from” Australia.’ Meanwhile, the most obvious drawback of Ceylon, as understood by senior figures such as Nigel de Grey and Alastair Denniston, was that it might not prove safe. The idea of east Africa was mooted yet further, with discussions about the transportation of technical coding material, such as the Hollerith machines – card-operated behemoths ordinarily used for simple accounting and calculations which had a use in terms of processing encoded letters. But time ran out and the Singapore staff were posted – in the nick of time – to the naval base just south of Colombo known as HMS Anderson.

  Most of the staff evacuated from Singapore immediately; a few stayed behind in order to ‘assist Army and Special Air Intelligence’. At the same time, Bletchley Park’s special liaison contingent also left: among them was Arthur Cooper, the brother of senior Bletchley codebreaker Josh Cooper. The departure of such personnel from Singapore was vital on two levels: to keep the flow of decrypts moving smoothly; and to prevent such people falling into the hands of the enemy. If interrogated, they would have a wealth of secret information to disclose under torture. As one veteran has already noted, capture in these circumstances would have meant the life of a wireless operator would no longer be worth living; and death would be both terrible and slow.

  There followed weeks of ferocious fighting. On 7 February, General Percival announced that Singapore would stand to the last man, as the Japanese guns were turned on the city. Come 15 February, Singapore surrendered and over 60,000 soldiers were taken prisoner.

  To this day, the fall of Singapore is an episode of Second World War history that causes many to shake their heads. We were ‘looking the wrong way’; the disgrace that was brought upon the British was almighty; and the suffering caused to so many thousands of soldiers by their Japanese captors still evokes horror.

  Yet amid the carnage, the Y Service and the codebreakers, removed to Colombo, returned to work with remarkable speed; the ferocity of the Japanese onslaught appeared to have the effect of stimulating fresh, successful efforts to pierce the Japanese codes. The Far East Combined Bureau massed itself a little outside Colombo; its staff now included thirty-eight Wrens trained in Japanese wireless transmission. By March, the Bureau had managed to intercept and unscramble more Japanese signals, and its efforts were shared this time with the Americans.

  And as time went on, it became apparent that as a posting, there were many worse places than HMS Anderson to be sent; indeed, a number of the young people who sailed halfway across the world to reach those shores found instantly that there was something quite enchanting about them. This was especially the case in an age of rationing.

  ‘HMS Anderson was well off the road,’ says Victor Newman, who arrived in Colombo some time after Singapore’s fall having beforehand rarely left his native Weybridge. ‘Every day, there was a lorry called the Liberty Boat that would take people down into Colombo. But rather than going into town, I used to enjoy going to a spot called Mount Lavinia. It was a place where you could go swimming.

  ‘You would see local ladies there,’ Mr Newman continues, with a note of wistfulness. ‘They would have baskets on their heads that were full of pineapples. Imagine having all that delicious pineapple juice running down your face . . . and then washing it off with a swim. It was a beautiful spot.’

  There was also the eye-popping nature of the local wildlife. On the night train from the harbour at Trinacomalee, says Mr Newman, ‘I saw fireflies out the window. Millions upon millions of fireflies. I had never seen anything like that before.’

  Unlike many of the Wrens who were about to arrive, Mr Newman was not keen on the lively Colombo nightlife – the local fauna once again being part of the reason: ‘You only went to the cinema in Colombo if you didn’t mind getting insect bites. After the film, you’d get up and find the underside of your legs had bites all over.’ As for other exotic sightings, ‘There was the occasional snake – I saw one on a football pitch. Then there was a large reptile like an iguana one day, which some of the locals were chasing – presumably,’ he adds with a laugh, ‘to eat it.’

  Mr Newman was also – given his technical position as a wireless interceptor – suspicious of being made to take part in any form of barracks-confined military activity. ‘HMS Anderson was quite a big station – two huts on the side, canteen and the mess. They brought in a small squad of marines – and this resulted in paper raids, Sunday divisions. Our work took precedence over parades. And we could sometimes bunk off them too. They were building a new mess hall at that time and when parades came round, some of us could go in there and hide ourselves. That worked until one Sunday when we were hiding in these cupboards and got caught. We weren’t allowed to go into town for a week after that. Not,’ he adds, ‘that that was any great hardship.’

  And while the Wrens in Colombo lived in rather less regimented accommodation, the men of HMS Anderson were very much enclosed within barracks. ‘Accommodation was camp beds, with mosquito nets over them. We had the blankets that we had been issued with but quite often you didn’t need them at all. When you were working, you wore shorts and short-sleeved shirts. And the mosquitoes were not a worry because down that end of the country, they were not malaria carrying. More uncomfortable for the RAF, who had to wear long-sleeved shirts and long trousers.’

  Victor Newman – who, just weeks beforehand, had been working in the Home Counties countryside, in a tiny office attached to an oil-seed mill – took to his new life of colour and intensity with a readiness that older people might not have been able to match. And he was by no means alone. It would not be too long before fresh female recruits were to discover that, alongside the gruelling work, there was something magical about this part of the world that they might otherwise never have seen.

  8 Feuds, Farce and Panic

  The secret listeners were young, and very often they were women. But back in Britain, an honourable role was carved out for middle-aged and older men too – without any intended disrespect, a sort of Dad’s Army branch of the Y Services, as Ted Mitchell recalls.

  Mr Mitchell’s father was sought out for his radio skills in the early stages of the war. Slightly too old to fight with the regulars, he none the less had a huge amount to contribute, and he did so in circumstances that were occasionally very funny and rather surreal.

  ‘As a teenager during the Great War,’ says Mr Mitchell now of his father, ‘he went straight from school to Leith Wireless College. After graduation, he joined Marconi as a Wireless Operator and thereafter was assigned to a series of merchant ships during and after the war – torpedoed once!

  ‘He left the service on marriage in 1926 to embark on a career in the fledgling electrical sector.’ Like everyone from Richard Gambier-Parry to Ray Fautley, Mitchell senior ploughed himself into what would prove to be one of the most crucial of the new industries. And like those others, he clearly had an abiding love and fascination for what he did. As Voluntary Interceptor Ray
Fautley has wisely observed, for those who were fortunate enough to pursue radio and make a living from it, ‘it hardly felt like work.’

  ‘With the looming prospect of another war,’ says Mr Mitchell, ‘[my father] volunteered initially with the Merchant Navy Reserve which led to his joining the Voluntary Interceptors.’ Indeed, among his father’s papers is a letter from Lord Sandwich, chief of the Radio Security Service, welcoming him into the fold with words of encouragement and warning:

  Valuable results have already been achieved by Voluntary Interceptors. And the very nature of our work must mean that in many cases, watch may be maintained for weeks without apparent result. Do not let this discourage you; the fact that there has been no illicit transmission does not mean that there will not be and we must be ready and watching to catch it when it happens. Finally, I cannot impress too strongly upon you the need for silence and discretion. Great care is taken in the selection of Voluntary Interceptors and equal care should be taken by them to ensure that this trust is not abused.

  But that was only the beginning. A little later on, Mitchell senior found himself being drafted into rather more hands-on activities. ‘My father was called up to full-time duties with the Radio Security Service,’ says Mr Mitchell. ‘He was provided with an Army uniform badged as Royal Signals and he was sent to Penzance, Cornwall. There he was billeted in a guest house with two similar recruits, all of whom would be stationed at the newly built receiver at St Erth. There they met up with all the other operators, who were aged between forty and seventy plus.’