Susan Bendon returned to the world of fashion after her work at Bomber Command in the war. In 1950, she changed direction and opened an antique shop where she founded the company Halcyon Days, which produced decorative enamel boxes, many of which Susan designed herself. She wrote three books on enamels and became a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. In 2009 she wrote about her wartime experiences:
Work apart, there was a great deal of fun to be had at the station and we held marvellous parties in the Sergeant’s Mess, to which many officers from Intelligence came. I think most people’s recollections of being in the forces during the war are the hilarity of so many incidents, and in spite of the tragedies we either were part of or observed, we seemed to have laughed most of the time.14
Charlotte Bonham Carter was one of the first to be demobbed. Hazel remembers:
She came back to see us at Medmenham from a conference in Oxford and not only told us exactly what she had eaten at some banquet, but went around all the sections eating their biscuits, or whatever they had. She was as thin as a rake!15
Charlotte was a doyenne of the London art world and a generous patron of the arts. In 1946 she inherited her family home, Wyck Place, in Hampshire, where many parties were subsequently held and Charlotte’s favourite phrase ‘My dear, isn’t that marvellous!’ was frequently heard. Peter Greenham painted her portrait in 1978 with Charlotte wearing a red gown designed by Fortuny, which she had bought from him in 1922. The portrait hangs in the Tate Gallery in London.
Having completed a course on Far Eastern PI in 1945, Ursula Powys-Lybbe’s plans of enjoying a posting at the Pentagon were thwarted, and she left the WAAF to resume her photographic business, taking up portraiture again. She chose to abandon London society, and instead took her ‘Touring Camera’ to the Australian outback of New South Wales, where for several years she photographed people in their own homes. She returned to England and in 1983 published The Eye of Intelligence, a book that relates the technical detail of PI successes at Medmenham and its major contribution to the intelligence gathering processes during the Second World War.
Loyalty Howard from the Night Photography Section went to New Zealand after leaving the WAAF, then travelled to Australia where she became the headmistress of a girls’ school. Sophie Wilson, who had worked in the white-tiled cubby hole in the basement of Danesfield House, also took up teaching and in the mid-1950s opened her own school near Tewkesbury which became one of her life’s great achievements. In the autumn of 2002 Sophie revisited Danesfield House and, with difficulty, located her old white-tiled office, now sandwiched between the wine cellar and the cleaning materials store, in an area somewhat like the bowels of a large ship.
Sophie’s two ‘W’ Section colleagues pursued surveying careers after the war. Ena Thomas worked for the Foreign Office on Antarctic survey and Lucia Windsor was appointed to the staff of the Directorate of Overseas Surveys computing section, later becoming chief computer. Lucia carried out much technical work on trigonometric adjustments and aerial triangulation concerned with mapping.
After the war PIs Mary Grierson from Second Phase and Ursula Kay from the Aircraft Section worked together as cartographers in a survey company. Ursula left to become a farmer and in 1960 Mary was employed as the official botanical illustrator in the Kew Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens. She had been encouraged by John Nash RA at a series of botanical painting courses held at Flatford Mill, and when he retired Mary took over. The Herbarium archive holds over 1,000 of Mary’s paintings and drawings, together with her meticulous record books. No doubt the same observational skills that Mary used throughout the war in examining air photographs were employed in her botanical paintings. She contributed to numerous books and publications, and was awarded five gold medals by the Royal Horticultural Society, an honorary doctorate from Reading University and, in 1999, the Kew Award medal.
In 2011, at the age of 99, Mary was asked which photographs she remembered from her wartime service. She replied:
The photographs of the Moehne Dam and seeing all the flooding down the valley, sweeping everything away, made a huge impression on me which I shall never forget. I remember too the very brave PR pilots, with no defence or guns, who flew into enemy territory in the days that followed to see what damage had been done.16
Fears that women had about loved ones fighting in Europe, and elsewhere, continued to the end of the conflict. In March 1945, just a few weeks before the war ended, Mary Harrison, the model maker, recorded that her brother’s ship had been torpedoed off Russia; thankfully he survived. Mary was working on a model of the naval port of Kiel as there were fears that the enemy might retreat into Norway for a ‘last stand’. A reconnaissance Spitfire did fly over Kiel on 8 May, VE Day, to see if there were any large ships in the port, but only thick plumes of smoke were seen.
The end of Mary’s wartime service is told in her diary entries for October 1945, in a way familiar to many other servicewomen:
1st – Due for demob on October 10th.
9th – Went to Marlow with Nancy Hayes for a last coffee at The Dutch Café. Final pay at Medmenham, 3 shillings. Went to say goodbye to ‘V’ Section and moved to the transit hut.
10th – Demobbed at Wythall. Left ‘Med’ for Wythall at 7.45 am. Commenced demob about 2 pm. All happened so quickly one didn’t quite know what one was doing.
11th – Can’t realise I’m really ‘out’.
12th – Went to National Registry Office – got identity card, coupons, ration book etc. In the afternoon Mother and I went shopping and I bought myself a rather nice brown suit. The price broke me for a time – but gosh – to be a civvy!!!
30th – Dyed my RAF cardigan successfully.17
The 800 or so women who had worked with air photographs at RAF Medmenham, and all the other women who had served in similar ways on reconnaissance and interpretation units in Britain and overseas, could be proud of the part they had played in one of the Second World War’s great achievements. From a few lumbering aircraft and a handful of civilians in 1939, photographic reconnaissance and interpretation had become the major provider of intelligence used in virtually every wartime operation. Unusually for those times, women had carried out the same work as men, were chosen for a particular job solely on their capabilities and had played a decisive part in winning the war. Mary Harrison summed up the effect of war on women:
It gave women freedom and equality to do jobs that only men did before. It taught us tolerance and how to get on with others.
Many of the Medmenham women had served for nearly six years, some had lost husbands and fiancés, and most knew of a colleague who had not returned from the conflict. They were demobilised into a country scarred and worn from the war and some faced a struggle to find employment and housing. All were affected by more stringent rationing than in wartime and shortages of just about every commodity. A significant number married and took the decision to set up new homes in America and Canada. Many years after the war Mollie Thompson wrote: ‘We just wanted to get back to normal.’
Joan ‘Panda’ Carter sketched the ATS waving goodbye to their colleagues at the end of the war. The sentiments expressed would be echoed by most women who worked with air photographs in the Second World War.
As soon as the European war ended, some sections at Medmenham closed and in 1946 the Central Interpretation Unit moved to RAF Nuneham Park and was renamed the Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre (JARIC). On 17 July 1946, a number of wartime PIs gathered together and formed the Medmenham Club, with the primary objective of preserving the friendships made during the war.
For nearly thirty years Danesfield House was used as an RAF Signals Unit, before being sold in 1977 to Carnation Foods as their corporate headquarters. It opened as Danesfield House Hotel in 1991, since when the management has welcomed the return visits of many of the men and women who worked there in wartime. Golden wedding anniversaries, ninetieth birthdays and other notable occasions have been celebrated in the rooms where
stereoscopes, maps and photographs were once used.
In 2010 the BBC used Danesfield House Hotel to film ‘wartime scenes’ as part of their documentary Operation Crossbow, which told the story of the hunt for the V-weapons. A celebratory Medmenham Club tea was held in the Versailles Room, where Second Phase had worked, and afterwards members and guests stepped out on to the terrace to admire the gardens and river, just as the PIs of many nations had during the war. Then, thanks to the BBC, everyone, including men and women who had worked at Medmenham in wartime days, enjoyed a spectacular flying display by a Spitfire, and WAAF PI Suzie Morrison was reminded that:
Whenever we heard the sound of a returning Spitfire we rushed outside to welcome home our pilot, and hear his news.
Notes
1. Palmer (née Ogle), Stella, letter, March 1945.
2. Mottershead (née Rugg), Barbara, memoirs.
3. Scott, Hazel, Peace and War, pp.91–3.
4. Mulvagh, Jane, The Real Brideshead (Black Swan, 2009).
5. IWM 13707 Misc 262 (3569) The papers relating to Elspeth Horne (née Macalister) that form part of the Kemsing village memoir of 2005, held by the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum.
6. Chadsey (née Thompson), Mollie, correspondence.
7. Sheldon (née Davey), Alice, 1956/7 interview with Constance Babington Smith (Medmenham Collection).
8. Powys-Lybbe, Ursula, The Eye of Intelligence, p.14.
9. O’Neil (née Peat), Pat, audio recordings and conversations.
10. Introduction to A History of the Aircraft Section, May 1945 (Medmenham Collection).
11. Daniel, Glyn, Some Small Harvest, p.99.
12. Churchill, Sarah, Keep on Dancing, pp.80–1.
13. Horne (née Macalister), Elspeth, memoirs.
14. Benjamin (née Bendon), Susan, memoirs.
15. Scott, Hazel, Peace and War, p.94.
16. Grierson, Mary, conversation with Marilyn Ward, illustrations curator at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2011.
17. Harrison, Mary, IWM papers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Published Works
Abrams, Leonard, Our Secret Little War (International Geographic Information Foundation, 1991)
Babington Smith, Constance, Evidence in Camera (Chatto & Windus, 1957). A new edition was published by Sutton Publishing, Stroud, in 2004. Evidence in Camera was published in the USA as Air Spy in 1958
Barker, Ralph, Aviator Extraordinary: The Sidney Cotton Story (Chatto & Windus, 1969)
Beck, Pip, Keeping Watch: A WAAF in Bomber Command (Goodall, 1989)
Bogarde, Dirk, Snakes and Ladders (Chatto & Windus, 1978)
Brayley, Martin, World War II Allied Women’s Services (Osprey, 2001)
Byrne, Paula, Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead (Harper Press, 2009)
Cassin-Scott, Jack, Women at War 1939–45 (Osprey, 1980)
Churchill, Sarah, A Thread in the Tapestry (Andre Deutsch, 1967)
———, Keep on Dancing: an Autobiography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981)
———, The Empty Spaces (Leslie Frewin, 1966)
Coldstream, John, Dirk Bogarde: The Authorised Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004)
Conyers Nesbit, Roy, Eyes of the RAF: A History of Photo-Reconnaissance (Sutton Publishing, 1996)
Daniel, Glyn, Some Small Harvest (Thames & Hudson, 1986)
Downing, Taylor, Spies in the Sky: The Secret Battle for Aerial Intelligence during World War II (Little, Brown, 2011)
Duncan, Jane, My Friend Monica (Millrace, 2011)
———, Letter from Reachfar (Macmillan London Ltd, 1975)
Leaf, Edward, Above All Unseen: The Royal Air Force’s Photographic Reconnaissance Units 1939–1945 (Patrick Stephens Limited, 1997)
Lee, Celia, & Paul Edward Strong (eds), Women in War: From Home Front to Front Line (Pen & Sword Military, 2012)
McKinstrey, Leo, Lancaster: The Second World War’s Greatest Bomber (John Murray, 2009)
Mead, Peter, The Eye in the Air: History of Air Observation and Reconnaissance for the Army 1785–1945 (HMSO Books, 1983)
Middlebrook, Martin, & Chris Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries: An Operational Reference Book, 1939–1945 (Viking, 1985)
More Poems of the Second World War: The Oasis Collection (Dent & Sons Ltd, Everyman’s Library in association with The Salamander Oasis Trust, 1989)
Mulvagh, Jane, Madresfield: The Real Brideshead (Doubleday, 2008)
Nicholson, Mavis, What Did You do in the War, Mummy? (Chatto & Windus, 1995)
Ogley, Bob, Doodlebugs and Rockets: The Battle of the Flying Bombs (Froglets Publications, 1992)
Olson, Lynne, Citizens of London (Random House New York, 2010)
Phillips, Charles, My Life in Archaeology (Alan Sutton, 1987)
Plaisted, Arthur, The Romance of a Chiltern Village (The Village Bookshop, 1958)
Powys-Lybbe, Ursula, The Eye of Intelligence (William Kimber, 1983). Quotations are by kind permission of the copyright holder
Rice, Joan, Sand in My Shoes. Coming of Age in the Second World War: A WAAF’s Diary (HarperCollins, 2006)
Scott, Hazel, Peace and War (Beacon Books, 2006)
Searle, Adrian, PLUTO Pipe-Line Under The Ocean (Shanklin Chine, 2004)
Smith, Nigel, Tirpitz. The Halifax Raids (Air Research Publications, 1994)
Stanley, Colonel USAF, Roy M., V-Weapons Hunt: Defeating German Secret Weapons (Pen & Sword Military, 2010)
Watson, Jeffrey, The Last Plane Out of Berlin (Hodder, 2002)
Ziegler, Philip, London at War 1939–1945 (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995)
Unpublished works held by the Medmenham Collection.
Babington Smith, Constance: interview notes, papers and letters relating to Evidence in Camera, 1956–57
Cator, Francis, ‘Allied Central Interpretation Unit, Medmenham, September 1943–June 1945’
Eaton, Hamish, Captain, Intelligence Corps, ‘60 Years of Army Photographic Interpretation 1914–1974’
Historical reports on the wartime function of each section at RAF Medmenham, written in 1945 immediately after the war ended
Jones, Robert Idris, ‘Royal Air Force Days 1939–1945’
Kendall, Wing Commander RAF, Douglas, ‘A War of Intelligence’, written in 1980s
Operational Record Book for RAF Station Medmenham 1942–1947
PLATES
1 Danesfield House Hotel in Buckinghamshire. During the Second World War this was RAF Medmenham, the headquarters of Allied photographic interpretation.
2 The gardens and River Thames in 2011.
3 ‘The Airwomen’s Mess’, sketched by Mary Harrison:
‘For breakfast, sausage with baked beans,
For dinner, camouflaged with “greens”,
For tea, it finds itself in batter,
By supper – Oh, it doesn’t matter.
The Eternal Sausage.’
4 A cartoon, ‘Stereo Pair – 60% Overlap’, drawn by Flight Lieutenant Julian Phipps, a PI at RAF Medmenham.
5 Camera loading into a PR Spitfire painted in distinctive ‘Camotint’ colour. A re-enactment in 2011.
6 The Wild A-5 stereo-comparator, used for calculating exact measurements.
7 ‘WAAF Methods of Travel’:
‘I wonder if you’ve ever tried
When going for a lorry ride
To climb into it “dignified”
I did and darned near died.’
8 The Christmas dinner menu 1943, at RAF Medmenham.
9 Pantomime programme for a production at RAF Medmenham.
10 Section Officer Diana Byron (Cussons), who worked in Second Phase.
11 ‘WAAF on Parade’, illustrating the inconvenience caused by a broken suspender.
12 Evidence in Camera booklet. Produced weekly, it selectively publicised some of the best reconnaissance photographs taken during the war.
13 & 14 An imaginative programme design for the revue Out of the Blue, which had an all-female c
ast.
15 A V-1 flying bomb in flight, otherwise known as a Doodlebug.
16 The Medmenham Club was formed in 1946 ‘to preserve wartime friendships’. The lynx at the centre of the crest represents the keen-sightedness of the photographic interpreter.
17 An aerial view of Danesfield House in 2000, under reconstruction, showing the extent of the grounds and its proximity to the river.
18 Pat Peat (O’Neil) at home in Maryland, USA, in August 2009, displaying her sketch of Studley Priory in Oxfordshire, drawn in 1945 before she sailed home for demobilisation.
19 Margaret Price (Hurley) and Xavier Atencio, a ‘Disney Legend’, were both PIs at RAF Medmenham. They met again in California, USA, in December 2010.
Women of Intelligence: Winning the Second World War with Air Photos Page 28
