The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  Not so far away across the Mediterranean, the strategically important island of Malta had been heroically holding out against Italian and German onslaughts. Some codebreakers and wireless operators posted to Heliopolis now found themselves being redirected to Malta; what was more, they discovered that they were to complete part of the journey by submarine. It was not an attractive prospect. But the experience, as Y Service veteran John Boylan found, had a quality of fascination, not to say novelty, amid the trepidation and claustrophobia.

  ‘All submarines going to Malta carried the maximum quantity of stores in short supply on the island,’ he recalled. That was on top of transporting himself and several other Y Service colleagues. ‘We were soon given a welcome on board by the Captain over the loud hailer, who told us we were in for a fairly uncomfortable journey owing to the limited accommodation . . . The first order was for us to replace our army boots with gym shoes and vest – our clothing for the next 8 days.’ Day and night were turned upside down: some of the submarine’s crew operated nocturnally, when the vessel would surface for a short time and messages were swiftly transmitted; by day, the vessel would dive once more to the depths. Boylan and his Y Service colleagues had barely enough room to sleep: the submariners naturally had the bunks, the wireless men had to bed down ‘in the sitting position’.

  ‘We had limited water for ablutions and drinking,’ recalled Boylan, ‘although the taste of the tepid water didn’t encourage over-indulgence . . . One soon lost all sense of taste and this remained for days, even after the completion of the journey. It was . . . like the taste from sucking pennies.’ But the relief on finally reaching his destination was great; Boylan recalled the ‘fresh air, brilliant sunshine, blue sea’. In Malta, the Y Service operatives were based in St Paul’s Bay; it was pleasingly cool by comparison to Heliopolis, though during the winter rains, ‘the station was in the middle of a sea of mud.’3

  Boylan and his male colleagues made the transfer to Malta with some ease; this was not the case for Cairo WAAF operative Aileen Clayton. She had been telling her commanding officer that she felt she could make a valuable contribution on the island, which thanks to its strategic significance was acutely vulnerable to German aggression. Clayton argued that her experience, acquired both in Egypt and beforehand back in England, would be valuable. But as one would expect for the time, her sex counted against her. Malta was clearly considered too dangerous to be a suitable posting for a young woman. Clayton wrote:

  I made up my mind that this was something I had to do. Rowley [her superior] on his return, did not think much of the idea and suggested that we send someone from Suez Road. I was furious at his decision. Here was the first opportunity since my arrival in the Middle East to put into practice the lessons that I had learned and the experience I had gained at Kingsdown.

  It hit me forcibly that this was a foretaste of what I would be up against unless I took, there and then, a firm stand. Had I been a man, there would have been no question of my going, but merely because I was a woman, I was not eligible for work in which I was much better qualified and experienced than any of the men whom they proposed sending to Malta . . . I went on arguing [with Rowley] but it was to no avail.

  Finally, choking with rage and frustration, I picked up my heavy German dictionary and hurled it at him. It missed, and that only made me more angry . . . I walked down to the YWCA at Dharbanga House and found a quiet corner of the courtyard of the old Arab palace to sit and think about what to do next. The sun was filtering through the fretted ‘musharabiya’ screens, making patterns of light on the floor.4

  But the dictionary had hit its metaphorical target. Her superior eventually relented; and Clayton was flown to the Y station in Malta (this is in contrast to Boylan’s submarine voyage – 1940s feminism had its limits. Indeed, it is only very recently that women have been granted the right to sail in such British vessels). Not long after she arrived, the nature of the day-to-day jeopardy became all too clear:

  I was returning one evening to my hotel with an airman from the radar site, when we saw a single fighter coming in very low over the water. ‘He’s low,’ I remarked. ‘I hope he hasn’t been shot up. If he doesn’t pull up a bit, I doubt if he’ll make Ta’Qali.’ Suddenly there was the chatter of machine-gun fire. ‘Christ!’ yelled the airman. ‘He’s a bloody Hun!’ We smartly threw ourselves flat behind one of the stone walls enclosing the field. Having missed us, the ME 109 . . . went on its way to beat up the airfield. ‘Phew, that was a close one, the f—ing bastard,’ the airman exclaimed. ‘Are you all right, ma’am?’ ‘No, dammit, I’m not,’ I replied. ‘I’ve wrecked my stockings, and I’ve only got one more pair with me.’ The airman roared with laughter. ‘You’re great!’ The only reply I could make was to comment: ‘Well, after all one must have a sense of proportion. You can’t have an improperly dressed WAAF running around.’

  Prior to the siege of Malta in 1942, further practical difficulties were thrown up by the bombing raids, as John Boylan recalled. ‘The . . . raids increased in frequency and intensity . . . and the island was under a state of almost continuous red alert . . . If you were on duty, work continued as normal as possible but when the bombs were dropping in the vicinity, the noise blotted out the signals in your headphones. With the screaming bombs, you certainly couldn’t take the Morse through the noise.’ Those working on messages and codes managed to use their rest periods to watch Hurricanes and Spitfires ‘get stuck into the bombers, even through the heavy barrages’. Aside from these spectacular pyrotechnics, though, operatives began to notice how the rations had started to go into a ‘gradual decline’, at first not especially noticeable, but then sharply conspicuous. For the interceptors, it must have been a strange and alienating period; at an extraordinarily tense moment of the conflict, they had found themselves bearing witness to the action while being right at its centre.

  10 This is No Holiday Camp

  Wireless operatives who worked in far-off countries had the curious solace of jeopardy. Even though their work could be mind-numbingly tedious, it was carried out in exotic, alien conditions that at any point might erupt in anarchy, or worse. The precious knowledge that they carried, plus the imperative never to be captured, gave a biting edge to their experiences. From Singapore to Colombo, from Cairo to Malta, the listeners were part of a company; a direct boon to the troops with whom they worked so closely. These listeners could see, on some level, the results of the good work they were doing.

  For those back in England, it was not always so simple. And by 1942, in RAF Chicksands, morale was plummeting fast. The authorities were not merely chastened but also startlingly sympathetic to female operatives who lashed out.

  At the beginning of that year, pressure on the Chicksands personnel had started to increase sharply as the Luftwaffe took some unwelcome security precautions. The official history of Chicksands in the National Archives points out:

  On January 1st 1942, the German Air Force introduced a variety of new keys . . . this made a great increase in the number of [receiving] sets required and forced us to devise new methods of obtaining the maximum interception from the sets available. The difficulties were overcome to a large extent by increasing the Search teams at Chicksands and Harpenden . . .

  But where were all the extra recruits to come from; and would all of them prove suitable to the demanding nature of the work? A few months later, an ominous internal memo began to tell of developing staff difficulties, to do both with the hours and the deadening lack of recreational possibilities in the vicinity. There was, the memo stated, an ‘increasing sense of injustice among the personnel concerned, which is already threatening to lower the standard of efficiency’.

  Days afterwards, it was noted at Chicksands that ‘77 WAAF ops arrived – bolshie for lack of leave.’ The unremitting pressure, and the never-ending nature of the task – combined with the need to keep such WAAF operatives effectively in the dark about the nature of the information they were receiving – was stoking
resentment.

  By 13 June 1942, things were so bad among the operatives that the authorities proposed in a further internal memo that the station be visited by a psychologist – one ‘Mr Chambers’. He was to be asked to ‘look into cases of neuroses among the WAAFs’. The memo went on:

  Very recently, [a senior officer] told me that Chicksands WAAFs . . . could only cope with a 6-hour day, and on checking with the other Y services, I found that their experience was the same. Cheadle, on the contrary, still manage to get their people to do an 8 hour day, but ask that the WAAF may be reinforced considerably above the usual four watch basis so as to give them additional rest periods.

  Chambers the psychologist did indeed visit Chicksands; and by July, he had filed part of a report that caused the authorities a great deal of annoyance – not because it pointed out awkward truths about the wellbeing of staff, but because it put forward no obvious solutions. When WAAFs had nowhere to go and relax, when their accommodation was uncomfortable, when their spare hours away from the grinding work were still dreary and depressing, what precisely could the authorities at Chicksands do about it?

  ‘I have seen the extract from Mr Chambers’s report affecting Chicksands and do not find it very helpful,’ wrote Commander Ellingworth. ‘He has tabulated all the difficulties inherent in the place which we told him, without offering any constructive criticisms. Incidentally, his criticism of me as a “regular service officer” and his remarks that my subordinates do not see eye to eye with me I resent very much indeed from many points of view.’ He concluded, with a magnificent flush of anger: ‘Quite apart from anything else, my Squadron Officer and Squadron Leaders DO see eye to eye with me – and the rest better had.’ (Indeed, when Commander Ellingworth was a little later transferred to the Y establishment at Beaumanor, veteran Chris Barnes remembers that his attitude was always rough-edged and autocratic. Not that this was necessarily a bad thing; ‘I think he was respected if sometimes feared,’ says Mr Barnes.)

  None of this helped at Chicksands, though; and neither did a report the following month from a ‘senior medical officer’ in response to rising sickness rates at the establishment. It listed the main difficulties as ‘Shortage of personnel. Half-completed camp. Long distance from civilian amusements.’ Again, a ‘batch of discontented WAAFs’ were noted. ‘Not every operator . . . suitable for the work’, it stated. There was a ‘lack of facilities during short leaves for people who live at a distance’.

  Then there were the technical difficulties. Too much responsibility was placed on the administration staff, alongside a lack of ‘runners’, or messengers; this meant that wireless operators not only had to take down messages with pristine accuracy, they then also had to hare around the station to give them to the right people for transmission to Bletchley Park. The authorities at this stage were trying to set up a system of pneumatic tubes in order to remove this chore; but the tubes themselves were too slow.

  Drawing comparison with Chicksands’ sister RAF station at West Kingsdown, the medical officer’s report was damning:

  This is a bad station. The work is similar to that at West Kingsdown but instead of listening to intelligible radio transmissions, the operators listen to and note cypher signals in Morse. There is little or nothing in their work to hold their interest.

  The men work an eight hour watch and the women a six hour watch. There is somewhat more regularity of life than at W Kingsdown but this is paid for by rather fewer days off . . . Living conditions are in a state of flux. At present, the women are rather uncomfortably housed in a camp; the men are in billets. Civilian and recreational facilities are scanty, but improving . . .

  Intriguingly, the medical officer also noted that ‘operators come from a less privileged strata of society’ than at West Kingsdown. Not only did they have less rewarding work, he suggested, Chicksands recruits were more likely to come from working-class backgrounds and were less likely to have received further education than those at West Kingsdown. And this – as far as he could see – was an important contributory factor towards their unhappiness. ‘There is . . . a much stronger leave fixation and a very real urge towards posting or remustering. There have been,’ he added ominously, ‘indications of the possible imminence of a sudden breakdown.’ For the women stationed here, the ‘only emotional satisfaction is in leaving the station.’

  If changes were not made, the officer concluded, ‘I feel it is my duty to warn that there is likely to be a progressive deterioration in morale, a strong possibility amounting to almost a probability of sudden collapse, and a high probability of an increase in the sick-rate.’ And there was the hint of a further comment about the issue of social class in his conclusion that ‘there is little to be said . . . for [wireless] operators doing such work as cooking and general cleaning of the camp, particularly if undertaking such work means, as it does at RAF Chicksands, that time off duty and days off have to be reduced.’

  The authorities did have one idea for improving morale, expressed in yet another memo: ‘Need for “privilege” or some form of “glamourising” of operator’s trade’, it stated. ‘What can you tell the operator without breach of security?’

  This was the core of the issue. The nobility of the war effort was one thing – everyone was familiar with Gracie Fields’ song about ‘The girl that made the thingummybob’ (a paean to the heroic yet unsung factory girls whose dedicated labour in producing small components for planes and weapons was proving immeasurably valuable); but these women at Chicksands, at all hours, were expected to take down an abstract collection of seemingly random signals, with no sense of where the results were being sent, or how they were helping. Unlike the factory girls, they had no tangible idea of the value of their work. Certainly they could use their imaginations; but even the most colourful daydreams would pall after a few nights spent in the darkness at 2 a.m. noting down interminable series of dots and dashes.

  Who could fail to side with the operators? At Bletchley Park, there was a full team of support staff and most codebreakers had comfortable billets; in contrast, the WAAF operatives at Chicksands were not only required to live in spartan camp conditions, but were also responsible for maintaining that camp on top of all their other work.

  This perhaps contributed to a surprising physical assault against an officer, quietly referred to in a memo in the archives dated a few weeks later. ‘There had been grave concern as to the state of discipline and morale at Chicksands,’ it stated. ‘It will be recollected that the discontent culminated in an act of violence against the C.O. by a member of the WAAF.’

  In general terms, however, the consequences were more empathetic than punitive. ‘Subsequently, the Commanding Officer was changed, a new padre has been installed and the hours of work for WAAF reduced. The root of the trouble, however, was the fact that the Commanding Officer and staff were trying to meet operational requirements with an inadequate staff and, in consequence, over-working the personnel.’ Over-working seems to be putting it mildly; a round-the-clock interception rota, combined with drudgery, and in a location with scarcely the entertainment of a village hop, must have seemed to the women who worked there a kind of grey purgatory.

  Yet, not too many miles away at Beaumanor Hall, the War Office Y Service seemed by 1942 to be a remarkably smooth, even happy operation. In that year, the station’s numbers had been greatly expanded with the arrival of the ATS women; their presence was to make an already congenial atmosphere even more lively and amusing, especially for the civilian male Experimental Wireless Assistants.

  One cartoon, drawn for the in-house magazine, depicts a fellow, sitting in a comfy armchair, twiddling a wireless knob while arrayed around him are three attractive young women: one bringing him tea, another massaging his shoulders, and the third sitting on his knee. The caption to this drawing: ‘My job – As seen by my wife.’

  Elsewhere in this notably irreverent and good-humoured staff magazine was a decidedly ungallant comic poem inspired directly by the influ
x of female company:

  Now females thin, and fat, and old

  and females young and vital

  Are toiling in our midst, ’tis time

  Someone gave them a title

  Whatever she’s been – a debutante

  or humble ‘char’ or waitress

  She wouldn’t care for anyone

  To call her OPERATRESS.

  There was also a joke concerning one such young lady who, on overhearing talk of ‘jamming’, exclaimed: ‘I can’t understand where they get all the sugar from.’

  Even the personnel complaints at Beaumanor seemed to be better natured than elsewhere. One such complaint concerned the perennial lack of chips in the canteen, and yet how, poetically, somehow their aroma continued to haunt the place. Poignantly, even in 1942, there was an awareness that the secrecy of the work – and its quiet nature – would make for some awkward conversations after the war had ended. One waggish poet dramatised this in a comic poem concerning a little boy badgering his father for details of what his war work had involved:

  Oh! I was an EWA my laddie

  My part I most nobly did play

  And although I ain’t got any medals

  I sure took my part in the fray.