Nine and a half months later, Roberts disembarked the train at Liverpool station in the early hours of 2nd January 1942. By day, great shafts of light would funnel through the Gothic arched windows, partitioning the steamy air. At night, however, Roberts was forced to plod, squinting, across a dark concourse, past the Nestlé chocolate machines and, beside them, the reprimanding weight-testers. He had not slept. Churchill’s commission was thrilling; it finally brought Roberts in from the cold, much closer to the heart of matters than he had been before his illness. But it was also a high-risk assignment for a man for whom the question of legacy had, at just forty-one, become a preoccupation.
Roberts’ task was threefold: discover the secret of how the U-boats were operating; develop effective countermeasures; and, finally, teach these new tactics to any and every captain who sailed the Atlantic. Tuberculosis may have robbed Roberts of the chance to serve at sea, but it had, in this unlikely way, provided him with an opportunity, one by which he could make his presence felt on every destroyer and corvette on the ocean.
Roberts stepped into a beleaguered city. Liverpool’s buildings huddled forlornly, their roofs a thatch of splintered beams, their blown-out windows giving the appearance of hollow eyes and haunted mouths, multistorey expressions of architectural dismay. Not even the city’s grand cathedral had been spared the Blitzing: one night a few months earlier a German bomb had pierced the roof of the south-east transept, bounced off an inner brick wall and exploded in mid-air to create a multicoloured downpour of stained glass.
From the beginning of the war the Luftwaffe’s bombers had targeted Liverpool. But in the twelve months leading up to Roberts’ arrival the bombing had intensified, in part because the Nazis suspected that the city housed a secret control bunker from which the Battle of the Atlantic was being orchestrated. Their suspicion was correct. On 7th February 1941 Western Approaches command, the headquarters from which the protection of shipping in the North- and South-western Approaches to the British Isles was directed, had moved from Plymouth to Liverpool. The city was better placed for operational control of ships using the Clyde and Mersey. By the end of the war more than ninety per cent of all the war material brought into Britain had passed through Liverpool’s eleven miles of quays.
Liverpool’s Harbour Board officials were, as one lieutenant put it, ‘kind and remarkably tolerant’, considering a naval base had been superimposed onto working docks.1 By the time of Roberts’ arrival, Liverpool was not only bomb-wrecked but also unprecedentedly busy. An average of four convoys, sometimes consisting of as many as sixty ships, arrived in the city every week. Some were damaged from brushes with U-boats, others by the extremities of the Atlantic weather. The ever-pressing need to resupply and repair ships put tremendous strain on both Liverpool’s facilities and workforce. More than 20,000 men and women were involved in ship repair on Merseyside, often working twenty-four-hour shifts to mend both merchant and naval ships in an effort to get them back to sea as quickly as possible.
In the middle of the night Roberts walked across the open-air square toward the new Western Approaches HQ, a bland and nondescript eleven-storey office block known as the Exchange Buildings situated behind Liverpool’s Town Hall. It was here that, in centuries past, Liverpool’s merchants, nestled in the nook formed by the U-shaped complex, had carried out their business. Slave traders exchanged business cards on which the flag of their ship was drawn, a practice known as ‘trading on the flags’.2 The trading area would become unworkably muddy so was eventually paved over.
Derby House was the main building in the complex. Having been chosen as Western Approaches HQ, it had been adapted with a two-metre-thick concrete ceiling, above the military command. Roberts looked up, in the half-light, at the building that was to become his home for the remainder of the war. The west wing had already been partially demolished to build the Atlantic Hotel, work that was never completed. On the east side Derby House was pocked and blackened, having been successfully hit by German incendiaries. The entrance was fenced, sand-bagged and guarded by Marine sentries.3 Roberts showed his papers to the armed guard and made his way down into the basement through a winding corridor and, finally, out into the grand Operations Room, the nerve centre of the Battle of the Atlantic.
Derby House was designated HMS Eaglet (all naval shore establishments are treated as ships, in order that their occupants abide by naval rules) and was unofficially known as ‘the Citadel’. The scores of Wrens who worked there, however, nicknamed it ‘the Dungeon’, a reference to its warren-like corridors and rooms–more than a hundred in total, covering around 5,000 square metres–and the mood-darkening, skin-blanching dimness of the place.
The Operations Room where Roberts now stood was the exception: a cathedral of a space and the heart of the building, a place so secretive that, when the cleaners came to Derby House each morning, a curtain was drawn across the windows overlooking the room, to ensure they did not peep.4
It was from here that Sir Percy Noble, commander-in-chief of Western Approaches, ran a tuned operation. His mezzanine office overlooked the main plotting room, and faced a twenty-foot-high situational map of the Atlantic that stretched from the floor to the ceiling. The sea was painted dark green and land masses biscuit brown.* One account claims that the surface was magnetised.5 Onto this map, which was cork-backed,6 a plotter Wren standing on a wheeled, telescoping ladder would place markers to indicate the known, estimated or suspected locations of Allied convoys, German wolfpacks, escort groups and air patrols. (A duplicate plot was set up in the nearby mansion Knowsley Hall as a fall-back if Derby House was destroyed,7 and while the plot at Derby House was the largest and most imposing of all, similar wall plots focused on smaller areas of the ocean could be found at coastal bases around the British Isles, from Portland to Belfast, where Christian Oldham worked.)
Seven pieces of key information were maintained at all times on the plot. Most importantly, there was the known position of all Allied ships and convoys currently in the Atlantic, and the planned routes of these convoys,* each marked in different coloured elastic, depending on their speed and ultimate destination. Each convoy was represented by a plastic clip showing its name and number, and into this clip were slotted the names of all the escort vessels on cardboard slips: yellow for destroyers, dark red for frigates and corvettes, green for trawlers and pale grey for ‘sloops’. Air cover, if it existed, was indicated by a small plane token. Once every four hours the positions of the ships were moved along the stringed routes, assuming there were no U-boat attacks to upset the planned course.
Next there was the Admiralty’s ‘best guess’ of the position of any U-boats known to be at sea. This information was often taken from coded messages intercepted by the Wrens working beneath Scarborough racecourse (a U-boat transmission would immediately be known by its telltale signal ‘Dah di di di dah’) and decoded by Wrens working at Bletchley Park. Once relayed to Western Approaches, it would be carried into the Operations Room by messenger Wrens and, finally, added to the plot by the Wrens plotters–life-and-death information passed along a chain of competent young women, stretched across Britain.
Initially, a U-boat was marked up as a white lozenge-shaped symbol on the plot, and when its position was confirmed, usually following a positive sighting at sea by an Allied ship, the marker was changed to a black lozenge. The position of ships and convoys at the moment of a U-boat attack was also added to the plot, along with a red ship-shaped symbol to denote the final position of any vessel that was sunk. Finally, the direction and speed of the wind was shown as a white arrow, the number of ‘tails’ indicating its force. The positions of the ships and U-boats were rarely precise. A good fix was considered to be a location within a forty- to fifty-mile radius, and even fixes that could be up to 200 miles out were logged.
Every night Noble stood at the window of his glass-fronted office, read the sweep of the ocean on the wall opposite, and saw the dramas represented by the pins, string and tokens. At a glance he could see the thousands of men and millions of tons of shipping under his direction. From this information, he would decide how and where to deploy his fleet. Officially, Western Approaches HQ had no say over the routes that convoys took, although the Admiralty often agreed to its suggested diversions.8 Such alterations were calculated in the Convoy Room, which was papered with gnomonic projections, sundial-like maps used for plotting great-circle paths.
‘There was much conferring of staff at times of crisis,’ recalled the Derby House plotter Mary Hall. ‘We were given the resulting changes of route to put up on the main plot as quickly as possible.’
Finally, Noble would issue his commands via a brass speaking tube, similar to those used to communicate on ships.
‘It was a strange feeling going down about half a mile into the ground,’ Patricia Anne Parkyn, another plotter at Derby House, later recalled of her work. ‘I loved climbing up and down the long ladders, sticking pins in hopefully the right places, being watched–like a monkey in the zoo–by countless VIPs and brass hats behind the glass wall opposite.’9
Wren ratings worked one of two watches, either from 08:00 to 18:00 (ten hours) or 18:00 to 08:00 (fourteen hours). The officers worked for the same length of time but changed watches an hour later than the ratings.
‘During these watches we had time off for meals, and a bit of a snooze at night if we were lucky,’ recalled Carlisle. Due to the long hours, a Sun Ray Treatment Room was eventually installed at Derby House to help compensate for the fifty-hour work weeks spent underground. Rather than use this, Carlisle would go out into Liverpool during her lunch break, in order that she might see some sunlight that day.
‘I took sandwiches midday and went on a ferry across the Mersey and back,’ she wrote. ‘It was fascinating to see the ships one had been plotting, some looking a bit battered. One stormy day I was the only passenger on the top deck and the dear ferryman came out of his wheelhouse for a chat. “Real sailors’ weather isn’t it, miss?” I loved that.’10
Churchill–who had served as First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War and the first nine months of the Second, prior to becoming prime minister–had a profound interest in naval matters. He made frequent visits to Derby House, often using them as an excuse to parade through Liverpool. On one visit Norman Robertson, chauffeur to the commander-in-chief at Derby House, was told to collect Churchill from the Adelphi Hotel and drive him to Gladstone Dock to inspect the crew of an escort ship. Robertson waited outside the hotel, his car flying the flag of St George. When Churchill emerged, he refused to walk down the steps to the car, insisting that it be swapped for an open-top vehicle to enable him to wave at the assembled crowds. A Wolseley owned by the police was found, and with Churchill finally in the car, Robertson raced to make up the lost time, aware that the sailors were waiting on the cold dockside.11
The prime minister’s presence was felt in Derby House even when he was not there in person. A dedicated hotline housed in a soundproof booth, just outside the main plotting room, connected Western Approaches to Churchill. With a dedicated guard, the black rotary telephone featured a bright red handset and was known as MATE, or multiple access telephone equipment. It linked Derby House to Churchill’s war office and nine other favoured lines and was deemed so important that it had its own back-up battery power supply. This was in addition to Derby House’s emergency generator, which was powered, with a flourish of cosmic irony, by a diesel engine taken from a German U-boat captured during the First World War.
The Wrens in the Operations Room would be the first to know when things went wrong, and this knowledge would spread quickly, either through Derby House or back at the women’s shared quarters in Ackerleigh House on the outskirts of Liverpool. The building, a tram ride away in Sefton Park, was named after Kathleen Ackerleigh, the first Liverpool chief Wrens officer, who died aged forty-six in a traffic accident in September 1940.
‘We slept in “cabins” on double bunks, all with the Admiralty blue and white anchor covers–nice and shipshape,’ recalled Carlisle of her time in Ackerleigh House. ‘I was first in a huge noisy room with some odd bods indeed.’
Like Roxane Houston, the Derby House cypher Wren who mourned her friend Isabel Milne Home’s death on the Aguila, the on-duty Wrens were deeply affected whenever the human stories behind the coloured string and pins on the plotting wall were revealed. Late one night Dorothy Carroll, an eighteen-year-old leading Wren who worked as a typist in Percy Noble’s office, was called to the chief of staff’s office. There, the captain informed her that thirty-four ships in a Russian convoy had been sunk.
‘He was exceedingly sad and said he felt we’d lost the war,’ she later recalled.12 The officer, Captain Neville Lake, who had narrowly escaped sinking during a U-boat battle in the First World War,13 presented Dorothy with a report of the engagement, which she was to type up. It ended with the phrase ‘It’s Doenitz who’s done it.’
As she returned to Noble’s office, ‘feeling thoroughly dejected’, Dorothy called in at the subterranean canteen in Derby House and bought her first packet of cigarettes.
There was little emotional respite for those on duty, even when the news was personal. One morning at around two o’clock, the Derby House plotter Patricia Anne Parkyn was handed a telegram informing her that her brother, Mytton, had been killed in action. Parkyn still had ten hours left on her shift, and there was no reprieve.
The preparations at Derby House, not only to become the directorial hub for the Battle of the Atlantic but also to fit the site for the 1,000 or so staff who would work and often sleep there, were not without controversy. During construction, Wren officers requested that the living quarters at Derby House be divided into cubicles rather than dormitories. This simple request was led by Angela Goodenough, the Wren officer responsible for insisting that as high a standard of accommodation and welfare be laid down as was compatible with necessary economy. Laughton Mathews described her as ‘very determined’ and as having a ‘happy knack of getting her own way with male colleagues without arousing rancour’.
In the case of Derby House, which had on-site accommodation for those who needed to stay the night, however, rancour was most certainly aroused. In a March 1941 report by the chief staff officer to Percy Noble, Captain E. Bush wrote that ‘the standard of living expected by the WRNS, especially the senior WRNS officers, is much too high’. Bush continued with the suggestion that a lecture be prepared for Wrens officers in which the women were made aware of ‘the standard of living which naval officers cheerfully put up with both at sea and ashore in time of war’.
Captain Bush’s report, for which he earned a commendation, received the full-throated support of the Civil Service. A memo marked ‘secret’ and attached to the front of the report described the attitude of Wrens officers in the matter as nothing short of ‘deplorable’ and asked that ‘anything that can be done to correct such an outlook in these ladies would be much appreciated’.14
Angela Goodenough was having none of this. In a brisk response, she wrote: ‘The remark is not understood. The large expenditure… was not due to the provision of a high standard of living but to the provision of the splinter-proof sleeping accommodation.’ Moreover, she explained, the Wrens were never ‘shown the drawings’ nor ‘allowed to visit the houses until the work was almost completed’. Had they been consulted, Goodenough added, she would not have been in favour of providing this kind of sleeping accommodation ‘for officers and ratings who already have to spend their working hours in artificially ventilated and lighted spaces underground’.
The Civil Service responded coolly to Goodenough’s note: ‘The report will require further examination.’ In truth, the Wrens did have slightly better living conditions than the men, with a little more cubic area per head and more space for their belongings although, as Laughton Mathews put it, ‘certainly no luxury’.
‘What we asked for seemed to us the minimum for a decent living,’ she wrote. When, later, a naval officer bluntly asked Laughton Mathews, ‘Why should the Wrens have better conditions than the men?’ she replied: ‘I can’t think why. But I’m not responsible for the men.’
None of this hidden drama was known to Roberts when he arrived, but he had his own pressures to contemplate. That night he was presented with a note, informing him of the whereabouts of his quarters, along with an invitation to meet Sir Percy Noble the following morning. Roberts left Derby House still not yet ready for sleep. He walked the streets, contemplating the magnitude of everything he now faced.
The next morning, Roberts returned to Derby House for his meeting with Sir Percy Noble. He needn’t have felt any sense of trepidation. Derby House had become, as the war journalist Terence Robertson later put it, the place where ‘all the misfits of the navy had congregated’.15 Scores of officers who had been passed over for promotion, or who, like Roberts, had been invalided out of service by illness, had wound up there. He would be at home among the lost men who had found in war the renewed purpose that, when combined with boiler-room pressure, occasionally agitates brilliance.
Roberts met Sir Percy Noble in the commander’s glass-fronted office, overlooking the Operations Room, with its industrious Wrens. The admiral was greying but still youthful, and wore his authority with, as one observer put it, ‘naturalness’.16 That day, however, just as Usborne had warned, Noble was in a hostile mood.
‘I thought the Admiralty were sending me a captain,’ he said, woundingly. (Later, when Noble read a letter of recommendation outlining Roberts’ success at the Portsmouth tactical school, he apologised for this comment.17) Noble explained that, on Usborne’s instruction, Roberts was to be given the entire top floor of Derby House, recently vacated by Tate & Lyle sugar company, comprising eight rooms.* Noble–fifty-two with a headful of hair and a trim waistline–was well liked and respected by his staff, whose opinions he would often seek regardless of their rank or seniority. Still, he couldn’t quite mask his scepticism toward Roberts’ enterprise. What, precisely, did Roberts intend to do with this school? Would it be for research, demonstrations, or something else?
Roberts explained his intention to develop a game that would enable the British to understand why the U-boats were proving so successful in sea battles and facilitate the development of counter-tactics. Finally, Roberts said, the game would become the basis for a school, where those fighting at sea could be taught the tactics. With just a few adjustments, Roberts explained, his wargame could be used for either analysis or training.
Still unsure of how play, of all things, might achieve all this, Noble gave his reluctant approval.
‘Well,’ Roberts recorded his new commander-in-chief saying. ‘You can carry on but don’t bother me with it.’ Then, as if to underscore his disdain, he added: ‘Perhaps you can run occasional courses for half a dozen Reserve officers?’18 Stinging from Noble’s remark, which reignited the dismay that he felt from his earlier dismissal from the navy, Roberts laboured his way upstairs to the top floor of the building.
His plan was simple. Using the floor as a giant board, just like the one he had used when teaching tactics at Portsmouth, he would design a game that approximated a wolfpack attack on a convoy in the Atlantic. One team would play as the escort commanders, the other as the U-boat captains. They would take turns to make their moves, firing torpedoes, dropping depth charges, the U-boats diving and surfacing to make their attacks, the escort ships wheeling around in great arcs as each side hunted the other.
Not knowing how long the war would last, or how the U-boat tactics might evolve as it progressed, Roberts was eager that his game could adapt to changes in circumstances. The scenarios for these games wouldn’t be pulled only from Roberts’ imagination. They would also be based on real battles that occurred at sea to allow participants to see why the escort commanders acted the way that they did, and whether they might have lost fewer convoy ships and sunk more U-boats had they done things differently.
This was Roberts’ masterstroke. By repeatedly playing through recent action at sea and using a game to understand the situation from all angles, he would be in a strong position to see where the British commanders had misunderstood the U-boats’ behaviour. The process would enable him to formulate the first universal set of defensive tactics for the navy to use against U-boats, encouraging escort ships to work together like team-mates, rather than individuals.
Before they could begin, however, Roberts needed supplies: string, chalk, great sheets of canvas, linoleum that could turn the floor itself into a game board. He also needed a willing and able staff to help him. More than anything, though, he needed information. It had been just one day since Roberts had learned the true extent of the navy’s failure at sea to date, and the sheer scale of the U-boats’ success. Now he needed first-hand accounts from sailors who had survived encounters with U-boats, information that could be sifted for clues as to what was going wrong.
Later that day, Roberts met the first of the officers who he had been assigned: Gerald Cousins DSC, an acting commander who, at six feet five, must have either irritated or intimidated Roberts as, in his diary, he described the man as ‘fifteen years older than me and showed it’ and, crueller still, ‘quite dull of brain’. Then there was Lieutenant Commander Higham, a submariner who had been sunk and hauled out of the sea on a rope earlier in the war. ‘This hadn’t done him much good,’ Roberts wrote, with a similar tartness to that which he’d directed at Cousins. In fact, Roberts added, ‘he was gross’.
Faced with these incompetents, Roberts requested the transferral of an old friend, Chief Signalman Bernard Rayner, with whom he had worked at the Portsmouth Tactical School, to the nascent unit. Rayner, at least, knew how to run games. Roberts could only hope that the Wrens he was being sent would make up the considerable shortfall.
At Wrens headquarters Nancy Osborne, the forbiddingly bright, fastidious Australian administrator whom Vera Laughton Mathews had appointed the officer of the headquarters staff of the Wrens, ran her finger down the list of names in front of her.
Osborne had graduated from the University of Sydney with a first-class degree in 1921, an MA in 1924, and was the first person, male or female, to be awarded the University Medal in English.19 She had a peculiar knack for choosing the right Wren for the right job. Since assuming the responsibility for appointing Wrens officers, she had, almost by a process of osmosis from Laughton Mathews and her formidable memory, come to learn the various attributes and skills of hundreds of young Wrens.20
This project, however, was a little different to the usual. Derby House, she had been told, needed Wrens officers to join a new project in Liverpool, developing a game that would reveal the secrets of the U-boat tactics. The women needed to be whip-smart–of this Osborne was certain–but what more precise qualities would equip them for this unusual task?
If the Wrens were to calculate the positions of imaginary ships and U-boats, Osborne reasoned, then they would need a keen mind for numbers. And if they were to keep pristine records of how particular imaginary attacks played out, who missed whom, and by how much, then they would also need to be good with record-keeping. Who better than Jean Laidlaw, the assiduous twenty-one-year-old former Sea Ranger and chartered accountant with whom she shared an office and who, late one night a few weeks earlier, had been the first to notice that the Wrens had passed 10,000 members?
Next Osborne picked Laura Janet Howes, who had come to England from Antigua just four years earlier. Howes, a stylish perfectionist, who was known to all as ‘Bobby’ after a minor film actor of the day, was a mathematical wunderkind. At school, when her teachers were off sick Howes would teach the class maths in their stead.21 At the outbreak of war, Howes wrote to her father in Montserrat to ask if she could return home.
‘Don’t even think of coming home,’ he replied. ‘Serve your country.’
Howes, believing the Wrens to have the most handsome of the women’s service uniforms, summarily signed up.
Elizabeth Drake was next. Drake was already serving at Derby House at the time as a plotter on the map facing Percy Noble’s glass-fronted office,22 a fact that would typically disqualify her from a transfer as Wrens were rarely moved from one job to another within the same shore establishment. Osborne saw from Drake’s records, however, that her father Charles worked as an actuary for the Prudential Assurance company. Just as Nicholas Monsarrat had been chosen for the role of ship’s surgeon based on his father’s vocation, Drake was chosen to work with Roberts based on the assumption that an aptitude for mathematics, like height or temper, runs in the family. Drake, who had spent a year at finishing school in Paris, was also an expert plotter.
Finally, Osborne chose a sportswoman: Nancy Wales.* Nan, as she was known to her friends, was older than the others at twenty-seven. Born in Hull, she had moved with her family to the nearby town of Anlaby at the outbreak of war, working at her grandfather’s printing works, while keeping the accounts for her father’s launderette.23 After she joined the Wrens in 1941, she had served at the shore establishment HMS Beaver before undergoing the familiar officer training course at Greenwich, which she passed with the highest distinction. Wales was a formidable tennis player and competed in badminton at county level. Hockey, however, was her true passion; two years later she would play for Lancashire, and then earn the unique distinction of being the only player to go on to play for their arch rivals Yorkshire, a team she captained for many years. Nobody in the Wrens, Osborne reckoned, understood team tactics quite like Nan Wales.
With her squad of officers complete, six junior Wrens, known as ‘ratings’, were chosen to handle the more administrative side of the game-playing. Two were secretaries, two coders and two messengers. Then she sent off the orders that would divert the course of each young woman’s war and, in many cases, their life thereafter.
Following the bruising humiliation of his inaugural meeting with a dismissive Sir Percy Noble, and the dismay he’d felt at being presented with men he considered ‘dull of brain’ and ‘gross’, Roberts may have felt quite alone. Certainly, neither of the men he had been sent would last long. They were, as Roberts put it, ‘vastly out of date and cantankerous’. He was not yet aware that an elite team of young women, on whose nous and support he would come to depend, had already been assembled.
The Western Approaches Tactical Unit, or WATU, had its team.