The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  Mitchell senior was introduced to this new life by means of another Radio Security Service letter, which read: ‘For reasons of security and discipline, personnel who are employed by RSS will be enlisted as serving soldiers.’ But, it added, a ‘special form of enlistment is used whereby the soldier is bound only to serve in RSS. Should his engagement in RSS be terminated, he becomes automatically entitled to a free discharge from the Army and return to civilian life.’

  ‘Definite discipline’ was a given; and yet, as the letter intriguingly added, ‘the whole organisation is run in accordance with modern ideas which are very different from traditional notions of Army discipline.’

  Perhaps so; the area of Cornwall to which Mitchell was being sent was remote – far from parade grounds – and St Erth was the highest point. It had fine strategic value, and these gentlemen of a certain age were doing vital work. ‘They were organised into teams working in shifts covering twenty-four hours, monitoring German signals from occupied France as well as from U-boats in the eastern Atlantic,’ says Mr Mitchell.

  Of course, having such a ‘phantom’ company of soldiers did result in strange encounters – embarrassing at the time but amusing in retrospect. On one occasion they met some regular Royal Signals personnel at a pub and had to be rather evasive in response to queries – so much so that the regular soldiers officially reported that they had met suspected spies masquerading in Army uniform.

  ‘On another occasion, the Army Command suddenly heard of the existence of this squad of Royal Signals which apparently had no documentation. Command therefore sent a drill sergeant to Cornwall to discover more,’ says Mr Mitchell. The notion of ‘modern ideas of discipline’ was pushed to one side as the fearsome sergeant caught up with this incongruous and mature platoon. ‘The drill sergeant planned to start by giving them all a good dose of PT but when he saw them all lined up, he was aghast and decided to substitute this with a walk instead.’

  Even that was to little avail. ‘During this “walk”,’ continues Mr Mitchell, ‘several of the men collapsed and had to be revived with cups of tea from local householders. The drill sergeant heard those householders muttering things like: “Poor old men – it’s dreadful that they have to put them in the Army at their age.”’

  At their age, it must have been flattering nonetheless to be regarded as skilled operators. And the Radio Security Service was most insistent on the precise levels of those skills. To make Grade A – and thus be in line for the sum of £7 a week – you had to have a ‘speed of 23 words per minute’ when transcribing signals, ‘as well as an ability to read weak signals through jamming and a general aptitude for wireless interception work.’ Incidentally, if £7 a week now sounds an absurdly paltry amount, it might be worth bearing in mind that many of the younger codebreakers at Bletchley Park – flat out, day and night, in the intricacies of Enigma – were often on £4 a week. From this we might gather that wireless interceptors were appreciated.

  Even on Grade C – ‘18 words per minute or less where the applicant shows definite promise and aptitude for wireless interception work’ – the operator could expect to make £5 a week. For the older recruits, such as Mr Mitchell’s father, this might not have seemed much, but for some of the younger men, it was quite a sum.

  Grading was carried out after an exam – ‘practical and oral’. Even the Grade C test was tough; if they wanted to make Grade A, the wireless operators were required to take down ‘69 groups of 5 letter cypher in three minutes making not more than 8 mistakes’. The reward, other than the money, was the prospect of cosy quarters – ‘they will consist of well-built brick huts with proper heating, etc’ stated an RSS memo, adding: ‘Those huts although built for 40 men will be used to accommodate only 20. Each hut will be partitioned into 10 divisions . . . Each division . . . will accommodate two men with a view to providing a degree of privacy.’

  Compared to the bustling conditions encountered by ordinary soldiers, these premises have a touch of luxury about them. But in other ways, the Radio Security Service was very far from a cushy number. Given the almost preternatural concentration that the job required, a comfortable bed after eight hours’ listening and noting weak signals throughout a black night was hardly too much to ask.

  In wider terms, the organisation was deemed such a success that it became, in 1941, the subject of a jealous government departmental tug of love: which part of Whitehall should take control of it? The Radio Security Service was subsumed into MI6 that year, and came under the control of Lieutenant-Colonel E.L. Maltby (with the ever-genial Brigadier Gambier-Parry taking a wider overview of all branches of the Y Service). Not everyone was thrilled. In the upheaval, Captain Trevor-Roper’s old boss Walter Gill was demoted and Trevor-Roper’s own job was recalibrated. According to Richard Davenport-Hines, editor of Trevor-Roper’s wartime diaries, he was now chief of the intelligence sub-section to be known as the Radio Analysis Bureau. He had new bosses: Felix Cowgill, head of the MI6 counter-espionage unit, and MI6’s deputy, Valentine Vivian. For both of these men, Trevor-Roper apparently felt ‘mutinous contempt’. His wider opinion of the secret services was extremely low, and his periodic spasms of rage would soon find creative outlet in some venomously furious private poetry.

  Despite the inability of various parties in MI6 and MI5 to contain their mutual disdain, the wireless operation was working, and giving Bletchley Park invaluable material. In terms of interception, the RSS’s main radio masts were now to be found at Hanslope Park, not far from Bletchley Park. This allowed the RSS to monitor the Abwehr around the clock, which was later to give piercing insights into German operations not merely in Europe and the Mediterranean but also around the world. It has been estimated that half the staff of the RSS had been huge radio enthusiasts in their civilian lives. Every hobby has its practical uses in the end.

  Elsewhere, despite the nerve-jangling nature of the work, life at Beaumanor Hall was settling down into a pattern of quirks and small eccentricities that mirrored the anarchy of Bletchley Park. Again, this seemed partly to do with the volatile mix of civilians and military personnel (the latter chiefly in the form of ATS girls). The staff magazine, for instance – assembled by committee and laid out with surprising skill with plenty of illustrations – ran, almost from the start, regular ‘gossip’ items concerning the latest parties and romances. There were limerick competitions, in which readers were invited to complete the following from opening lines such as ‘A wheezy young lady of Rye . . .’, ‘The curious habits of men . . .’ or ‘A frivolous filly of Bicester. . .’, the whole being accompanied by little dustings of mildly saucy, lightly racist jokes:

  An ARP warden spotting a light showing through a crack in the door, knocked and said to the woman inside: ‘I have just seen a chink coming through your door.’ The woman exclaimed: ‘The *******! He told me he was a Polish airman!’

  Those who had been transferred from RAF Chicksands to Beaumanor were addressed with an especially lively editorial: ‘We say farewell CHICKSANDS and HOLD TIGHT Leicester! Pigs, billets, free buses, wonderful canteen, plenty of smokes? Here, have all . . . we may, we hope, look forward to happier, freer and smokier days!’

  There were other, less openly discussed concerns, such as romance. Many cartoons in the Beaumanor staff magazine involve Wrens and soldiers, with the soldiers apparently the focus of all the Wrens’ attentions. Then there was the equally cartoon-like gossip around the establishment. Repeated with delight was the instance of a young female wireless operator who had been celebrating her twenty-second birthday. A male colleague told her that if he had known what the day was, he would have taken her out ‘on the razzle’. She replied: ‘I didn’t know you had a razzle.’

  The magazine gleefully noted elsewhere that one of the young female ‘runners’ – the messengers – reported being ‘chased by a small man while on Night Duty’. ‘We have long felt,’ commented the magazine, ‘that there is still too much wishful thinking in the country.’

  The mak
e-up of the place, says Beaumanor veteran Chris Barnes, was ‘ATS women, civilian men. And I suppose there were occasional get-togethers in the canteen, and so on. But a number of people I know who formed lasting partnerships there are very small indeed. We didn’t work in the same huts, by the way, men and women worked in quite different huts.’ Although less a separation by gender than one of ATS (military) and civilian, perhaps this explains why, according to Mr Barnes’s observations, there was a great deal less romance than one might have expected. ‘Interestingly, I don’t remember very many people getting married,’ he continues. ‘There weren’t very many romances. In the staff magazines, you come across some, but those entries are mainly written by women.’

  Beaumanor sometimes received distinguished visitors, from important politicians to top brass. Wren Ollie Pearce noted such special guests in a few sardonic lines of verse – as ever, these fragments illustrate conditions much more colourfully than their writers ever intended:

  I glance up as some strangers enter

  And hear a voice proclaim ‘Nerve Centre’

  With vacant stares they gaze about

  In wonderment, without a doubt

  Regarding me as people do

  Uncommon species at a zoo.

  A little later, a fresh influx of female recruits prompted Pearce to new heights of lyricism:

  Due to the recent innovation

  Of female scribes now at our station

  Life’s taken on a different hue

  And interest has been born anew.

  The effect of female colleagues on the menfolk was described thus:

  Vocabularies have grown quite small

  Some words are never heard at all! . . .

  In answer to ‘How does she shape?’

  Some fellow, grinning like an ape

  Will wave his two hands in the air

  Describing curves beyond compare . . .

  There was little time for such cheerful sexism in other listening establishments, chiefly because women had a more dominant role. Throughout the many coastal listening stations, ever greater numbers of Wrens were being trained. But this is not to say that life by the sea was smooth-going; rather, as at Chicksands, the intensity of the work – and the tight shift system – led to outbreaks of conflict. Elizabeth Mashall wrote:

  Watchkeeping was one area where discipline was always maintained. Once a watchlist had been posted, changes could not be made except for sickness or going on leave – and in the latter case, only if there were enough operators to cover the period without causing undue strain.

  I had to postpone my own leave once or twice because of this but there were two very traumatic incidents when I delayed the leave of two others. Neither of these incidents could have been foreseen, but that did not prevent the intense resentment that followed as a result. The first was at North Foreland when, to cover watches, I delayed the leave of a Wren for a few days. Her husband, who had been in England, was unexpectedly and at very short notice posted overseas and she missed seeing him before he went. The other incident . . . was really very tragic as when a Wren arrived a few days later than was originally intended, and was greeted with the news that her airforce husband had been killed the previous night.1

  Mistakes were made too; how could they not be? There was often an inherent ambiguity in the very nature of call signs and messages – not just the heavily encoded material, but also in even the low-level code words used by pilots when communicating over the radio – and those who were listening could not always be expected to interpret correctly what they heard. The consequences of each and every failure, though, were tragic; and the authorities tried to keep up the pressure on the listening stations to achieve 100 per cent accuracy. In May 1942, Arthur Bonsall, who had done so much to establish the station at RAF Cheadle, was looking into a night of losses. During a Lancaster bomber raid on Augsburg, German fighter pilots had materialised without warning and shot four of the planes down. Was this because of faulty intelligence? And could the system be tightened up? ‘Our aim is to discover . . . whether we can augment in any way the information we pass to RAF Kingsdown,’ wrote Bonsall, ‘so that in the future even more operational intelligence can be extracted by them from the R/T intercepts.’

  Bomber Command claimed that the Kingsdown listeners ‘were not able to supply them with details of where the bombers were intercepted and by whom’. ‘It is not suggested that Kingsdown missed an obvious tie-up,’ the memo continued. ‘The intercepts in question were taken by Beachy Head and were very restrained.’ But somewhere along the line, the German fighters had been detected by their messages, and yet two and two had not been added together when it came to their targets. ‘This instance does tend to show that the art of correctly melding relevant intercepts is by no means an elementary one.’

  It was not a blame game; nonetheless, the pressure under which the wireless interceptors operated was perhaps occasionally greater than that endured by the Bletchley codebreakers. The results of their work were immediate and concrete: unlike the mathematical abstraction of cracking a cipher, the women and men in headsets, taking down those messages, were also in some cases hearing a moment-by-moment commentary – real, live pilots’ voices, not staccato dots and dashes – on the deadly manoeuvres being executed in distant skies. The lives of Lancaster crews were often in their hands.

  The conflict was of course every bit as grave in the Middle East; but those posted to Cairo continued to find – even as Rommel and his forces made their seemingly unstoppable progress east – that the city had its own curiously detached atmosphere. Harold Everett was now ‘attached to one of those mysterious units whose function was to provide information to HQ about enemy communications and to provide replacements for the intercept units in the desert’. They were, Everett wrote, ‘a special wireless group and covered everything from Panzer Armee Afrika to – it was said – Balkan Tramways’.

  Everett was conscious of being the new boy; also there when he arrived were veterans from desert units: ‘To a newcomer like myself, everyone seemed so “dug in”. They knew the best restaurants and cafes in Cairo, they knew when free concerts were to be given . . . and above all, they knew where not to go for fear of risk to life, limb or wallet.’

  Nor was Everett especially charmed by the workplace that had entranced Aileen Clayton and Barbara Skelton – the old museum at Heliopolis: ‘Both its exterior and its interior were ornately decorated in oriental style and the absence of glass in the window openings kept the place cool. Opposite our museum was a strangely elaborate carved tower said to house a collection of pornographic paintings belonging to King Farouk. Unfortunately, it was kept locked.’

  This was not the only setback:

  Our camp was in the museum grounds. It was a miserable place. Unbearably hot in the afternoons, when we did not work, and with practically no amenities to enliven the evenings or other time off. The food was atrocious and was served in a scruffy cookhouse thoughtfully sited next to the latrines. There were flies everywhere and ‘Gyppy tummy’ was prevalent.2

  Despite this, the community was close, even in the face of the ongoing feud between the military and the cryptographers – the latter led by Major Freddie Jacob, Director of the Combined Middle East Bureau. In late 1941, Lieutenant-Colonel Scott of the military fired off another scorching memo to his superiors in London concerning what he considered to be the Bureau’s shortcomings. ‘You are aware that it has always been difficult to work with Director CMEB,’ he wrote. ‘Cryptographic institutions are curious things. We have always made allowances for this, and put up with many things for the sake of “Y” as a whole. Records of the correspondence between this HQ and Heliopolis show this clearly enough . . .’

  Scott went on to quote from Heliopolis memos that complained of lack of staff, as well as about having to provide ‘cryptographic personnel to work with sections in the Western Desert’. The cryptographers’ position was that ‘all ciphers should be solved at the School [Heli
opolis], and that partially readable low grade ciphers should be handed to officers who have been trained at the School to handle and exploit traffic passing in such ciphers. These officers can then be sent to the forward sections, and not cryptographers on the School’s establishment.’

  Scott was beside himself over the ‘flagrantly dishonest’ position taken by Heliopolis; his view was that barely a handful of its cryptographers had been sent to the Western Desert. On top of this, it was his opinion that Major Jacob . . .

  lives in a curious world of unreality in which he sees himself as the emperor of all the ‘Y’ services . . .

  The present state of affairs should not be allowed to continue. The military ‘Y’ organisation here is strained to its utmost and the friction and opposition that we meet with from Heliopolis in our efforts to improve and expand use up time and energy which should be devoted to beating the enemy.

  This was followed by a smoother, more darkly treacly memo, copied and distributed more widely among a few other officers, quietly and calmly explaining that the Director of the Combined Middle East Bureau was ‘a representative’ of the Government Code and Cypher School, ‘consulted on all matters concerning our own ciphers and those of our allies’ and steeped in all manner of hidden responsibilities that gave him a wide purview over the needs of the services when it came to interception and codebreaking. He proceeded to list – with a feast of acronyms – the exact functions of each and every branch of the Y Service in the Middle East, and concluded that ‘we are all here to serve’ and that ‘our links with the “Y” organisation in the UK are purely technical ones.’3

  There is no secret about communications in war; all combatants understand that the enemy will be listening, and at all times. We have only to think of the young Luftwaffe pilot who addressed his jovial remarks directly to the young women he knew would be monitoring his transmissions in the coastal stations. But for the Army in the Middle East, there was a point when the workings of the Y Service seemed to become opaque; it was to this that Lieutenant-Colonel Scott objected so vociferously. How could it be that the listeners seemed beyond the control of the military? Furthermore, how could it be that in Heliopolis, they appeared to be running an autonomous and independent operation, answering apparently only to an even more clandestine hierarchy?