Rows of huts sprouted up in the gardens surrounding Danesfield House throughout 1941 and these provided living quarters for men and women and all the messes, leaving the house itself to accommodate many working PI sections. ‘Jane’ wrote:
November 1941 was bitter. Water in the fire buckets froze, the walls in the huts (to which the typists had now moved) ran with moisture and we spent most of our off-duty time huddled in bed drinking steaming cocoa. Sometimes it was so cold that we lay, facing upwards like Russian soldiers left to die in the Baltic wastes, Balaclava helmets over our foreheads and arms straight down by our sides.5
Later on, with an increasing need for work and living space, especially with the additional US personnel, more accommodation huts were put up in Wittington Woods opposite the main gates. Diana Byron recalls:
Our hut accommodated nine WAAF officers, ablutions took place in a block outside in the woods and a stove kept us warm – we all took turns in collecting firewood to feed the stove.6
Although the huts in the woods were reasonably comfortable, they were damp and the surrounding wildlife took up residence with the humans. Clothes and shoes went mouldy and there was a permanent musty smell. Mice, woodlice and spiders abounded and the hot weather brought out the mosquitoes.
Jeanne Adams:
I did my six months in the ranks at Medmenham living in a Nissen hut with 32 other girls. We all worked on different watches so sleep was a problem for us all. Our only heat was from a huge, black iron stove in the middle of the hut, which had to be stoked frequently, day and night, to keep us warm. The ablutions were primitive with no mains drains and a dreadful cart which came round each day to empty the loos. The baths and showers were shared by four huts full of girls and were pretty grim. I used my tin hat as a very effective shower cap and when inverted it carried my soap and toiletries. One night when the orderly officer came round at about 10pm to ask if we had any complaints, I foolishly told her that we had a blocked drain. I was told to come along with her and unblock it. I learnt not to complain!7
Corporal Pat Peat was posted into RAF Medmenham in spring 1942 and shared a Quonset hut with fifteen other women:
There was a coal stove in the centre of the hut – some of the women stole coal from the store so we were always warm. Toilets and showers were down at one end of the hut. We had an inspection every morning. There was one bath tub and each week we were each allowed 2 inches of hot water for a bath. A group of five of us decided to pool our hot water ration to make one full tub every week and rotate who went in first. It was heavenly to have a full 10 inches to wallow in. I also went up and down the hut when I first got there to see who did the best cleaning of shoes, the best ironing and so on, then each did the task we were best at for the others. I did the buttons because I was the best at metalwork. We were always the best turned out WAAFs.8
Mollie Thompson described the gardens of Danesfield House:
It was a great pity that the garden was so defaced. The owner had been a well-known gardener and his alpine garden (in the valley between the House and the Danes Ditch) was full of treasures – clipped yew hedges, a wooded area which in spring was a sheet of daffodils (you could pick a hundred and never notice where you had done so), a topiary garden at the foot of the steps, a sunken rose garden, a pool garden and acres of mown lawns. The cliff edge over-looking the river was clear cut so that standing on the cliff path you could look for miles in both directions up and down the Thames valley.
By 1945, the garden was a mass of assorted hutments, and the alpine valley was devastated by an enormous sewage pipe with the spoil used to fill up the sunken rose garden. The trees in the daffodil plot had been cut down and the trees below the cliff edge had been allowed to grow so the house looked ‘shut’ from the river and the view blocked out.9
Contemporary photographs indicate that the topiary and part of the garden survived the building works. At least one fishpond with water and fish remained intact, as Myra Murden remembered lying in bed one night listening to splashes and shouts coming from the garden. Their WAAF sergeant, returning to camp on a dark, moonless night in the blackout, had fallen in the pond and the goldfish swam round her legs for some time before she was rescued by her American boyfriend.
The whole wartime population had problems getting around in the darkness due to dimmed lamps on vehicles, blacked-out windows and the mere glimmer of light allowed in public places. Finding the way back to their huts in the middle of the woods on a moonless night after finishing a shift was just one extra challenge for the Medmenham personnel. Dorothy Colles had a brush with the local law in 1941, about a light that was off rather than one that was on:
On Christmas Eve I went to supper with the Palmers and on the way home got caught by a policeman as my back light had gone out. So I had to walk home to Phyllis Court and arrived cross and tired to find a party in progress with a whole load of pilots from Benson. It was quite spontaneous – they came for a drink and someone started playing and we danced and sang and had a wonderful time. I went to bed at 1am.10
US PIs in the gardens of Danesfield House. WACs Lillian Kamphuis, Lois Willard and Doris Jacobsen stand behind Mabel Menders.
Poor lighting was sometimes used to their advantage by the ATS draughtswomen. ‘Panda’ Carter wrote:
The most dreadful act we committed was to cheat the railway. Buy one return ticket and make it last several journeys. In the Drawing Office we would very carefully paint out the date and put a new one in. We did not think of the crime we were committing. We did it for the thrill of putting the ticket under the collector’s nose, watch him turn it over in his fingers and hand it back as he directed us through the barrier.11
The personnel who worked at night had the problem of trying to sleep during the day in a hut that housed twenty or more colleagues all working different shifts. An insomniac possibly penned these lines pinned to the door of a hut:
PERADVENTURE HE SLEEPETH
1. KINGS. XV111. 27
Remember those who sleep by day:
Tread softly when you come this way,
Pray do not whistle, sing, or shout,
It puts the hopeful sleeper out.
And other things that he abhors
Are clattering tools and banging doors.
So QUIET in the daytime PLEASE,
And let the sleeper take his ease.
N.B. This does not give one any right
To make commotions in the night.
Opinions of the food served at Medmenham were universally low, even allowing for rationing and wartime shortages of ingredients. Those working long night shifts who had to eat their main meal in the early hours of the morning were particularly critical, as Diana Byron and Jeanne Adams explained:
We ate in a hut beside Danesfield House. The cooks left the food in huge ovens hours earlier so it was not ideal at midnight with the odd cockroach thrown in – it was quite ghastly.12
On night shifts we had breakfast at midnight and another dreadful meal with something like stew at 4 am, with tea made in a coffee urn!13
Jane Cameron was a PI at Medmenham:
My new unit was a fantastic amalgam of nationalities, Army, Navy, Air Force and personalities that ranged from Freddie Ashton (later Sir Frederick Ashton, the Master of the Royal Ballet) to a man who had spent his pre-war working life watching the movements of herring shoals in the North Sea.
I remember coming off a twelve-hour night watch and walking to the Nissen hut mess for breakfast with Pilot Officer Freddie Ashton. The orderly presented each of us with a plate of dehydrated, re-constituted eggs which had been ‘scrambled’. In the centre of each plate there was a little island of greenish-yellow vomit, washed on all sides by a little ocean of pale green liquid.14
By 1943, a canteen had been established by the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). Clementine Churchill, the Prime Minister’s wife, was president of the YWCA and spent much time and energy in raising money to open more canteens and hostels of a high
standard. Hearing from Sarah how bad the catering was at Medmenham, she intervened to get a YWCA canteen established there. ‘Panda’ Carter and her ATS friends certainly appreciated the canteen when they moved to Medmenham in January 1945:
Near to our Sergeants Mess hut in the woods was a small house run by kind ladies of the YWCA where we spent our evenings drinking tea and eating buns.15
Geoffrey Stone, a young Army PI also recalls the YWCA:
The concert last night was in the YWCA – well furnished, warm and very bright. We all sat in comfortable armchairs and afterwards had coffee and buns.16
The service cooks were clearly capable of producing attractive fare on special occasions as was shown by the RAF Medmenham menu for Christmas dinner in 1943, which listed roast turkey, chipolata, chestnut stuffing and all the trimmings, preceded by soup and followed by Christmas pudding and mince pies. Dorothy Colles recorded in 1941:
There was a very good dinner at Danesfield House on Christmas Day with speeches and dancing. All the Mess and kitchen staff came in and joined the dance which was very jolly.17
Perhaps the Americans suffered most of all from the unimaginative food, for when they joined RAF Medmenham they became part of the unit and thus were subject to British provisioning and rationing restrictions. Leonard Abrams wrote:
Over a period of two years we Americans never did adjust to the rations. At best, the general level of British cooking was uninteresting, to put it politely. The soggy, dull monotony of the food, the lack of any refrigeration, and the rather casual attitude towards cleanliness in those times, made the Americans bitterly and vocally resentful. We traded cigarettes for food which we cooked illegally in our huts and we challenged other Americans to baseball games so we could eat in their camps.18
US PIs enjoy boating on the River Thames. The WACs wear their distinctive uniform ‘Hobby’ hats.
However awful the food was, the British servicemen and women were also ‘bitterly resentful’ when they heard the Americans criticising it; after all, they had endured it for far longer. WAAFs taken by their American boyfriends to a US unit at nearby High Wycombe could not believe the variety and quantity of food, drink and other goods available; many were also fiercely critical of these unnecessary commodities taking up precious cargo space in convoys crossing the Atlantic.
A last story about food. One day Charlotte took Hazel Furney’s bike, not knowing whose it was, to go out to dinner. Next day the bike was back in its place with a note attached saying who had borrowed it and if the owner went to see her, a bar of chocolate would be given in recompense. Having presented herself for her consolation award, Assistant Section Officer Furney was most aggrieved to be told that as Charlotte had assumed that the bike belonged to an ‘other rank’, Hazel, as an officer, did not qualify for the chocolate bar!19
Almost everyone got around locally by bicycle, so it was possible to enjoy a tea nearby, shop in villages or towns or, for the artists of Medmenham, find many attractive places in the surrounding countryside to paint and sketch. ‘Jane’, the typist, recalled her off-duty time in the summer of 1943:
I remember boating on the Thames, brambling on Marlow Common, dreaming in Quarry Woods, crossing on the ferry from Medmenham to the opposite bank then walking along the towpath to Hurley to visit a farmhouse for fresh bread and homemade jam.20
The chain ferry ran from the slipway at the end of the village lane and cost 2d per crossing. It was used by everyone at Medmenham to cross the river, often to enjoy meeting up with colleagues at the Old Bell in Hurley, the village on the opposite bank. The favourite pub for the pilots and PIs from RAF Benson was the White Hart at Nettlebed, where Mrs Clements, the landlady, mothered the PR pilots. The Dutch Café in Marlow was a favourite place and was renowned for the quality of their dried-egg omelettes. A more expensive rendezvous was the Compleat Angler Hotel on the river at Marlow, while the nearest pubs to RAF Medmenham were the Hare and Hounds at the bottom of Marlow hill and the Dog and Badger opposite the village church. Mary Winmill and her new husband, an army PI, had their first married home in the cottage adjoining the Dog and Badger, complete with a convenient, or inconvenient, hatchway from the public bar that opened directly above their bed.
Pat Peat:
I could not ride a bike until I came to Medmenham and had to learn. The road went through a wood and then down a steep hill almost to the Thames. The hill was scary at first but eventually I took my hands off the handlebars and ‘flew’ down. I remember there was a gypsy camp nearby with a field of poppies alongside. Sometimes I cycled into Marlow to see a ‘Western’ at the cinema, but I was a solitary person – not gregarious – and mostly I explored the countryside, sketching and painting in water colours. I never had difficulty in buying paper, paints or pencils; I bought them in ‘Boots’ in either Marlow or Henley.21
Catching the train up to London was a popular off-duty option. Peggy Hyne and her colleagues often went into London to see a matinee performance at a theatre:
We would take a train from Marlow to Paddington and then go to the Dorchester Hotel which had Turkish Baths in the basement. Then we could lie down and feel more refreshed, very welcome after a night on duty, before seeing a play in the afternoon.22
All uniformed personnel were offered, and accepted, lifts in cars and lorries and, although officers were not supposed to ‘thumb’ a driver down, they too hitched when necessary. Usually all they had to do was walk past the guardroom and out through the main gate of RAF Medmenham for some sort of service or civilian vehicle to stop and offer them a lift. Charlotte had a rather different approach to acquiring transport: arriving at the main gate, she would inform the airman on guard duty where she wished to travel to. Then she waited until a suitable vehicle had been halted and her travel requirements passed on to the driver. Rather similar to a hotel commissionaire hailing a taxi, but it always worked for Charlotte.
Due to the nature and intensity of work at RAF Medmenham, off-duty activities on the station grounds were officially encouraged. After a 12-hour shift concentrating over a stereoscope or working at the other demanding jobs, all physical sports such as football, tennis and running were popular and well supported. Physical training (PT) was compulsory, although Myra Murden managed to avoid a daily session by carefully choosing the right work shift, and Mary Harrison saw it as a way of keeping warm through the chilly winters. There were station sports’ days and several rowing ‘Blues’ took over the boats of the Marlow Rowing Club, temporarily without members due to the war, and held regattas on the Thames in the summers of 1942 and 1943.
With artists and musicians working and living alongside people formerly employed in the theatrical world, it was not long before a variety of entertainments were being staged. The RAF Medmenham Players came into being in 1942 and performed full-length plays, revues and pantomimes. The unit was completely self-sufficient in actors, dancers, scriptwriters, musicians, set builders, costume designers and any other skill necessary to stage a near-professional performance. Men and women from all the services took part in these either on stage or behind the scenes.
The model makers were a group of professional sculptors, artists and architects who readily turned their hand to set designing, building and lighting, while the scriptwriters included a BBC drama writer and producer, Captain Bill Duncalfe, a PI in the Army Section. The Lynx RAF Medmenham Dance Band was on hand to provide the music required and one of the vocalists, Robert Rowell, another army PI, was a professional operatic singer. Props were ‘scrounged’ from various quarters and the programmes and posters were designed and drawn by renowned cartoonists, such as Julian Phipps and A.E. Beard, who had both worked on newspapers and magazines in pre-war days. The costumes were designed and made by the women at Medmenham who, with inspiration and much improvisation, achieved stunning results.
Once Upon a Time was a production staged by the theatre group at RAF Medmenham.
LACW Myra Murden reported to the unit dental officer one day:
I had a bottom front tooth needing to come out according to an earlier dentist’s decision. I protested as I was going to be in the front line of the chorus in a show being put on that evening and I did not want to appear with a gap in my teeth. So the young dentist agreed to do a root job instead, which incidentally was very painful, on condition that I introduced him to my glamorous friend, Gill Clarkson – she went on to dance at The Windmill after the war. So I got my tooth and the dentist got his date – a good deal all round.
Women of Intelligence: Winning the Second World War with Air Photos Page 11
