One of the bleakest, coldest, most northerly of the British Y stations was sited just outside Murmansk, on the north-western tip of Russia; a seaport in the Arctic Circle that stood not far from the borders of Norway and Finland, and which could boast a harbour that was free of ice. The station was established in 1941 in order to give aid to the Arctic convoys sailing through those freezing, treacherous waters, pursued by the U-boat wolf packs and by German battleships.
In the wake of Operation Barbarossa – the German invasion of Russia – and with it the violent end of the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact (the always fragile non-aggression treaty between Germany and Russia that had also contained clauses concerning the appropriation and carving up of eastern Europe), the port of Murmansk was also a means by which the Allied convoys could deliver urgently needed goods to the Russians. In this sense, the Y station suited the Soviet purpose, at least for a time. But the Russians had an extra use for it too; according to the official Bletchley Park history, it gave them valuable information about German naval transmissions. Intriguingly, also according to the official history, the paranoid Russians at one point demanded that the station be closed down, for fear that the British were spying on them; but when this was done, the Russians found that they missed the intelligence that the station generated. Soon afterwards, normal service was resumed.
Shipboard wireless telegraphist Ron Charters was sailing on HMS Bellona with the Russian convoys near the Arctic Circle at the time when the Allies were attempting to give careful support to the nervy Soviets. Charters soon became familiar both with the harshness of that region of the world, and the danger that lurked in the icy waters of the Arctic. ‘I well recall my almost stunned realisation when receiving my first U-Boat . . . message,’ he wrote. ‘There was little time to identify [it] and at the same time take a bearing on the signal.’ He had no idea how he succeeded on this first encounter but it did, he said, teach him to be fully alert. However, he was having to perform such feats of focus in appalling weather. ‘We were not allowed to sling hammocks while at sea and it was a case of using an inflated life-belt and sleeping fully dressed on any part of the deck that was free,’ he recalled.
In the midst of such conditions, the young sailors on the frozen ships did what they could to keep spirits high. On one occasion, when two ships were berthed at a Russian port in the darkness of midwinter, the rival crews set up a football match in a square that was ‘covered with ice and snow’. ‘With no available changing facilities, I, with 21 other “braves”, changed into our football strip in the open,’ said Mr Charters. The Russian locals looked on ‘more with amazement than admiration’.1
But the Y station at Murmansk was not perceived as the most attractive posting. One veteran wrote bitterly of his sojourn there: ‘Mosquito-ridden north Russia is as inhospitable as its communist inhabitants.’
A few months later, the British made great efforts to tackle the simmering distrust that clearly existed in Anglo-Soviet relations, to the extent of sending a senior military commander out to Moscow to talk directly with his Russian Y Service counterparts. There were delicate diplomatic issues: not least of which was the importance of not letting the Russians know that the British had succeeded in cracking the Enigma codes. On top of this was the barbed issue of Russian security; it was all very well the British sharing some of their valuable Y intelligence, but how could they be sure that the Soviets would not accidentally leak such intelligence to their enemies? This was later to become a diplomatic matter requiring almost superhuman skills of negotiation.
Secret listeners were also quietly active in neutral countries, picking up transmissions from enemy spies. The nature of such missions – often given not to highly trained British secret agents, but simply to young men with a firm grasp of radio expertise – was filled with intrigue and risk, and proved an invaluable means for these men to grow up very fast. One such man picked out very early for such duties was Morse and short-wave radio expert Bill Miller, who was designated a Section VIII operator.
Having completed three months’ military training on the south coast, Miller was approached quietly by his superiors and asked if he would be willing to put himself forward for special duties ‘involving overseas service’. As if this were not thrilling enough, he was then given the old cloak-and-dagger injunction not to tell any of his friends in the regiment what he had been offered. He was also told that he was to be posted to a place in Buckinghamshire called Bletchley Park.
It was here that the James Bond-esque life began in earnest, and the way Miller related it exudes a sort of quiet, carefree pride. Like Edgar Harrison before him, Miller was fully briefed by Brigadier Gambier-Parry. His mission, he was told, was to ‘proceed to San Sebastian in Spain near the French frontier.’
There, his cover story would be that he was joining the staff of the vice-consulate. Miller’s real business, however, was to set up a wireless out-station and transmit reports back to Britain on a daily basis. It went without saying that this had to be a top secret operation. German operatives transmitting from neutral territory would be slightly more lax about short-range material, and might not even bother enciphering it. For this reason, it was vital that they should not suspect that anyone in the locality was listening in on them. Furthermore, the neutral countries were extremely reluctant to allow the gathering of any form of covert intelligence on their soil; neutrality was a tricky balancing act, and the pressures upon them were great. To be caught could create serious repercussions, and cause substantial damage to related secret operations.
So, before travelling out to San Sebastian, the young and relatively inexperienced Bill Miller was sent for a short but intense course of advanced cryptography training ‘with a couple of nice young ladies’, as he put it, from MI6 HQ in Broadway Buildings, St James’s Park. This gave him a grounding in both encoding and deciphering.
One such code he had to learn with extreme care was his personal one. It was based on one of the brand new paperback books from Penguin, Poet’s Pub by Eric Linklater, and involved ‘the [book] page number and a line number to choose a couple of words or a phrase from which a grid was formed’. Miller also had to familiarise himself in painstaking detail with German officers and units, their military equipment, their tanks and guns and vehicles. In other words, he was required to take on board a very great deal in a short space of time.
At last, in early 1941, came the flight to Lisbon, and the start of his adventures. He departed from Bristol; and the world in which he landed was a far cry from everything that he had known. In Portugal there ‘was no blackout, no war, and the shops were full of fruit that had not been seen at home for a long time’, wrote his friend Geoffrey Pidgeon. ‘He could not get over the brilliant lighting everywhere, the streets, the shops, the crowds of people sitting in cafes and restaurants . . . A man from the Embassy took him out to dinner at a restaurant one night. During the meal, he muttered: “Take a discreet look at those chaps over there . . . they’re from the German embassy.”’2
This was just the start of it. Miller was then required to establish himself in Spain, which was quite a different prospect from Portugal. In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the ruling dictatorship of General Franco might prove amenable to the Germans at any point, so it was vital for Britain to know of any Nazi manoeuvres in the vicinity. The naval fleet around Gibraltar would have to be given sufficient notice to set sail in the event of German troops crossing into Spanish territory; British diplomatic interests, too, would need advance wireless warning in order to be able to burn their secret papers before the enemy arrived.
Young Miller found himself posted, with a minimal cover story, to the British consulate in Bilbao, the staff of which clearly had no wish for him to be there. The Spanish authorities had recently set down extremely stringent rules to do with forbidden wireless interception and transmission; it seemed to the consulate staff that it was altogether too obvious what Miller was, and what he would be doing.
Miller was counselled not merely to keep himself to himself, but also to avoid the attentions of young women; this was a matter of deep practicality. Of all the catches a female counter-intelligence spy might make, a wireless operator was among those of the highest value. Like all secret agents, Miller was also advised not to frequent the same bars or cafés repeatedly; it was important that he should not be noticed, or attract attention. And so this very young Englishman, operating almost independently, set up his equipment in a small back room, and began the long vigils listening in on German signals.
Young radio experts were also needed to transport vital equipment to strategic locations in Europe in order to help with the struggle against the Germans. These men would need an unusual blend of talents: both the raw bravery of the Special Operations Executive and the technical knowhow of a back-room scientist. One such man, a talented young wireless buff known to his friends as ‘Spuggy’ – real name Arthur Newton – had, after his recruitment in the 1930s by Richard Gambier-Parry, been instrumental in devising wireless equipment that could be hidden and buried in strategic locations in the event of a Nazi invasion of Britain. His love and feel for the technology made him an invaluable innovator and by 1940, he was working for the Auxiliary Intelligence Organisation under Captain Peter Fleming (the brother of Ian).
Spuggy had also designed a mobile two-way station that could be used in a Dodge car. In the early weeks of 1941, he was required for a rather more hazardous mission: carrying valuable, up-to-the-minute radio equipment to Belgrade, Yugoslavia. This meant somehow crossing a continent dominated by the Nazis and Italians. The route, of necessity, would be circuitous. Quite how circuitous no one could have predicted.
Newton’s journey involved sailing from Greenock, Scotland, and for reasons of evasive action, heading towards the North Pole. This part of the voyage was not only, as he wrote to his wife, ‘B****** cold!’ but also fraught with menace from the patrolling, invisible U-boats. Eventually the ship was able to set a more southerly course. Some weeks later, with its engines failing, the vessel reached the harbour of Freetown on the coast of west Africa; from there, Spuggy, still caring for his precious radio cargo like a mother hen with chicks, was obliged to load everything on to a rickety plane that was to sweep his party across the Belgian Congo. An encounter with a tornado forced the pilot to ditch the plane miles off course – the emergency landing clipping the tops off trees – and Spuggy and his equipment found themselves in a wilderness near Stanleyville where they were taken in by missionaries.
This accident-prone journey across Africa finally came to its conclusion in Cairo, as a rather crusty Spuggy, always on the lookout for somewhere to get a proper wash, made preparations to sail to Athens on a boat filled with New Zealand soldiers. Some days later, in April 1941, Spuggy was established in Athens (passing ships, as it were, with his fellow Y Service operative Edgar Harrison, though of course Spuggy’s mission was onwards to Yugoslavia): at that time, Spuggy wrote home to his wife to inform her of his excruciatingly slow progress to Belgrade. The letter gives a vivid flavour of the near-anarchic atmosphere of Mediterranean Europe as the Nazi shadow grew longer:
The days after Yugoslavia told Germany to go to hell, imprisoned the Government, turned out Prince Paul and started mobilising, I had to go to Belgrade. Had stacks of baggage too! Caught a train Monday 4.30 a.m. and arrived in Salonika at 2 a.m. the following day. Went to hotel – had two hours sleep – then up again to catch another train for the Greek/Yugoslav frontier. Got across border and changed for Belgrade.
Arrived . . . 4.30 p.m. Wednesday after a nightmare journey. Train was packed with troops with women and children crying in the corridors. There was no food.
I delivered all the bags (with the valuable radio equipment) but was told to get out fast and to take the midnight train out from Belgrade to Greece. It turned out to be the last train. Crossed the Greek frontier at Salonika before Jerry invaded Greece.
As it happened, Spuggy’s timing was acute; with the Germans advancing, Athens was in a state of near collapse. It was vital that he get out. But how? As an air raid started, he hurried down to the docks, thinking he might be able to hop on to a destroyer that was scheduled to be there. The ship in question did not materialise and time was running ever shorter. Spuggy managed to find a place on a refugee boat that was sailing for Alexandria, his fellow passengers terrified children and women.
‘Had loads of bags and equipment and had to load this myself,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘which meant heaving out a derrick, tying all my boxes on to the end of the guy and then running up the ship and working the winch.’ All of this very much against the clock. ‘After sweating and struggling for half an hour in the boiling sun, I was a mess.’3
Ever preoccupied with hygiene, Spuggy ‘managed to scrounge a wash’ from the ship’s engineer. Then it became apparent to him just how terrible the conditions on board were for the petrified evacuees: on a boat designed to carry six passengers, there were now 200 people with ‘no food’, ‘limited water’ and – at best – sparse lavatorial arrangements. Thankfully for Spuggy, there was the solace of some smuggled spirits; and he found himself a corner under a lifeboat cover. The boat was strafed by German fighter pilots, who dive-bombed and fired machine guns at the open deck; miraculously, there were no casualties.
The ordeal at sea went on for three days and three nights; when Spuggy and his shipmates arrived safe in port at Alexandria, he was able to return to Cairo and deliver the diplomatic bags and equipment that he had picked up in Belgrade. One might think he would be grateful for this deliverance, and for the relative peace of Egypt. But he confided to his wife as soon as he got there that he was ‘fed up to the teeth’ with it.
But what impresses now is the idea of a young man from Durham moving through this war-ravaged world with such apparent insouciance; his genius clearly lay not merely in the art of radio communication, but also personal communication. This ability to extemporise – while remaining completely imperturbable – was shared by some of his other radio-minded colleagues.
For Harold Everett at Beaumanor, a young corporal with 110 Wireless Intelligence Section, the prospect of Egypt loomed somewhat unexpectedly. ‘Six of us were being sent to Cairo from our highly secret and closely guarded intelligence school in the Midlands,’ he wrote. Not only that: for reasons of security and discretion, they were being sent via warship, rather than the more basic troop carrier. The six men clambered aboard HMS Shropshire at Glasgow; they were to find the interregnum at sea both extraordinary and a little like a dream.
For these young men and women, such voyages marked transitional moments in their lives. Because the nature of the work they were to do was cerebral rather than physical – and because there was not much they could do throughout the course of the long journeys but relax – they had time to reflect, while at the same time their eyes were opened to the wider, more colourful world beyond Great Britain.
Everett described moments of comedy:
When we reached a specified latitude, the order was issued to don tropical kit. We soldiers emerged in the sartorial splendour provided by the War Office. We caused quite a stir as I imagine that the uniforms were left over from the Battle of Omdurman. Long, narrow, tight fitting jackets with high collars and real drain-pipe trousers for evening wear and some enormous long baggy shorts for daytime. These shorts [were] known as Bombay Bloomers.
Such voyages were, nevertheless, naturally jagged with jeopardy. There was alarm on board HMS Shropshire when it appeared that the biggest and most feared German battleship, the Tirpitz, was bearing down upon the convoy. In the end, it turned out to have been a misread signal (highlighting in a small way the need for complete accuracy). But Everett also noted that in an enclosed community like a warship, rumours were rife, and spread like lightning. The ship sailed to Sierra Leone, where one RAF passenger suddenly, and without warning, became manic with a clasp knife; the man had to be overpowered, sedated, and taken to hospital in Freetown.
Everett and his colleagues were then transferred to another ship for the next leg of their increasingly exotic journey:
We had no duties, the weather was glorious and the sea calm. I remember lounging in a chair on the foredeck in the hot sunshine reading a book I had found on board and watching the flying fishes. One day we were hit by a tropical storm – lightning of an intensity I had never seen before. Some chaps stripped off and enjoyed a refreshing shower in the cascading rain.
They arrived at the Gold Coast, where ‘we were reminded that the Empire “on which the sun never set” was still a reality, as demonstrated by the sight of Government House with the Union Flag waving proudly from a flagstaff’. The voyage continued around the west coast of Africa, until finally it was time for a spell on a flying boat, which took Everett and his colleagues over the ‘dark green impenetrable mass’ of the jungle, a sight that he found ‘unutterably sinister’.4 By the time he arrived in Egypt, this quick-witted, good-humoured young Englishman was almost a citizen of the world.
Another young man who had his eyes opened to a hitherto unsuspected world during a voyage through the Mediterranean was eighteen-year-old Victor Newman, who hailed from Weybridge in Surrey. After Mr Newman’s months of training in the arts of interception, he was at last to set sail with twenty or so of his squad on board HMS Gambia. This voyage to the Far East took in pit stops that he remembers with almost lurid clarity even now.
‘We stopped off very briefly in Gibraltar, and then Alexandria. We only had about five hours ashore in Alexandria.’ This was enough time to establish the sort of English presence – young men in a tight-knit group – that is greeted with wariness by so many Mediterranean bar owners even today. ‘There were five of us in a gaggle, and we walked around the place, and then we realised we had to get back to the docks so we got this horse-drawn buggy and it took us down to the docks. But we didn’t have any money. A terrible argument ensued with the driver when we told him we didn’t have any money. The sergeant at the gate had to get involved.’
Nor did the tale end happily. ‘The driver didn’t get any money,’ says Mr Newman, with a shade of remorse in his voice.
‘Then we sailed through the Suez Canal,’ he continues. ‘We sailed the Red Sea and for some reason, we hove to for a while there. We were told then that we could go swimming if we wanted, so we did – swimming in the Red Sea!’
Meanwhile, a bus was sent to pick up Harold Everett and his fellow operatives from a transit camp on their arrival in Cairo. It took them to MI8 HQ in Heliopolis. Everett had been travelling for weeks. But, as he wrote, ‘I was not destined to stay there very long. Many journeys lay ahead of me in many countries. My odyssey had really only just begun.’
Throughout the late autumn of 1941, the drums of approaching battle were sounding ever louder in Malaya and the Far East. The British colony of the Malayan peninsula held much that the Japanese needed: not merely was it in an excellent strategic position, it was also a land rich in rubber and metals – Japan of course lacked so many vital resources of its own. In order to fight a war successfully, to have a land such as Malaya within its grasp would have been invaluable.
According to various accounts, only a very few within the British ranks understood exactly the nature of the threat to Malaya and Singapore; and these few were countered by stubborn colonial diehards who waved away any suggestion of imminent danger. Nor, from the wireless interception point of view, was there any concrete clue as to the enemy’s intentions. Certainly the listening station and Special Liaison Unit in Singapore were tracking messages to do with an ever more restless Japanese navy, while contending with ever-shifting ciphers. But even a decrypted message cannot always convey clarity. In some cases, the Japanese navy disguised the meaning of their communications by assigning certain operations code words from weather reports. Thus if a cryptographer were to receive a naval message that apparently said simply ‘Westerly winds, rain’, they could not be expected to guess that ‘winds’ and ‘rain’ were special terms used to denote the British, and Japanese intentions towards them.
For a young woman hailing from a quietly prosperous English provincial town like Norwich, Singapore was not an easy posting. Even without the looming catastrophe to come, this part of the world offered a great many challenges. Joan Dinwoodie had signed up for the Wrens and undergone the usual wireless telegraphy course, as well as lessons in rudimentary Japanese. Then came the voyage, which was punctuated by more than one fraught episode. ‘I shared a cabin with three other girls,’ she recalled. ‘A few days after leaving, we were attacked by a Focke Wolf aircraft. Expecting to be sunk, two of us rushed back to our cabin and ate a whole box of Black Magic chocolates, as they were so hard to get.’
Then there was the station at Singapore itself:
The working conditions . . . were dreadful. We worked in four hour watches in wooden huts with no windows and very little ventilation. It was extremely hot and humid and the perspiration ran down our faces, arms, bodies and into our shoes. Personnel from all three services worked together gathering and intercepting Japanese naval signals, coded and plain language signals and passing them on to Bletchley Park . . . One of the thunderstorms that were a regular afternoon feature blew four of the wireless sets and killed two of the Chinese coolies. After this we were double banked with experienced operators and had to adjust to Morse as the Japanese sent it.
It had to be admitted, though, that life was not unremittingly grim; such colonies held out a few exotic consolations. ‘Although we were working very hard in difficult conditions and with different watches we still managed to have a very full social life,’ remembered Mrs Dinwoodie. ‘We visited the hotels – namely the Adelphi, the Rex and of course Raffles for dancing and dining. We visited rubber estates, toured [the city of] Johore Bahru, attended a Tamil wedding, and the Tiger Balm Botanical Gardens.’ These, it must be reiterated, were experiences that would never before have been open to young women from such a background; in years past, only the very rich would have been able to tour and take their leisure in this way. Joan Dinwoodie was among the very first women from a more staid middle-class background to see such things.
We also swam, played tennis and sailed whenever possible. We also went to the cinema and some of the films we saw included, ‘First Love’, ‘Edison the Man’. During this time I met a Royal Air Force pilot named Rich and we started spending a great deal of our free time together. On one of our outings, on the 4th December 1941 we visited King Albert Park where Rich proposed to me.5
Tragically, the change in the air could already be sensed. Even before 7 December – the day when Japan launched the lightning, murderous assault on Pearl Harbor – everyone from the Wrens to the commanders was almost subliminally aware of a gathering feeling of oppression and menace. As Joan Dinwoodie remembered:
The Japanese air raids were now becoming more frequent and it became very obvious that as we were the only intercept station in the far east that the authorities could not risk us being captured so we would soon have to leave. At first it was suggested that we would be sent to Australia but this changed and we were told that we would be going to Colombo in Sri Lanka (Ceylon).
Yet when Japan struck Pearl Harbor, it did so with an aggression the breadth of which had scarcely been imagined. The American fleet was almost completely destroyed. There had also been attacks on other US Pacific strongholds. And throughout Malaya and in Singapore, Japanese air raids had begun to increase in both frequency and ferocity.
In late December the decision was finally taken to remove the Far East Combined Bureau from Singapore; as Joan Dinwoodie said, it was shifted to Colombo in Ceylon. Memos in the archives reveal that there had been a great deal of heated debate, illuminating both the limits of communications technology and the extent to which certain aspects of the war were a matter of discussion, and indeed of miniature power struggles. Not only were the three services constantly jostling for primacy, there were also cliques within cliques in intelligence; the wishes of Bletchley Park operatives, for instance, straining against those of military intelligence. Even with Japanese fighters strafing Singapore, and the countdown to the invasion ticking by, there had been quarrels about what to do with the wireless interception services, and where best to send them.
‘It was clear,’ states one document for the attention of Bletchley Park’s deputy director, Nigel de Grey, ‘that following the outbreak of war with the Japanese, the Sigint party at Singapore would have to evacuate somewhere . . . [some] thought Australia would provide better facilities . . . An emergency meeting of the “Y” committee was called in London and the question of Melbourne was raised.’ Also on the table was the possibility of relocating to India, to join up with Captain Marr-Johnson’s Y operation. And what of Kenya, and the out-station site at Kilindini in Mombasa?
Australia continued to seem the most attractive option; but this idea was stymied by the certainty that ‘communications between Australia and the UK were likely to go at any time and it would not be possible to get any raw material either “to” or “from” Australia.’ Meanwhile, the most obvious drawback of Ceylon, as understood by senior figures such as Nigel de Grey and Alastair Denniston, was that it might not prove safe. The idea of east Africa was mooted yet further, with discussions about the transportation of technical coding material, such as the Hollerith machines – card-operated behemoths ordinarily used for simple accounting and calculations which had a use in terms of processing encoded letters. But time ran out and the Singapore staff were posted – in the nick of time – to the naval base just south of Colombo known as HMS Anderson.
Most of the staff evacuated from Singapore immediately; a few stayed behind in order to ‘assist Army and Special Air Intelligence’. At the same time, Bletchley Park’s special liaison contingent also left: among them was Arthur Cooper, the brother of senior Bletchley codebreaker Josh Cooper. The departure of such personnel from Singapore was vital on two levels: to keep the flow of decrypts moving smoothly; and to prevent such people falling into the hands of the enemy. If interrogated, they would have a wealth of secret information to disclose under torture. As one veteran has already noted, capture in these circumstances would have meant the life of a wireless operator would no longer be worth living; and death would be both terrible and slow.
There followed weeks of ferocious fighting. On 7 February, General Percival announced that Singapore would stand to the last man, as the Japanese guns were turned on the city. Come 15 February, Singapore surrendered and over 60,000 soldiers were taken prisoner.
To this day, the fall of Singapore is an episode of Second World War history that causes many to shake their heads. We were ‘looking the wrong way’; the disgrace that was brought upon the British was almighty; and the suffering caused to so many thousands of soldiers by their Japanese captors still evokes horror.
Yet amid the carnage, the Y Service and the codebreakers, removed to Colombo, returned to work with remarkable speed; the ferocity of the Japanese onslaught appeared to have the effect of stimulating fresh, successful efforts to pierce the Japanese codes. The Far East Combined Bureau massed itself a little outside Colombo; its staff now included thirty-eight Wrens trained in Japanese wireless transmission. By March, the Bureau had managed to intercept and unscramble more Japanese signals, and its efforts were shared this time with the Americans.
And as time went on, it became apparent that as a posting, there were many worse places than HMS Anderson to be sent; indeed, a number of the young people who sailed halfway across the world to reach those shores found instantly that there was something quite enchanting about them. This was especially the case in an age of rationing.
‘HMS Anderson was well off the road,’ says Victor Newman, who arrived in Colombo some time after Singapore’s fall having beforehand rarely left his native Weybridge. ‘Every day, there was a lorry called the Liberty Boat that would take people down into Colombo. But rather than going into town, I used to enjoy going to a spot called Mount Lavinia. It was a place where you could go swimming.
‘You would see local ladies there,’ Mr Newman continues, with a note of wistfulness. ‘They would have baskets on their heads that were full of pineapples. Imagine having all that delicious pineapple juice running down your face . . . and then washing it off with a swim. It was a beautiful spot.’
There was also the eye-popping nature of the local wildlife. On the night train from the harbour at Trinacomalee, says Mr Newman, ‘I saw fireflies out the window. Millions upon millions of fireflies. I had never seen anything like that before.’
Unlike many of the Wrens who were about to arrive, Mr Newman was not keen on the lively Colombo nightlife – the local fauna once again being part of the reason: ‘You only went to the cinema in Colombo if you didn’t mind getting insect bites. After the film, you’d get up and find the underside of your legs had bites all over.’ As for other exotic sightings, ‘There was the occasional snake – I saw one on a football pitch. Then there was a large reptile like an iguana one day, which some of the locals were chasing – presumably,’ he adds with a laugh, ‘to eat it.’
Mr Newman was also – given his technical position as a wireless interceptor – suspicious of being made to take part in any form of barracks-confined military activity. ‘HMS Anderson was quite a big station – two huts on the side, canteen and the mess. They brought in a small squad of marines – and this resulted in paper raids, Sunday divisions. Our work took precedence over parades. And we could sometimes bunk off them too. They were building a new mess hall at that time and when parades came round, some of us could go in there and hide ourselves. That worked until one Sunday when we were hiding in these cupboards and got caught. We weren’t allowed to go into town for a week after that. Not,’ he adds, ‘that that was any great hardship.’
And while the Wrens in Colombo lived in rather less regimented accommodation, the men of HMS Anderson were very much enclosed within barracks. ‘Accommodation was camp beds, with mosquito nets over them. We had the blankets that we had been issued with but quite often you didn’t need them at all. When you were working, you wore shorts and short-sleeved shirts. And the mosquitoes were not a worry because down that end of the country, they were not malaria carrying. More uncomfortable for the RAF, who had to wear long-sleeved shirts and long trousers.’
Victor Newman – who, just weeks beforehand, had been working in the Home Counties countryside, in a tiny office attached to an oil-seed mill – took to his new life of colour and intensity with a readiness that older people might not have been able to match. And he was by no means alone. It would not be too long before fresh female recruits were to discover that, alongside the gruelling work, there was something magical about this part of the world that they might otherwise never have seen.