The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  But the boy is sceptical – if he wasn’t a soldier or a sailor or a pilot, what exactly did he do? Daddy, of course, is not permitted to say. All he can show for his war are ten pairs of trousers kept in the chest upstairs. There the boy would find:

  a record of service unstintingly given

  I completely wore out each ‘behind’.

  It has been noted that the social mix at Beaumanor was more varied than at other stations. It was a blend that seemed equally at home in the local pubs and at organised activities such as the Beaumanor Choir, which rehearsed in the Quorn Church Room and offered, as bonuses, ‘Dancing, games’, ‘entertainments’ and ‘light refreshments’. This heterodox mix of people may have contributed to an atmosphere that seemed rather more forgiving of the authorities’ shortcomings.

  Furthermore – and this is not something you often hear of either Leicester or Loughborough these days – both towns seemed to be oases of pleasure, easily reached by bus after long hard shifts at the radio receivers. The range of cinemas were a particular blessing, and it is ineffably sweet to read Beaumanor magazine’s very own guide to ‘What Was On’: from dreadful forgotten turkeys such as Black Dragons, a thriller starring Bela Lugosi as a Nazi scientist using plastic surgery to transform Japanese agents into replicants of American politicians, to reissues of hugely popular hits such as 1939’s Gone With The Wind, ‘presented in Technicolor’. Of course, colour cinema was still a luxurious novelty then; and in purely visual terms, it is quite easy to imagine the escape that the operators enjoyed as they left their drab desks in drab rooms and made their way through black soggy nights to the sudden rich burst of gold, red, green and blue on the cinema screen.

  Beaumanor’s resident film critic, Dudley Truin, offered his own views on every one of the offerings, from In Which We Serve – ‘British films before the war were a subject for derision, and justifiably so but since 1939, in spite of immense difficulties, they have gone from strength to strength’ – to The Ghost of Frankenstein – ‘Lon Chaney Jr has in my opinion more than lived up to the high standard of acting set by his father’. The latter, incidentally, was an opinion held by very few others.

  Just a few miles away, at Whaddon Hall, fourteen-year-old Geoffrey Pidgeon had had his earlier wish granted; although a bright lad, he was not remotely engaged with his school work at Wolverton Grammar, and so he was able to join his father, and indeed a growing number of family associates, in the highly secure wireless section. Geoffrey was obviously to start not in uniform, but working on the manufacture of specialised sets, some of which were destined for secret use out in the field. He very quickly developed a feel for the work – the complexities of coils and wiring, the fascinating new possibilities that rapid technological change was throwing up.

  A close analogy for the workshops of Whaddon Hall might be inventor Q’s laboratories from the James Bond films; there was that blend of labyrinthine wiring and machinery, combined with improvisational genius and the sense that, underneath the chaos, this was a secret powerhouse of invention and technology. And though young Geoffrey Pidgeon’s very first job might have involved the unglamorous process of engraving Bakelite, he knew that he had a privileged insight.

  ‘So how on earth did I get into Whaddon?’ says Mr Pidgeon now with a laugh. ‘I knew I was skilful with my hands. I had always made models. I painted things. We all had to have hobbies at school, and had hobby contests. I made some very good models of HMS Renown [a nineteenth-century gunship]. The guns moved. And I made a model of a Messerschmitt 110. This was on a base of the sea, all in colour, with a destroyer running alongside.

  ‘My father was so thrilled with this model that he took it up to show it off at Whaddon Hall. Percy Cooper, Royal Navy, who was in charge of the workshops saw it, and he said, “Your lad seems to be talented. We’re looking for people with an aptitude for wiring. Do you think he would like a job?” ’

  Pidgeon’s father suggested that Geoffrey was unlikely to progress very far scholastically and asked his son if he would like to think about it. ‘So I said yes. I went up to Whaddon Hall, and saw this great man in an office – I had no idea what I was doing – and he asked if I would like a job there.’

  Pidgeon asked what work he would be expected to do. ‘And he said, “Well, you’ve been making models – it’s something similar to that.” So then we had to go back and see my headmaster Mr Morgan, who said something to the effect that “this boy’s wasting his time here – he’s not going to get anywhere”. I was brilliant at several subjects, but that didn’t carry the whole lot.’

  As it turned out, young Geoffrey Pidgeon was more than happy with the way his career had found this early shape. In the months and years to come, he would find himself bobbing around in the Solent helping to oversee trials of revolutionary remote-controlled radio apparatus housed in sleek missile-like tubes. And he was to be sent up in aeroplanes for tests of top secret equipment such as a device that would enable pilots to get precise fixings on radio receivers on the ground. This was an invaluable tool for spies: rather than having to spend agonising minutes transmitting so that their headquarters could get a fix on their position, in order to keep track of their movements – minutes in which the Germans could also lock on to them with ease – the new technology would enable them to be detected before the enemy even realised that they were there.

  Many of his classmates, back in those soporific schoolrooms in Wolverton, poring over Latin and maths and chemistry, would have been sick with envy if only Geoffrey Pidgeon could have told them anything. But of course he couldn’t: even at fourteen years of age, the Official Secrets Act applied.

  Some of the later young recruits to the Y Service found themselves in incongruously festive surroundings at the start of their training. Victor Newman, having been called up at the age of eighteen and opting for wireless telegraphy, found himself packed off to the Yorkshire seaside resort of Skegness – and more particularly, to a ‘Billy Butlin’s Holiday Camp’ requisitioned by the Royal Navy.

  ‘There were all the huts still there, which had been built for family accommodation,’ says Mr Newman with a laugh. ‘And because they were family accommodation [each chalet] had single and double beds in which all the recruits had to sleep. The double beds had a board down the middle. Not that this is something that we had ever heard about before, but the board was to prevent men getting at each other.’ The idea of such a precaution makes some other recruits to Skegness laugh to this day. One veteran recalls that he and another recruit removed the board in direct contravention of the rules, simply because their chalet was so bitterly freezing that they needed the shared warmth.

  The whole holiday camp had been taken over by the Navy – it was hardly as if there was any civilian demand for it at that time – and so in these invigorating seaside surroundings, Mr Newman and his comrades were put through ‘parade drills and learning to tie knots’ as well as being inducted into the mysteries of Morse messaging.

  Some female recruits recall being packed off to other branches of Butlins on the south coast where the fresh air also seemed to inspire officers into notions of parades and drills. Great numbers of WAAF personnel, meanwhile, were sent to the wireless training centre established on the Isle of Man. Here there was a focus on physical, as well as Morse, training. And perhaps the aforementioned rarity of travel goes some way to explaining the curious atmosphere – part hilarity, part resistance – that was to be found on the island.

  It was certainly a different world from the wartime mainland. As well as the often fine weather, the Isle of Man’s shops and grocery stores were – for those rationing-straitened times – extraordinarily abundant in produce. ‘The shops on the Isle of Man were full of things that you couldn’t get at home,’ says Jay McDonald, who had been brought up in quite another island community, that of Mull. ‘All sorts of stuff that wasn’t available – the war had been on some time and there was generally so little that you could buy. Even a comb for your hair could be hard to
come by.’ Not in Douglas, though, where the emporia overflowed. ‘I presume there was an abundance in Douglas because of all the holidaymakers who had never come because of the war.’

  There was one other terrific boon too, especially for sharp young appetites: ‘The food was also very good in Douglas, there was an abundance that we didn’t have at all on the mainland. Eggs were in good supply, for instance. They may have been getting extra food from Ireland, which was not playing a part in the war. There were fresh kippers you could get in Douglas, and you could arrange to have them specially boxed and packed and sent on. I had kippers sent back home to my mother in Tobermory, who then distributed them among people.’

  As well as Morse, there was instruction in radio technology. But the hours, Miss McDonald recalls, were not especially onerous. ‘When we got time off, we went to the pictures, dances, went for swims in the sea. All the usual things that teenagers did.’

  Indeed, for some male wireless trainees in the Signals Corps, the ratio of male to female recruits on the Isle of Man was the stuff of daydreams. Romance, though, could prove rather more elusive, as Dennis Underwood said: ‘We were on one duty or another almost every night, guard duty, fire piquet, kitchen fatigues, et cetera. So when the occasional night off came we were too exhausted to take advantage of the opportunities!’

  For Jay McDonald, this was a jolly time: she could only ever see the town of Douglas as a seaside resort, rather than the site of her training as a Special Wireless Operator. Even the most sonorous lectures on the mechanics of wireless transmission were tinged with the promise of constant fresh sea air: ‘And of course, after the work was done, all we had to do was cross the road and there was the sea. I was there in the high summer, which also made a big difference. We could swim in the sea or walk along the promenade. The atmosphere was very nice.’

  For ATS volunteer Cynthia Grossman, however, the Isle brought back shuddering memories, not least of which was the crossing that she and her fellow girls had to endure:

  We embarked on a sorry-looking ship to cross the Irish Sea. Most of the Isle of Man ships had been lost or battered in the Dunkirk evacuation. The skies that had been blue in the early morning had our spirits high, and we were hustled on board with wishes of good luck and gifts of chocolate bars (rationed at the time), from the WVS and the Salvation Army. We were soon to regret gobbling this delicious chocolate, for the skies turned grey, and the waves tumultuous. Cheerful excited chatter turned to whimpers and moans of ‘I want to die’ as uniformed girls gave up their chocolate whilst clinging to the rails of the ship.1

  After this unpromising start, the young women arrived at Douglas after a tortuously long voyage:

  Seven hours later, instead of the usual four, a bedraggled squad of girls from various training camps in the UK, trailed not marched along Douglas Promenade to the requisitioned hotels and boarding houses that were to be our homes and classrooms.

  Soon we were into a routine of breakfast, morning parade, and into classrooms by 9 a.m., to learn the Morse code alphabet, the Q code, and to me the dullness of lectures on magnetism and electricity.

  The lectures involved talks on atmospherics, how radio waves worked in certain conditions and how they could be affected by natural phenomena. In other words, they were not everyone’s choice of intellectual stimulation.

  This went on till 5 p.m., with a brief break for lunch. We had no idea what this learning was for, and the drill parades and physical training periods were welcome activities. At some point we learnt we were to intercept German messages that would be in code, and on no account were we to speak of this to anyone, not even our nearest and dearest.

  The girls’ ability to keep a secret was eventually put to a formidable test:

  We were to be inspected by an important visitor, the Princess Royal, sister of King George VI. She proceeded slowly down the line, and stopped in front of me. ‘What do you do Private?’ she asked. I floundered, saying in my mind ‘You can’t tell her’ – ‘We march and play games, Ma’am,’ I said. She must have thought I was a waste of space, not knowing that the game was a form of bingo, the letters on our cards being sent in Morse.

  Wherever the station, another crucial aspect of life for so many recruits remained their youth; as in the early years of the war, many were teenagers who had barely ventured outside their own home towns, let alone been called upon to engage in vital work. One such lad, and something of a prodigy, was Dafydd Williams. He had just taken his A levels and there was, as he recalled, talk of him being sent to Canada to work on a secret project involving physics (it was only many years later that he realised that the project actually concerned early atomic weapons research). In the wake of his exams, Williams went to a party; one of his fellow guests that evening was apparently a ‘wing commander’ who worked at Bletchley Park. As seemed so frequently the case, an ostensibly casual conversation led to recruitment. But Williams was not being drafted into the codebreaking operation; he was being drawn into the world of secret diplomatic communications. Interviewed by the staff of Bedford Museum for their website, Mr Williams said:

  I was sent up to the main Station at Whaddon Hall in Buckinghamshire which was responsible for secret communications between England and the various Embassies throughout the world and also the main Commanders in the Field. It was Section 8 of the Secret Intelligence Service and I was at Whaddon Hall for four to five months as it was suggested I would go on various jobs from there. I went into digs in Bletchley. A station wagon used to pick us up every day. And the thing which I remember – remember I was only 18 at the time – I was given a salary of £7 0s 0d a week! £7 0s 0d a week, free of income tax! Plus keep, plus my accommodation.

  Really this was a very big salary at that date for an 18 year old. At that time I was working shift operations, the Station was open for 24 hours a day . . . Basically it was sending and receiving coded traffic to Embassies and the Army Command in North Africa and in Cairo. I was supposed to go to North Africa and that fell through. I was supposed to go to Spitzbergen and that fell through and then eventually I found myself sent to Madrid in Spain.2

  But for other youngsters, even when the work did not involve the heady excitement of foreign locations – indeed, even if it was focused on one little town – the high spirits of youth were difficult to quell. ‘We had a lovely time,’ recalled one ATS recruit of her posting to Scarborough. ‘We were working with sailors – ask no more. There were dances at the hotel and we put on a little show. A marvellous time we had.’ One of her colleagues recalled her landlady with immense fondness: ‘Mrs Craig’s cooking was . . . well, we put on weight!’ And when not eating, they were able to find other amusements. ‘In our breaks, we’d go to the pictures and Chapel on Sundays – a great big central hall, like Westminster Hall, with tip-up seats.’ Among the Scarborough girls, there would be the occasional outbreak of one eternal preoccupation of the young: seances. Several ATS operatives recalled what would happen after coming off shifts late at night. ‘We were not ready for sleep at midnight. We would have many a discussion – on politics, how our parents made a mess of things. We even dabbled with a ouija board.’

  After her blissful training period on the Isle of Man, Jay McDonald found herself posted to Harrogate, and the exposed and wuthering listening station located on Forest Moor. She remembers her time in Yorkshire with deep affection, and has been back there for several reunions in the intervening years. One of the aspects of life that appealed very strongly to her was the chance to meet girls from all over the country, and from all sorts of different backgrounds: her home community on the Isle of Mull was close but also perhaps a little limited in terms of variety. In any case, even the rigours of her duties at Forest Moor now bring back fond memories.

  We were taken from Harrogate to Forest Moor on these troop carriers. It was cold on the Yorkshire moors, even though we were well clad. For a reunion not long ago, on the way there, we were singing the songs that we used to sing on those carriers. Everyone sang
those wartime songs. We worked a shift system, three rotas. You did all the shifts, and then you would get thirty-six hours off to recover.

  The night shift was always a bit of a bind. There were all the usual difficulties. Trying to sleep when everyone else was getting up, trying to sleep in the daylight (even though we had blackout). But we were living in Queen Ethelburga’s, a requisitioned school, which was great. Outside the room I slept in was a cherry tree. There was parquet flooring. So only the night shifts spoiled things a bit . . .

  The work was very focused – but then, you could also sit there for seven hours, and the station you were listening for just wouldn’t come up. So either that or you could be very busy, the messages all coming through at once. But in any night shift, there were always two of you there. A partner, in a sense. The two of you would be doing the same job. So one might be busy and one not, and one would be there really to help the other stay awake. You might have had some nights when you were idle; but you couldn’t read a book, you couldn’t write, you couldn’t knit, you had to sit there. So when the other person wasn’t busy, you would make conversation.

  And this is how you got to meet girls from all sorts of different backgrounds that you would never have met before. I got to know girls from London, they got to know me. I would tell them about the Isle of Mull and they would ask if there were trains there. When I’d explain there were no trains on the isle, they would be taken aback. Some would ask about the Gaelic language – others would never have heard of it.

  And they would show you photographs of boyfriends, mothers and fathers. You really got to know people, you really liked them.

  On the south coast, meanwhile, Wrens on the windy clifftop stations overlooking the Channel found inventive means of entertaining themselves. Miggs Ackroyd recalled the most unlikely amusements: ‘While sitting in a wireless van on the end of Portland Bill before the Americans came into the war, we used to pick up the Boston police cars “calling all cars” and listen to the American Ham operators operating on the Skip distance. They had funny call signs. “TWV – Tiny White Violets” or “GYD – Granny’s Yellow Drawers”.’3