Madge Barnes ran along the Edinburgh cobbles and, with a flutter of adrenaline, dropped the envelope into a postbox. It was not the first time the teenager had applied to join the Wrens. A year earlier, on the eve of her seventeenth birthday and less than a week after the outbreak of war, she had sent much the same application letter to London. The eventual reply, that Barnes was, alas, too young, had stung, but at least the rejection was temporary. A year later, a week or so before the City of Benares left Liverpool, Barnes promptly re-sent her application. It was timed to arrive at Wrens headquarters in London on 5th September 1940, the day of her eighteenth birthday.
Barnes was one of tens of thousands of young women who sent off similar applications for, initially, one of just 1,500 vacancies in the Wrens. Christian Oldham was another. Having attempted to bandage her step-grandfather’s bald head as a try-out, Oldham had decided that nursing was not for her, and chose the Wrens instead. Oldham had a twin advantage in securing one of the hotly contested spots. Not only was her father an admiral, but her bridge partner was Colonel Frank, brother of Vera Laughton Mathews. And Laughton Mathews, or VLM as she was often called, was the newly appointed director of the Wrens.
Vera Laughton Mathews had joined the first incarnation of the Wrens, formed in 1917 to support the First World War effort, in her late twenties after reading an advertisement in The Times under the headline: ‘Women for the Navy: New Shore Service to Be Formed’. Like Barnes, it was not the first time that she applied. Three years earlier, in 1914, long before there was any talk of allowing women to share the work of naval men, she strode up to the imposing Admiralty building and asked for a job. The man on the front desk looked her up and down and replied, curtly: ‘We don’t want any petticoats here.’
The rejection bounced off Laughton Mathews, who since the age of twenty had been involved with the suffragette movement, fighting for women’s right to vote, and who often boasted that she was descended from pirates on both sides of her family.1 Principled, idealistic and usefully confrontational–the necessary characteristics for any young activist–Laughton Mathews felt the full force of society’s prejudice just as she was entering the adult world. While standing at the side of the road handing out issues of the Suffragette newspaper, on which she worked as a journalist, passers-by would spit in her face.
With characteristic eagerness, Laughton Mathews showed up at the first temporary Wrens office on the same day that she read the advertisement in The Times. Three women in plain clothes–including the inaugural director of the Wrens, Dame Katherine Furse, a ‘tall, handsome, athletic woman who, despite her youth, had the quiet, determined authority that accompanies a natural leader–conducted the interview. Laughton Mathews volunteered the nugget that she had been a suffragette. As her interviewers’ faces darkened, she tried to make amends with mention that she also had a brother in the navy.
‘Ah,’ said one of the women, witheringly. ‘Does that mean you also have lots of boyfriends in the service?’
Despite her fears, Laughton Mathews had not in fact thrown the interview. She was told to enrol on the first Wrens officers’ course, scheduled for the end of December. The next month, she arrived at an old naval training facility in Crystal Palace–the only naval establishment at the time that was willing to receive a woman officer–wearing a bottle-green coat and beige hat (an official uniform was some way off, and the stylish haute-couture cut of the later Wrens uniform decades away). The Wrens’ motto at the time was ‘Never At Sea’, a pledge that also carries with it a sort of negative space assurance: we know our place. What other organisation is defined by what its members are forbidden from doing, rather than what they hope to achieve? Nevertheless, 7,000 women joined the Wrens in the First World War, more than double the anticipated number. In addition to cooking and clerical work, they performed an array of duties. At the Anti-Aircraft Defence Corps, Wrens worked as telephonists calling up gun stations during air raids to pass on orders for gunfire and barrage. At the Battersea Experimental Workshops, Wrens were employed in drawing, tracing and preparing designs for new machinery and weapons. Seventy Wrens worked as drivers for the Admiralty.2
Then the war was over. Just a year after Laughton Mathews had read the advertisement in The Times, the training depot at Crystal Palace became an Army Demobilisation Centre. Before the last of the recruits had been demobbed, Laughton Mathews fell victim to influenza, the great plague spread by the Great War in France, where men fought in trenches that flowed with blood, rats and urine, before returning in their infected millions to their home countries around the world. By the time the virus had run its course, almost three years later, as many as 100 million people had died–a higher toll than that of both world wars combined.
The pandemic’s symptoms were like spells cast by a cruel yet imaginative witch. Most commonly, hands and faces turned a pale shade of lavender, the result of a condition known as heliotrope cyanosis. After a few days, some victims’ skin turned black, before their hair and teeth fell out. Others gave off a curious smell, like musty straw. One medic described seeing men choking to death, ‘the lungs so swamped with blood, foam and mucus that… each desperate breath was like the quacking of a duck’. The American novelist Katherine Anne Porter survived, but the disease permanently turned her ebony hair pure white.
Laughton Mathews suffered a milder form of the flu. But her younger brother Hubert, who had been wounded and gassed in the Battle of Le Cateau in northern France, died of it two weeks after the Armistice. Laughton Mathews, who was closer to Hubert than any other member of her family, went to Edinburgh to grieve and recuperate. By the time she recovered, the Wrens had been disbanded. Without war, there was no need for women to take the jobs of men. Despite its brevity, the impact of the service was great, not only on the war effort but also on women’s liberation. The first incarnation of the Wrens had managed to crack, as Laughton Mathews once put it, ‘the ice of age-old prejudice.’
Between the wars, Laughton Mathews married and, for a time, moved to Japan. The friendships she made during her brief stint in the Wrens persisted and soon blossomed into a formal alumni group. Laughton Mathews edited its monthly magazine, the Wren. Dame Furse, one of the women who had interviewed Laughton Mathews, looked at this nostalgia with scepticism, believing it to be an indulgent invitation to live in the past. Rather than turn her back on the movement she pioneered, however, Furse established a naval-themed branch of the Girl Guides, which eventually came to be known, with a Boy’s Own-style flourish, as the Sea Rangers.
The Sea Rangers attracted naval super-fans, young girls who dreamed of learning to tie complicated knots, deliver signals and of, just maybe, one day going to sea. Nautical terms were used for everything, and drills were directed with a bosun’s whistle. The first company, like all those that would follow, took the name of a famous ship, in its case the ‘Golden Hind’. Laughton Mathews ran the second company, which she titled ‘Wren’ after the new destroyer HMS Wren. She would take the girls camping, rowing and swimming, and taught them signalling and first aid. After a brief stint in local politics, Laughton Mathews took over leadership of the ‘Golden Hind’, a crew that consisted mostly of young London working girls, including a bright insurance clerk named Jean Laidlaw.
Laidlaw, short, pretty, with a dark, Tinkerbell-pixie-bob, grew up in Scotland, where her father was an electrical engineer working on the tram system. She left the fee-paying High School of Glasgow when the family ran into financial difficulties and moved 400 miles south to Maida Vale, London.3 The Sea Rangers offered Laidlaw–a lonely young woman living in an unfamiliar city, who, at a time when homosexuality was still treated as a crime by the state and a sin by the church, was confronted with the unthinkable yet in-escapable fact that she was attracted to women–the chance to make a new group of friends, some of whom she would keep up with for the remainder of her life. In the dim, misty hours before the working day began, Laughton Mathews took Laidlaw and the other girls boating on the lake at Regent’s Park, where they learned to sail as, in the encircling roads, the day’s traffic gathered.
With age, experience and the roomy perspective that comes with having travelled, Laughton Mathews’ guiding conviction–that ‘at the root of much that was wrong with the world’ lay the lack of equal partnership and opportunity for women–deepened. She gave evidence before the House of Lords on a bill to raise the legal age of marriage to sixteen, to prevent the exploitation of girls and, later, on the question of whether or not to allow women to apply to become diplomats. Still, as war loomed it seemed as though the Admiralty had no intention of reforming the Wrens until, in 1938, with the navy facing widespread staff shortages, the government issued a booklet to every British household explaining how men and women might offer themselves to national service. As well as advertising positions for women to serve as air-raid wardens, ambulance drivers and first-aiders, this Handbook for National Service explained that there was a position for around 1,500 women to serve as secretaries, accountants, cooks and waitresses in naval establishments. Fifteen thousand women responded, but there was no one to sift through their applications.
On 22nd February 1939, Laughton Mathews walked through the tunnel that leads from what was then Trafalgar Square tube station toward the Admiralty, her heart thumping as she approached the doors from which, twenty-two years earlier, she had been turned away on account of being a ‘petticoat’.
This time, the experience was quite different. Laughton Mathews was led into the salubrious room of the secretary of the Admiralty, Sir Archibald Carter. The room filled up with distinguished men and other ex-Wrens officers. Seated at an expansive round table, the gathering’s discussion was halted when the grander of the two doors into the room opened and Laughton Mathews saw, framed in the doorway, Charles Little, the Second Sea Lord, standing ‘like a god’. Little sat quietly, listening to the discussions, as the group began to pick over the question of what this new women’s service might be called. Unanimously, the conference members agreed that the old name of Women’s Royal Naval Service was not only unimprovable, but also now carried with it the traditions and glories of the First World War. A. S. Lemaitre–head of the Civil Service and a man with, as Laughton Mathews later put it, ‘a sparkling brain’–suggested officialising the colloquial acronym ‘Wrens’.
There was silence. Then, all at once, the crowd agreed on the brilliance of the branding. Laughton Mathews did not know it but throughout the meeting the other attendees, who believed that she might be a suitable candidate to lead these Wrens, were observing her. A few days later she received a phone call inviting her back to the Admiralty. Once again, she sat at the round table in the imposing room, this time across from Sir Archibald, who promptly offered her the job. It is one of the twentieth century’s great curiosities that a branch of the British naval establishment, one of the most conservative organisations in the world, should come to be led by a battle-scarred activist and self-identifying feminist, and should prove so astonishingly successful.
Late one evening at the end of December 1940, Laughton Mathews was passing the deserted offices on her way home when she saw a light from beneath one of the doors. Inside she found Laidlaw, her former Sea Ranger, who, at twenty-one, had become a chief Wren, poring over a stack of papers. Laidlaw, a keen statistician who was also one of England’s first female qualified chartered accountants, had been calculating the number of Wrens currently in service. At war’s outbreak in September 1939, there had been 1,600 recruits, more than half of the number that Laughton Mathews had estimated would be required.4 Now, a little over a year later, Laidlaw ran her finger down the columns to rest on the final total, which read, implausibly, 10,000 recruits, exactly.*
Madge Barnes, who received her letter shortly after her eighteenth birthday, and Christian Oldham were among these early recruits. Both women were asked to report to London for a medical examination. Next, they were interviewed by a very senior and, at just five feet, very short Wren, Nancy Osborne, who assessed their potential suitability for one of the vacancies in the service.
Osborne, an Australian polymath, had come to England in 1932 after being rejected for a job with one of Sydney’s top newspapers (‘A woman?’ the editor had exclaimed. ‘On my newspaper? Never, never!’).5 With a letter of recommendation in her pocket, Osborne met a recently retired principal of a Cambridge college, who advised her to take a shorthand-typing course, obtain a job in an office, then ‘lose the typewriter’. (‘Oh, Perfidious Albion,’ Osborne recalled murmuring under her breath.) Osborne nevertheless took the advice, joined the National Council of Social Service and, after a brief stint working as a typist, earned a promotion to oversee an arts programme, building local village halls, then furnishing them with high-quality music and drama events. Osborne was one of the first women to join Laughton Mathews’ Wrens, first building up the headquarters staff to a hundred, then dispatching young Wrens like Oldham and Barnes around the country.
Oldham, who spoke fluent French and wrote faltering Latin, was sent to a former London University building in Campden Hill Road, where she reluctantly attempted to learn to touch-type. To break the monotony, she would spend the evenings tearing around Hyde Park on a motorbike, riding pillion with an old school friend who was also on the course. Barnes, meanwhile, was sent to Greenwich, to be trained as a cypher officer decoding signals that, among other things, would report the positions of U-boats in the Atlantic, positions that, in months to come, Oldham would pin to the plots.
At the Wrens training college in Greenwich, Madge Barnes joined a cohort of other young recruits to learn not only nautical terms and naval traditions, but also, in that nobly stifling British way, the rules of civility and decorum. In the Painted Hall, a room of tear-jerking beauty designed by Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor as part of the Restoration palace for Charles II and his heirs, Barnes ate breakfast, lunch and dinner from long, silver-candlestick-laden tables each day. Naval staff waited on the Wrens, treatment that contributed to Barnes’s blushing sense that she had passed into a new and elevated world, a place where it was quite reasonable to suggest that there was a right way and a wrong way to eat a pea.
During the ten-day training course Barnes, along with dozens of other bright young women, was trained in deciphering naval signals–secret work that demanded quick wits and tight lips (‘Be like Dad, keep Mum’ read one handout, now painfully of its time), memorising cyphers that would report the position of British ships and, if they had been spotted, that of any U-boats in their vicinity. On graduating, she was sent to Scarborough where, as the war continued, more and more Wrens would congregate in a secret underground hall on Irton Moor, today inhabited by Government Communications Head-quarters (GCHQ), intercepting and decoding U-boat radio signals.*
For all the wolfpack’s power and menace, it had one key weakness. In order to organise their U-boats for an attack, the captains needed to communicate at regular intervals, initially to report the sighting of a convoy, and then to invite other boats to join. Even in the midst of battle, requests often came in for U-boats to announce the result of specific attacks, fuel and torpedo stocks and, thanks to those helium-filled condoms, to issue weather reports. These signals, when picked up by Allied shore stations, acted as clues to the U-boats’ whereabouts. By triangulating the signal from two sources, a fairly accurate location could be determined, and the estimated position of the U-boat pinned to the plotting maps around the navy’s various premises.
Many U-boat captains, suspecting that their radio signal was being used to find them, refused to answer more mundane requests from Nazi command for up to three days, the threshold after which the U-boat crew’s families would be informed they were missing, presumed sunk. There was one notable exception to the rule. Occasionally, after a fortnight’s cavorting while on leave in the French ports, news would arrive via the U-boat’s radio that one of the crew had got a girl pregnant. The man would be expected to ask the woman to marry him. The U-boat’s patrol, however, could not be interrupted or cut short. As such, the exchange of wedding vows would be organised remotely, over the radio. Each party would exchange the words ‘I do’ at the appropriate moment in the proceedings, which were conducted by a priest.6 Any Wren who decoded the message, usually sent from Scarborough to Station X, the code name given to Bletchley Park, would have been bewildered by the exchange.
The Hotel Cecil became Barnes’s home in Scarborough, a so-called Wrennery, where all of the cypher Wrens were housed. It was a tall, comfortable building overlooking a park and, beyond that, the sea. Only a few of the young women shared rooms; most were given the luxury of their own space and, in the warm summer evenings, would congregate on a knoll in the park to read or chat in the flattering light of the golden hour. The young Wrens came from across the country, typically from middle-class families. The work was tiring, and the Wrens kept unusual sleeping hours, making different friends at different times, according to the watches they were asked to keep.
For all of war’s great horrors, service in the Wrens offered these women an unexpected freedom from the strictures of their previous lives, where they were subject to the rules of their Victorian fathers. For many young men the Second World War wiped out a multitude of possibilities. For many young women, however, war obliterated previously impenetrable barriers. In assuming an active role in the war effort, Wrens slipped the expectation to marry early, remain at home and bear children at the earliest opportunity. Joining the Wrens was something akin to setting off for university, a profound loosening of the centuries-old constriction of female prospects. For these girls–and many were still girls–war’s secondary effects had to do with liberation, excitement and possibility.
‘It gave me my first taste of freedom,’ wrote one Wren after the war. ‘Before the Wrens, I’d had to account for everything–where I was going, who with, and what time I’d be home. You didn’t really think about it until you had a chance to be much freer.’7 Even in war, when a young person’s range in the world expands, thoughts of death retreat. As well as the long hours, the endless drills and the burdensome stakes, there was also freedom to be young. The women sang. The women tried out falling in love. And when news came that the Wrens were looking for volunteers to form a delegation of cypher officers to sail for sunny Gibraltar, Barnes and all the other women excitedly applied.
This was an important posting for Vera Laughton Mathews, one of the first delegations of Wrens to represent the service abroad (the first had left for Singapore a few months earlier). Moreover, the signals officer at Gibraltar didn’t want women. He pleaded for the navy to send men instead, only accepting the Wrens when he was told it was women or nothing.8 The posting felt like a microcosm of the wider world’s resistance to women in spaces typically occupied by men. As such, Laughton Mathews personally selected the ten chief Wrens and twelve cypher officers from a long list of keen volunteers. These women were, in Laughton Mathews’ estimation, the most promising young officers of the service.
On 12th June 1941, nine months after the sinking of the City of Benares, twenty-one-year-old Phyllis Bacon, one of Barnes’s friends and another incumbent of the Hotel Cecil, wrote to a friend, incredulous with the news that she had been hand-picked by Laughton Mathews to sail to Gibraltar.9
‘I can’t THINK how we did it,’ Phyllis wrote. ‘Except perhaps they approved of my skirt, specially lengthened about four feet for the occasion, and my thick–very thick–stockings.’ The women were given coupons with which to acquire light, cotton clothes and ‘bright sandals’ appropriate for the Mediterranean climate. The trip, however, was to remain a secret. The Wrens were told not even to mention that they were going overseas, a source of considerable frustration for Phyllis, who feared her friends and family would think ‘nothing ever happens in the Wrens except leave’.
Before Gibraltar, a number of the Wrens were sent on a more modest delegation to Liverpool. In early June they arrived at Derby House, the newly located Western Approaches HQ, which had been built, at great and controversial expense, in the basement of the Exchange Flags building, close to the water. They were to provide expert help to the cypher Liverpool Wrens. Roxane Houston, a new Wrens recruit, had arrived in Liverpool just a few weeks earlier. She marvelled at the ‘remarkable ease’ with which the Gibraltar-bound Wrens sped through the mound of incoming signals. In the few days they were together, Houston struck up a friendship with twenty-three-year-old Isabel Milne Home. In downtime the pair would speak about Isabel’s visions of Gibraltar, as well as her anxieties about the journey.
As the date of embarkation approached, these private worries were expressed more regularly. After the sinking of the City of Benares and all those other ships that followed, the Wrens were aware of the risks of the journey, especially as the route would take their convoy along the French coast.
The day before she left for Liverpool in early August, Barnes sent another letter, this one to the skipper of her Sea Ranger unit in Leith, Scotland. ‘If anything should happen to me,’ she wrote, ‘I want you to know that the happiest moments of my life were when I was at a Sea Rangers muster… I am crazy on the sea, and it gave me my first connections with it.’
Barnes’s letter has the quality of prose written by someone wanting to set things straight in her life, to repay a debt of gratitude. That night, ten of the twelve chief Wrens, along with a young naval nursing sister who was to accompany the delegation, posed for a photograph on the steps of the Hotel Cecil.* The young women are frozen in a moment of uncomplicated joy, without the filter of self-consciousness usually found in posed group photographs. Despite the uniforms, and private anxieties, the unmistakeable spirit of youthful anticipation pulls all focus.
Women were forbidden from stepping aboard Royal Naval ships. As such, the Gibraltar Wrens were assigned to one of the merchant ships in the convoy. The SS Aguila was an ageing trading vessel that, since the 1890s, had delivered tomatoes, bananas, potatoes and cruise-goers from Liverpool to the Canary Islands, with stop-offs in Spain and Portugal. Each passenger paid £21 for a twenty-one-day cruise accompanying the ship’s crew while they collected their cargoes. The ship was one of five vessels run by the Yeoward brothers, each named after a different bird (aguila is the Spanish for ‘eagle’), whose Liverpool offices had been so badly bombed they had been forced to take up a temporary residence. The Aguila was fitted with deck guns, and, under the long-term expert captaincy of Arthur Firth, had already survived a brush with a U-boat. Still, it was old, lightly armoured and certainly no warship.
The restriction was, in part, due to the fact that the Wrens were considered a part of the Civil Service rather than the navy proper. It was a classification that forced Laughton Mathews into endless administrative scuffles, from difficulties in securing training premises down to arguments about whether, for example, Wrens’ lodgings should be referred to in military terms as ‘quarters’, or in civilian terms as ‘hostels’. Patronisingly, some naval officers argued that classifying Wrens as civilians was intended to protect them from the possibility of court martial, and the upsetting image of a young woman ‘trembling in the dock’.
This classification was also responsible for a considerable hold-up when it came to the design and manufacture of the women’s uniforms. In fact, for the first few months of war they had no uniform at all. Detractors argued that if Wrens were technically civilians, why should they be given a uniform? To Laughton Mathews’ dismay, a representative for the director of victualling, responsible for the allocating of uniform materials, told her that he could see no reason why the women should wear a uniform, but if they absolutely had to, why not wear something, anything, khaki? Then, in early 1940, just as Laughton Mathews obtained approval to award a contract to design and manufacture a Wrens uniform, the Naval Stores depot in Deptford was hit by a German bomb, destroying both the materials and the officer in charge.
During the First World War, Director Furse played down the importance of uniform due to ‘anxiety… that the usual remarks should not be made that women think only of dress’.10 But like Doenitz, Laughton Mathews knew the psychological power of a uniform. The right cut could create a sense of shared purpose, pride and identity. Just as Doenitz tried to encourage a sense of fraternity between his submariners, instructing captains to cock their caps and unbutton their leather jackets, so Laughton Mathews wanted to encourage sorority between the Wrens through the clothes that they wore (and, indeed, the way that they appeared: the wearing of jewellery was forbidden when Wrens were on duty, while hair had to be worn off the collar11). She commissioned the fashion designer Edward Molyneux to design a couture uniform that wouldn’t look out of place on a Parisian catwalk. Molyneux, a captain in the First World War, later mentored Christian Dior and dressed not only European royalty but also Hollywood stars such as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Gertrude Lawrence and Vivien Leigh.
‘Clothes must make us look our best,’ Molyneux once said. ‘Better than we really are. Your tailor must make a suit that does something for you. A woman’s dress should do even more.’12
Joining the Wrens gave young women the opportunity to be styled by a designer whose work was, for most, beyond reach. The writer of Molyneux’s 1974 obituary in the New York Times claimed that the designer’s clothes either reminded women of their breeding or provided them with it. In war, duty called first. Even so, many young women reasoned that if duty demanded that they must join the war effort, why not apply to the best-dressed service? The Wrens cap became a fashion item even among civilians, and was sold in high-street shops in a variety of colours. At a meeting at Buckingham Palace, the queen admitted to Laughton Mathews that to the delight of her children, the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, she had even tried one on. (When the director of the Wrens received her CBE in 1942, the king leaned in to ask: ‘How’s the hat?’)
So it was that, at 14:00 on 13th August 1941, twenty-one Wrens stood on the above deck of the Aguila in buttoned-up uniforms and tricorne hats as it pulled steamily out of Liverpool.
As western Ireland faded on the rear horizon, and the convoy broke the latitude of the Bay of Biscay, the weather was the best that many of the ship’s 161 passengers had seen all war. The sun shimmered in an unclouded sky. The sea was still and kind, allowing the ships to carve their precautionary zigzags with ease. The route to Gibraltar had been calculated to take the convoy in a great arc, down from gloomy Liverpool and far enough away from the French coastline to avoid any questing German air patrols. At the last minute, the route was altered and tightened, so as not to take the ships quite so deep into the Atlantic. But they remained far enough from land that, over the quarterdeck guard rail, sightseers could spot whales, basking sharks, flying fish and, to the great delight of the gathering crowd, a plucky, lone turtle, making its long journey toward Florida, some 4,000 miles away.
In the easy breeze, ship-hands took turns to sunbathe, the sun baking their tattoos and bronzing their calves till they were lulled or irritated into wakefulness by the sound of the ship’s stoker, on a break from his duties in the engine room, wheezing into a mouth organ.
The novelist Nicholas Monsarrat was a lookout on HMS Campanula, one of a handful of flower-class corvettes deployed as chaperones to the Aguila. One hundred and thirty-five of these chunky, hardy warships were made during the war, thirty-five of which were lost,13 and each was named after a different and equally delicate English garden flower (Bluebell, Zinnia, Hyacinth, Aubretia, Coreopsis). They were notoriously uncomfortable ships but doggedly seaworthy (their sailors were rarely lost overboard14) and, most usefully, presented only a small target to U-boats. The Campanula, Monsarrat later wrote, was a miserable ship on which to serve, but nevertheless the journey to Gibraltar had the soft-focus quality of a sunshine cruise, the sort advertised in the back of upmarket magazines. It was a welcome change, but one that came with peculiar risks. On ships, sunny comfort, just like cold routine, can easily dull a sailor’s vigilance.
At the outbreak of war Monsarrat was a freelance journalist who wrote regularly for the News Chronicle. Just as the Wrens was composed of students, journalists and cooks, so the men who made up the Royal Naval Volunteer Service, of which Monsarrat was a member, had left behind mundane jobs that had done nothing to prepare them for life at sea, let alone battle. Men need men they can look up to, and men they can look down upon, never more so than in the military. Members of both the ‘proper navy’ and the ‘Wavy Navy’*, the professional merchant seamen of the Royal Naval Reserves (RNR) felt the sting of mild irritation whenever they spied the letters RNVR–Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve–stitched at the bottom of a sleeve. These volunteers were seen, as one observer put it at the time, as ‘playing at being sailors’. Monsarrat’s captain, a long-term professional in the RNR, described Monsarrat, a member of the RNVR, as a ‘pink-faced amateur’.
The jibe was not entirely without grounds. Like Laughton Mathews, Monsarrat had joined the war effort after replying to an advertisement in The Times that, intriguingly, invited ‘Gentlemen with yachting experience’. A few months later, he was a temporary probationary sub lieutenant in the RNVR, initially earning £20 a month (almost enough for a peacetime cruise on the SS Aguila), a figure that increased to £26 following a swift promotion to lieutenant.
Monsarrat’s trip from journalist to lookout was, in fact, typical. One fellow officer was a former car salesman, another a gas-company cashier, another a barrister. Not only did war throw a kink into the professional trajectory of many young men, it also booted them firmly from the dawdling plains of adolescence. Those five martial years, as Monsarrat later wrote, ‘made a man out of me and a corpse out of my brother’.15
It also, unexpectedly, made a physician out of the journalist. Monsarrat’s father was an eminent surgeon and Monsarrat’s captain believed that mere proximity to the profession was enough to qualify the young man to care for the wounded and dying who were hauled on board. If anyone had told Monsarrat of the horrors coming his way–the need to stitch up a man’s throat without the benefit of anaesthetics, or to coax a dangling eyeball back into its socket–‘I might have kept my yachting experience secret,’ he wrote, ‘and settled for prison.’16 It was a skill, or lack thereof, that Monsarrat hoped he wouldn’t be called upon to use on this journey.
On Monday 18th August, after being sighted by a long-range German plane the day before, two Junkers 88 bombers appeared suddenly, and dropped bombs at the convoy. All eight missed, and the two bombers retreated, chased off by curtains of fire from the ships. In an instant, the lazy, cruise-like quality of the journey vanished. The Aguila’s rigging was damaged, either by one of her own overenthusiastic gunners or by stray bullets fired from another ship. Then, at 18:51, a signal arrived from the Admiralty in London warning that, based on U-boat radio signals received and triangulated by the Wrens’ colleagues in Scarborough, there appeared to be a wolfpack of four or five U-boats in the vicinity. The commodore, who was in charge of all ships in the convoy, ordered the vessels to trim their boiler fires in order to eliminate any telltale smoke, and, as day turned to night, to extinguish all lights.
While the weather remained warm and calm, the atmosphere among the ships’ crews was more fraught. On board the Aguila, the commodore’s yeoman spotted a Wren leaning over the guard rail.
‘Put that cigarette out,’ he shouted, worried that the smallest prick of light might give the ship away to a shadowing U-boat.
On the Campanula, where there were no women present to encourage decorum, sailors in search of sport and gossip to take their minds off the situation joined Monsarrat on his lookout. One of the men pulled out a little tin box, a keepsake, he said, to lift his spirits on just such a dark and lonely night. The men crowded around as the sailor cracked open the box to reveal a solitary pubic hair, plucked, he claimed, from a distant lover. The men laughed like schoolboys. Then, after a moment, another pulled out a tin of his own and, with a knowing flourish, clicked back the lid to show not one hair, but three.
As Monsarrat walked away, he heard one of the men quip: ‘They’re probably all different colours.’
On the Aguila, the captain, Arthur Firth, left the bridge to go to dinner. On his way, he stopped at the bar to chat to a steward. While they spoke, Firth invited a passing Wren officer to have a drink with them. As she finished her glass, she held out her hand.
‘I would just like to say goodbye,’ she said.
‘Goodbye?’ said Firth.
‘This is goodbye from me,’ she replied, as if having received some premonition of their imminent fates. ‘I wish you all the luck in the world, but you don’t need my good wishes. You’ll survive.’
Firth finished his drink and went to dinner alone.
The combination of fine weather and jittery success in repelling the German bombers had led to an impromptu singsong around the saloon. One of the sailors sat at the piano, and the diners, loosened by wine, sang in unison together. For the finale, Second Officer Christine Ogle lined up her company of Wrens. Wearing their Gibraltar whites, the young women, their faces as clean as cherubs, sang the hit of the day: ‘The World is Waiting for the Sunrise’.
Everyone retired to their cabins with the song’s lyrics–‘While the world is waiting for the sunrise… my heart is calling you,’ a perfect expression of the longing that follows parting, and the hope of reunion–sounding in their ears.17
At 03:00, from the dark sea, Kapitänleutnant Adalbert Schnee, a U-boat officer who served five commands under Otto Kretschmer before being given captaincy of his own vessel, U-201, fired two torpedoes at the Aguila.
Both struck, and the ship sank in ninety seconds.
At Western Approaches HQ, Roxane Houston deciphered the first signal to arrive from the Gibraltar convoy. For two hours she and the other Wrens, ‘sitting in the warmth and comparative safety within the four walls of our room’, fought the battle second-hand. They were the first to hear news of hard-pressed escorts dashing to the aid of torpedo-wrecked stragglers. The convoy’s constant signals told of the desperate evasive action being taken while the wolfpack, now twelve U-boats strong, fired from within the convoy’s columns, just as Kretschmer had instructed.
A smothered gasp from the table next to her told Houston that which she had been dreading. All twenty-one Wrens–including Madge Barnes, who had twice applied to join the Wrens, Phyllis Bacon, who had carefully adjusted her outfit before her interview for a place on the delegation, and Isabel Milne Home, who had been so helpful deciphering signals at Derby House–died that night. A twenty-second woman, Kate Ellen Gribble, a nursing sister who was also aboard the Aguila, perished too. Houston dropped her pencil, transported, she wrote in her diary, to ‘that thunderous darkness,’ with her friend Isabel somewhere in its middle.
Laughton Mathews, who had hand-selected the women for the trip and who had known some of them (including Mildred Norman, a former member of her ‘Golden Hind’ Sea Rangers), since they were children, was in Plymouth at the time of the sinking. Laughton Mathews later wrote that the scent of honeysuckle, which hangs heavy in the Devonshire summer air at the time she received the news, became forever associated in her mind with the tragedy. Close to a quarter of all the Wrens who died on service during the Second World War were lost that night.*
As the Wren had predicted, the ship’s captain, Arthur Firth, survived the torpedoing, and was rescued (miserably, he was again torpedoed and again survived on his return journey to England). When he finally arrived in London, a broken man, Firth met Laughton Mathews.
‘I have never forgotten my talk with him,’ she recalled, ‘nor the intense impression he gave me of what it means to go down into the bowels of the sea with the superstructure of the ship on top of you.’
Just as the sinking of the City of Benares had brought an end to the CORB programme to send British children overseas, so a change to policy immediately followed the sinking of the Aguila. Wrens proceeding on duty overseas were now permitted to embark on Royal Navy ships.
Rather than act as a deterrent, news of the tragedy spurred young women to join the Wrens. Scores volunteered to travel to Gibraltar in place of the lost Wrens. A fresh delegation was immediately organised. A few weeks after these women arrived in Gibraltar, the sceptical signals officer who had pleaded with Laughton Mathews to send men wrote to the Admiralty. ‘In every way I am most fortunate, and I am jolly proud of my team,’ he wrote of his new Wrens. ‘I would not swap them for anybody.’ The message provided Laughton Mathews with vindication and, in some small way, a moment’s respite from grief.
Monsarrat later said that this battle, more than any other, was the one to which he would return in his nightmares. Mortality is a theme, sometimes explicit, often lurking, for every writer who has survived combat. But Monsarrat is one of the few who explored, in his fiction, the loss of women’s lives at sea. In The Cruel Sea, his ‘forlorn last try’ to make it as a writer, and the book that subsequently made him a millionaire, one of his characters falls in love with a Wren. The pair’s marriage pledge is thwarted when she is killed after a ferryboat capsizes in a storm, a tentative prodding of his darkest memories of the war at sea.
After the war, Monsarrat sailed the ‘loathed’ Atlantic to a posting in South Africa. The glow of a peacetime sun did nothing to salve his psychological scars. As he peered over the deck, he imagined the water to be strewn with dead sailors, some blown up, others burned to death, their bodies ‘shredded’ and, finally, ‘sucked down’. The jetsam of human bodies could not be forgotten by those who saw these scenes. It was seven years before Monsarrat could bring himself, when visiting the beach–where children squatted by rock pools, their spades nosing the air like bayonets–to touch the water with his toes. With the misaligned rationale of the traumatised, he considered the lapping water to be ‘poisoned forever’.18
Eight of the convoy’s twenty-three ships were lost, along with two escort ships, one British and one Norwegian. The Aguila was one of five kills that went to Kapitänleutnant Schnee, whom Doenitz considered to be an ‘exceptionally brilliant captain’,19 success that totalled more than 9,000 tons.20 To write of sunken ships in these numerical terms is to be somehow complicit with a dehumanising tactic used by warmongers. How much easier it is on the psyche to measure kills not by the number of lives lost on board, but by weight in steel.
‘If it’s only one man you imagine it could be you,’ says one of the characters in Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s Das Boot, a fictionalised account of the author’s time spent with U-boatmen as a war correspondent in 1941. ‘But no one can identify with a whole steamer. That doesn’t strike home.’21
For German captains, a quota of tons focused the mind on the task at hand: to sink more ships than Britain could build. It turned war into a scoresheet, a game in which the winner would be declared in points, not on merit. It also helped to dull or perhaps even neuter the distress associated, for most people, with proximity to death, especially death caused by one’s own hands.
Teddy Suhren, U-48’s first watch officer who had fired the torpedoes at the City of Benares, later wrote of how he focused not on the men in the ships, but on the cargo on which ‘Great Britain was dependent if she was not to starve or bleed to death’.22 On scoring a ship, Suhren would look it up in the Naval Handbook No. 123. This book contained not only the names and particulars of every merchant vessel, but also their silhouettes, which made identification easier for the U-boatmen who attacked mainly at night. Besides, Suhren wrote, ‘names were completely irrelevant; it was their tonnage that mattered’. They were all ‘just ships’, he added, ‘whose wakes stretched from one horizon to another’.
Doenitz actively encouraged this blinkered focus on numbers. Every U-boat captain who achieved 40,000 tons earned a mention in the dispatches. Still, occasionally the crimson horror of what was involved in this competition was made human. In late July 1941, a few weeks before the loss of the Aguila, the cruiser HMS Manchester docked in Gibraltar carrying the remains of thirty-eight crew members who had been trapped below decks when it was hit by a torpedo fired from an Italian aircraft. The captain had been forced to leave what was left of the men in their watery, sealed-up grave till, a week later, the ship made harbour. Junior sailors wearing masks to cover their noses and mouths carried the remains, which had to be washed clean of oil, on pushcarts, before they were transferred to another ship for burial at sea. The job took close to eight hours and, in the Gibraltar heat, the dockside began to hum like an abattoir, a sensual horror that became familiar to many who fought in the Atlantic.
It is awful. But, for a moment, stand on the dockside as the carts quietly trundle past. Here comes one. And another. And another. As much as war is, in our contemporary imagination, Churchill pounding his points home at the Dispatch Box in a dimly lit House of Commons, as much as it is the chisel-jawed pilot breaking the clouds in a Spitfire with strains of Elgar swelling in the background, this too is the substance of war.
Technology has a distancing effect on combat. The fist becomes a sword. The sword becomes an arrow. The arrow becomes a trebuchet. The trebuchet becomes a torpedo. The torpedo becomes a nuclear missile. The ICBM becomes, maybe, a clandestine social media campaign, designed to undermine and topple democracies. With each step change the attacker is removed yet farther from the material effects of his actions. At a distance it is harder to properly count the cost. It is, surely, our obligation to count the cost.
‘I thought how we all cheered when a German battleship was successfully sunk with the loss of almost 2,000 men,’ Houston, the Derby House cypher Wren who mourned her friend Isabel’s death on the Aguila, wrote in her diary of the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck. ‘And we congratulated ourselves on a great victory. How could we? What was the war doing to us?’
Exactly three weeks after the sinking of the Aguila, Winston Churchill, who had replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister the previous year, addressed Parliament to announce that the government would no longer be playing by the rules of the German’s so-called tonnage game. The publication of official monthly figures reporting shipping losses to U-boats would cease. To justify the information blackout, Churchill argued ‘it is not desirable to give [the enemy] too precise or, above all, too early information of the success or failure of each of his various manoeuvres’. He added, for reassurance, ‘the public, and indeed the whole world, have however derived the impression that things have gone much better… I cannot deny that this is so.’23
In private, however, Churchill knew the truth. Close to 3 million tons of shipping had been destroyed in the first six months of 1941. The prime minister’s order to the minister of information, Duff Cooper (who had, like Colin’s parents, sent his son to America as an evacuee), to discontinue the publication of monthly losses was not only motivated to hide this information from the Germans, but also to hide it from the British people.
That autumn, imports to Britain had fallen to two thirds of the pre-war level, mostly thanks to the success of the U-boat campaign. Even with ever more stringent rationing (in March 1940 the meat allowance was cut to one shilling’s worth, around a pound of meat per person a week), the Ministry of Food was questioning how it could continue to provide British citizens with sufficient calories each day. The British diet had been forced to move away from fat-rich foods, which made up thirty-eight per cent of the average calorie intake pre-war,24 to a carbohydrate-rich diet of wholemeal bread and potatoes. The shift not only flattened the variety and taste of the typical Briton’s diet, it also had negative practical consequences. For a manual worker to obtain the 4,000 calories they needed for a day’s work from carbohydrates alone, they would have to spend almost the entire day eating. Fatigue became widespread in the workforce.
In his memo, Churchill warned Cooper that the press would accuse the government of attempting to ‘cover up the size of our most recent shipping losses’. When responding to journalists, the prime minister advised Cooper to say: ‘Well, that is what we are going to do anyway.’25 After all, Churchill added, ‘We shall have a lot worse to put up with in the near future.’
Questions hung heavy over the naval command as well. Captain George Creasy had been appointed the new director of anti-submarine warfare in the month of the City of Benares’ sinking. Creasy spent months poring over reports of U-boat attacks on convoys, and from the patterns established by these accounts had begun to sketch out what he believed to be the U-boat tactics. He knew that the Germans preferred to attack at night, using daylight hours to shadow their prey. He knew that U-boat captains preferred to attack from the bow of the convoy, before falling back to fire torpedoes on the convoy’s beam, finally withdrawing to a safe distance to reload the tubes. He did not yet know, however, about the technique pioneered by Kretschmer, of attacking from within the perimeter of the convoy, at point-blank distance.
So Creasy and all the rest at the Admiralty were left pondering what tactics the U-boats were employing that enabled them to continue to achieve such disproportionate success over the Royal Navy. What might be done about it, and who, for that matter, was the person to do it?