Morse Code Wrens of Station X: Bletchley's Outer Circle

Morse Code Wrens of Station X

Bletchley’s Outer Circle

Anne Glyn-Jones

Petty Officer Telegraphist,

WRNS, 1942–1945

amphorapress.com

2017 digital version converted and published by

Andrews UK Limited

www.andrewsuk.com

Copyright © Anne Glyn-Jones, 2017

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.

Amphora Press is the trade books division

of Imprint Academic Ltd.

Imprint Academic Ltd., PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK

Cover image courtesy of the Imperial War Museum,

used with permission.

Foreword by HRH The Princess Royal, Admiral Chief Commandant for Women in the Royal Navy

In 2017 we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS). During the First World War the Royal Navy became the first of the three services to recruit women. Nicknamed ‘Wrens’ the women were initially recruited to release men to serve at sea, but as the Navy expanded so did the Wrens’ responsibilities to include driving, operating radar equipment, planning naval operations, and code breaking work.

Intercepting German Morse Code signals was one of the jobs Wrens were tasked with when recruited to ‘Station X’, or Bletchley Park, and its outstations known as ‘Y Stations’. We now know just how important this undercover work was, and the Wrens played a vital part making up around 75% of the workforce.

The WRNS was integrated into the Royal Navy in 1993 but still has approximately 45,000 former members ranging in age from their thirties to their nineties. As patron of the WRNS Benevolent Trust I am delighted that Anne Glyn-Jones, now aged 94, has been able to leave us this valuable contribution to the WRNS’ history. Her bravery, tenacity and discretion are a shining example to younger women today wanting to make a contribution to society by serving those around them.

Prologue

Since the commitment to secrecy, to which we were all bound, began to be relaxed in the late 1970s, much has been said and written about the contribution to the war effort of the code-breakers of Bletchley Park. Much less has been made known about the lives and work of those without whom Bletchley Park would have had no texts on which to work, the men and women of all three Services and even beyond who became what Sinclair Mackay called, in his pioneering work of 2012, The Secret Listeners, or, as it was called (from WI, Wireless Intelligence), the Y-Branch. Some were linguists, listening to spoken enemy radio transmissions; others were telegraphists, trained in Morse communications. This memoir seeks to expand their story so far as one group was concerned - the WRNS contingent of telegraphists.

There were listening stations all over the world, facilitated by the widespread reach of the British Empire. Security ensured that those who worked at them had no idea either of the existence of Bletchley Park or of our relationship to it. I once overheard a charge-hand (they were civilian operators, who had gone into pre-war Y work on retirement from the Royal Navy) say, in relation to a problem at work, Maybe BP could help us with that one, and I presumed they were not referring to Buckingham Palace, but I did not ask, and would have been reprimanded if I had. ‘Need to know’ was always the criterion, and I did not need to know. Marion Hill’s Bletchley Park People, published in 2004, pinpoints the mindset we were required to develop. At Bletchley a 1942 security warning emphasized the importance of discretion even within Bletchley itself. Do not talk at meals. Do not talk in the transport. Do not talk travelling. Do not talk in the billet. Do not talk by your own fireside. Be careful even in your hut.

We heard only of ‘Station X’, where we presumed someone was trying, though with what degree of success we did not know, to decode the messages we so diligently transcribed. Despatch riders took away the messages we wrote down, but no one knew to what destination they rode. Transmission was later bolstered by teleprinters, and Wren teleprinter operators appeared on the scene. How messages reached Station X from overseas listening posts we had no idea.

The first crack in the security wall appeared in 1974, with the publication of F.W. Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret, and only then, more than thirty years after I got involved, did I first learn of the existence of ‘Bletchley Park’. During the 1970s, records containing Enigma/Ultra material began to be released to the Public Record Office, and this led to enquiries as to whether we were still subject to our vows of secrecy - vows which were life-long, not governed by the so-called ‘thirty years rule’. David Owen MP, then Foreign Secretary, made clear in a written answer to a question in the House of Commons in January 1978 that while it was permissible for those involved to say what they had been doing during the war, any reference to the content of their work must not go beyond what had been released to the PRO, and any information as to how the information had been obtained remained classified.

In 1979 came the first volume of F.H. Hinsley’s magisterial official history, British Intelligence in the Second World War, Vol. II of which, published in 1981, covered the story of Bletchley’s involvement in the U-boat battles in which the Wren telegraphists were so deeply engaged. Following these revelations, a leading British military historian, commissioned by Oxford University Press to write a definitive history of the Y-Branch, contacted some of us for help, and we asked the then Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, where we stood. Though by now a trickle of books was beginning to appear, and presumably receiving clearance, we were referred back to David Owen’s restrictive guidance of 1978. The historian sadly died in 1984, so that ended the possibility of seeing our story told.

Throughout the 1980s the Bletchley site remained neglected, the huts sinking into dereliction and the site attracting development interest for housing. In May 1991 the Bletchley Archaeological and Historical Society formed a committee to trace Bletchley veterans for a Farewell Party designed to put final closure to Bletchley’s wartime story. Over 100 people came, and their reminiscences led to the determination to save the site as a memorial to the work that had been done there. In February 1992 the Bletchley Park Trust was formed, and by arrangement with the landlords, the site was opened to visitors in 1994. Anxious negotiations and fund-raising over the next five years led to the site being permanently secured in June 1999. Central to the Trust’s ambitions was the reconstruction of Colossus, described as the world’s first programmable computer, brilliantly devised in the early 1940s by Tommy Flowers, a post office engineer, but completely destroyed at the end of the war together with all other evidence of Bletchley’s activities. Tony Sale, an electronics engineer, not only successfully achieved this reconstruction (completed in 2007), but also served as the Trust’s Secretary and was appointed the Trust’s security liaison officer.

By then, in 1993, the first formal reunion of Y-Branch operators had assembled at Bletchley, some half-century after the activity that had formed their joint experience. Of course, small groups of friends had always kept in social touch, and there was an active ‘Tels(S) Association’, largely composed of operators formerly working in the Far East, but the Bletchley Reunion was a formally organized occasion covering all activities pursued at Bletchley, with lectures and much exchange of information. The following year, in the autumn of 1994, the Second Reunion attracted some 250 veterans, who enjoyed a weekend of talks that widened many restricted horizons. The Trust, through Tony Sale, was now actively seeking reminiscences from veterans, and authority to talk was sought from GCHQ, who in December 1994 gave qualified approval, notifying us that the dispensation from the obligation of confidentiality (under the Official Secrets Act) about your work relates only to this undertaking and to discussions about it with Mr Sale, who was himself bound to use documentary material only as authorized by GCHQ’s security officer. Since we, on the listening stations, knew absolutely nothing about Colossus, this dispensation did little to liberate us.

In January 1999, acknowledging considerable help from the Bletchley Park Trust, Channel Four broadcast a four-episode series on ‘Station X’. This remarkably explicit account, still available on YouTube, included fascinating contributions from well-placed participants, German as well as British. Surely there was nothing within our deliberately limited experience left to protect?

Another decade was to pass before official liberation finally arrived. In July 2009 came the announcement that a commemorative medal was to be issued to all who had worked at Bletchley Park and its outstations. The letter inviting us to apply included an invitation to write down any memories you have of your time working in Signals Intelligence. You may consider anything that happened before VJ Day as unclassified. No archive material had survived the post-war expurgation. There was no record of what life was like, whether at Bletchley or on the Y stations. What hours did we work? What were our working conditions like? How did we occupy our free time? What kind of people were we? I began to put my recollections together.

Long ago, shortly after the war, I had written an account of a rather different narrative, the story of how the Royal Navy took a gaggle of young green schoolgirls and turned us into useful naval ratings. To give context to our adventures, I had made guarded references to what we were doing, and since this touched on classified material, I submitted the text to the Admiralty for clearance. It was not given. The text was duly relegated to the back of the proverbial drawer. That document, rather than an exceptionally good tenth-decade memory, is the source of the events of almost seventy years ago here described, supplemented by the material consigned to paper only after 2009.

My medal - in truth a lapel brooch - duly arrived, together with a certificate. It stated: The Government wishes to express to you its deepest gratitude for the vital service you performed during World War II, and was signed by Gordon Brown, the then Prime Minister.

I was astonished. What did ‘The Government’ have to do with it? We had not joined up to serve Mr. Chamberlain, or Mr. Attlee, or even Mr. Churchill, so why did their successors think they were in a position to thank us? We had made our oath of allegiance to the Sovereign, as a symbol of the Nation and all it stood for. ‘King and Country’ was not an idle phrase. I remembered a day in the summer of 1941, wandering in the Nadder Valley in Wiltshire, when the sun was warm and the fields golden to harvest, and knowing for sure that I would die before I would consent to see Nazi jackboots bestriding that farmland. It had nothing to do with ‘The Government’. It would not have been so strange if the citation had said ‘Her Majesty’s Government’, suggesting the politicians were, alongside us, serving the Nation as personified by the Monarch, but that’s not what it said. For 30p I found a suitable frame in the local charity shop, and hung my certificate in the downstairs loo.

Clearly, in the many decades that have passed since WWII, there has been a sea-change in the Nation’s political mindset. And not only in politics. These reminiscences bristle with attitudes and assumptions that will seem alien to many today. Autres temps, autres mœurs. Let the following pages stand as a testimonial to a world that, for better or worse, is long gone.

A Salted Innocence

It was in 1930 that I first left home to go to sea. I was seven years old.

The cook had scolded me for being under her feet in the kitchen. My mother was busy entertaining visitors in the drawing-room. My little sister threw water from the cold tap at me, so I threw scalding water from the hot tap at her, but she screamed and made a fuss, and when the cook and the nursery-maid heard what had happened, they consoled her and scolded me, which was patently unfair, since she had started the whole thing. There had been several incidents like that, and it was clear to me that everyone preferred my sister to me. There was nothing for it but to run away to sea, like the cabin boys in the various adventure stories I was reading at the time.

I filled a paper bag with cake. In our household we had bread and butter and jam for tea (after First Piece Plain), and one slice of cake, except on Sundays when we could have two slices of cake, because it was a feast day. Two biscuits counted as one piece of cake. But because I was leaving home for good, I felt I deserved something special. I put no bread and butter in the bag, only cakes. It was as special as the day when the doctor’s little son gave a birthday party, and there was on the table no bread at all, only cakes and biscuits - a truly memorable birthday party, I still remember the thrill, and it happened over eighty-five years ago.

About a mile and a half from home, half way through the Buckinghamshire village nearest our home, I climbed over the stile by the village church, and sat among the squidgy cowpats in a buttercup field. It sloped down to a stream, where rooks were cawing among pollarded trees. I ate the cakes.

The clock on the church steeple struck four. The door of the village school opened, and the children came bursting noisily out. They’re going home, I thought. In spite of myself, I felt envious. Their mothers would be waiting for them at home, with tea. As for me, I did not know quite where the sea was, I had finished all the cake, and I had nothing to take with me into my new life but an empty paper bag.

I swallowed my pride and went home. The great gesture had passed unnoticed. Tea was waiting on the nursery table, and no one even asked where I had been.

Eleven years later, for rather different reasons, I tried again. This time there was no going back, and I ate my tea in the WRNS training establishment in Plymouth. I had become a probationary Wren.

Chapter I: Sea Fever

So I started to scrub.

If there had been no war, I might have gone to Switzerland to be Finished. I needed it. But instead I went into the Navy, so naturally I took up scrubbing.

Later in the war, initial training for Wrens became complex and highly organized, but at the start of 1942 only two things were required: a reasonable proficiency at squad drill, and a superior proficiency at scrubbing. I loved both. My hands grew raw and the knuckles cracked as I scrubbed and scrubbed in the January cold. I did not mind. I had always known that the Navy scrubbed its decks, and that is exactly what I scrubbed - decks. Of course at boarding school we had called them floors, and if anyone scrubbed them it must have been the maids, but that little change in nomenclature made all the difference.

There were snags of course. There was, for instance, the Spiral Scrub, and a Probationary Wren called Rosemary was caught in its convolutions on the very first day. She scrubbed along the skirting boards right round the room, and then proceeded in diminishing circles until she found she was trapped on a little dry island in the centre with no escape and nowhere to kneel while she scrubbed the remaining dry patch.

But we learnt. I broadened my knowledge of naval terminology by learning the names of all the rooms through which we scrubbed - the fo’c’s’le, the galley, the cabins, the Mess. I became an Instructor Scrubber, showing even newer recruits how it was done. I carried coals, waited at table, and did a great deal of washing-up, though the washing-up was not strictly speaking necessary, at least not to the extent to which I indulged in it. The trouble was that quite often the stewards burst into the fo’c’s’le after meals and said Volunteers for washing-up. The old hands among the Wrens continued to sit in their chairs (recliner, ratings, for the use of), knees nonchalantly crossed, fingers tapping the ash from a cigarette,