John Lamb and half a dozen other British naval officers tumbled through the front doors of a well-to-do apartment block on a warm, late-spring New York evening.
Avoiding the glare of the doorman, the group jostled into the elevator and began the rattling ride to the Park Avenue building’s summit. Lamb, former first lieutenant of Vanoc, a member of Captain Walker’s crack pack of U-boat-hunting destroyers and a ship so old that it carried cutlasses,1 had landed in Manhattan in early May 1942 while, 3,000 miles away, WATU was entering its fourth month of operation.
The twenty-five-year-old was in high spirits. After months at sea, living each day with the awful promise of violence, the past few weeks had been a blur of dances, parties and mingling with mavens of New York high society while his current ship, HMS Glasgow, underwent a refit in Brooklyn’s shipyard.* With no firm estimate on how long the repairs might take, the sailors had thrown themselves into a city only too eager to welcome them, thank them for their service, and then take whatever money they had to spare.
Lamb’s home for his stay was Barbizon Plaza, an art deco hotel on the south-west corner of 6th Avenue and 59th Street, which many decades later became the Trump Parc condominiums. Originally this fashionable building was topped with a roof of tiny glass tiles that, during the day, shimmered in the sunlight. At night they emitted a humming prism of light into the sky. When America’s entry to the war drew the attention of German bombers, the tiles were removed to help facilitate city-wide, London-style blackouts. Despite the luxurious surroundings, Lamb’s dollar allowance meant that, unable to afford to eat in the hotel restaurant, he and the other officers would buy their meals from the basement drugstore, along with the bellhops and waiting staff. It didn’t matter. In the first glow of foreign adventure, when even the dullest routine is ripe with novelty and wonder, the eyes are yet to adjust to class distinctions. Besides, there was no shortage of Americans willing to dine with the British.
‘Everywhere the friendliness was fantastic,’ Lamb recalled in his diary. ‘It was impossible to enter a bar or coffee shop and be allowed to pay for one’s own refreshment.’2
To those Americans situated inland, the war was a distant, disinterested conflict. Not so for New Yorkers. By war’s outbreak, more than 95,000 German and Austrian Jews had emigrated to America, a large proportion of whom had landed in New York City with first-hand experience of the Nazi threat to life and liberty.3 After France fell to the Germans in the summer of 1940, the U-boats’ range spanned the ocean, and as the months passed, an increasing number of American merchant ships, which had neglected to adopt the British convoy system, were lost to German torpedoes. Despite this, President Roosevelt remained reticent to enter the war. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7th December 1941, when 3,500 American servicemen were killed or wounded and eighteen ships were sunk or run aground, the US declared war on Japan. Then, on 11th December 1941, Hitler declared war on the United States.
On 14th January 1942, four months before Lamb’s arrival, the Battle of the Atlantic came to the New York coastline. U-123, captained by Reinhard Hardegen and equipped with no more than a nautical chart and a guidebook to Manhattan Island marked with its inlets and harbours, was one of the first to arrive, picking its way into the Ambrose Channel, New York’s main shipping approach. Just after half past one in the morning U-123’s watch officer detected moving lights, around two-and-a-half miles away, to port. When the U-boat’s torpedo struck the Panamanian-flagged oil tanker Norness, a plume of flame tore into the air, as high as a skyscraper.
All but two crew members, including one puppy, made it off the vessel before a second torpedo sent it beneath the waves. The dog’s owner, Paul Georgson, managed to carry it onto a waiting lifeboat, but the sodden animal was shivering so violently that Georgson decided there was no way it could survive. ‘So, I said “goodbye” to him,’ he later recalled, ‘then brained him on the deck.’4
The following day, 15th January, the U-boat drew closer still to the city, and torpedoed the British tanker Coimbra. The attack was near enough to shore that residents of the Hamptons called the authorities to report the swell of firelight on the horizon. Two days later a report on the front page of the New York Times confirmed the attack and quoted a US Navy warning that the ‘U-boat menace along the East Coast’ was ‘increasingly serious’.5 Over the next four months U-123 and a clutch of other U-boats terrorised the east coast of America, operating with near impunity. The US Navy was unprepared to fend off what Doenitz had code-named Operation Drumbeat. By the time Lamb’s ship pulled past the Statue of Liberty on 6th May 1942, New Yorkers felt firmly invested in what had previously been viewed as a remote, European concern.
Before their arrival in New York City, Lamb and his crew members had been busy in the South China Sea and had not had time to visit WATU and take the course. For them, Raspberry was little more than a set of written instructions on a piece of paper. Without hands-on experience of the operation, nor training on how to effectively work with other escort ships while protecting a convoy, the crew was yet to adopt the latest tactics to come out of Liverpool. Their ship, HMS Glasgow, bore the scars of its crew’s inexperience. The opportunity, then, for an extended rest stop on a foreign continent and a break from the chaotic business of battling U-boats was a relief.
‘The welcome [we] received, first from the United States Navy, then the Dockyard and finally from shore organisations and unknown citizens sustained the thrill of arrival in a legendary city,’ Lamb later recalled. As the Glasgow underwent repairs, he and his fellow officers were free to enjoy the city, half a world away from the bombings in Liverpool and London. In the same month that the remaining US troops in the Philippines surrendered, and the Japanese captured Burma, for Lamb and his fellow officers life almost resembled peacetime.
The benefits of the British naval presence in New York flowed in both directions. With U-boats nudging around Long Island, the sailors brought with them a reassurance. For many of the city’s eligible young women, here too was an influx of young men to broaden and exoticise the dating pool. Introductions were made at the White Ensign Club, the English-Speaking Union and similar organisations, and many of the men were duly adopted by welcoming families.
Lamb received dozens of invitations to lunch, tea and dinner from families, spinsters, church members and other assorted New Yorkers. The first hostess, who invited him to tea, had laid out her silver service for his benefit. After offering Lamb a toasted teacake, she requested he make the tea as, in the presence of an Englishman, she felt ‘inadequate’ to the task. Lamb, having only ever made mugs of ship’s thick cocoa, blagged his way through the ceremony. The young lieutenant attended his second engagement with a colleague. The pair were greeted at the door by two older women wearing silk pyjamas, who, after inviting the two Englishmen in, revealed that their husbands were serving in the Pacific and, as Lamb put it, ‘gave the impression that they were ready and willing for any duty’. Lamb and his friend, he wrote, made swift excuses and ‘fled’.
On another occasion Lamb started talking to a pretty young New Yorker at the White Ensign Club. Jeanette, as the woman introduced herself, invited Lamb to her parents’ house for dinner, after which, she suggested, they might go dancing. Thrilled at the unexpected invitation and unburdened by the social mores that might have complicated such a night in England, Lamb agreed.
‘Which one is yours?’ he asked, when the pair arrived outside a tall building on smart East 69th Street. Jeanette gestured at the entire building in front of them and smiled. Lamb’s date, it transpired, was Jeanette Watson, daughter of Thomas Watson, millionaire founder of the IBM corporation.
‘Daddy doesn’t normally allow drink in the house,’ Jeanette said, as she brought Lamb a glass of sherry. ‘But he thinks British naval officers have need of it.’
For the next six weeks, the Watsons welcomed Lamb into their family, introducing him to various well-to-do members of New York’s social scene. Lamb considered Jeanette his girlfriend but, not knowing for how long he would be in town, or when he might be back, the pair kept their relationship social.
Some of the British engaged in more intimate relationships during their stay. According to Lamb, the captain of the Marines moved in with a woman he met at a nightclub on his first night ashore. He worked in the day, she the night, and as a result of their disharmonious working hours, Lamb recalled that the captain would often appear bleary-eyed in front of the Royal Marines guard at the colour-hoisting ceremony each morning.
For Lamb, much of that happy spring was lost in a haze of parties. He found that many of New York’s butlers and bartenders were expatriate Brits and would mix him ‘special’ drinks, double and triple martinis, daiquiris and old-fashioneds. When Jeanette introduced her new boyfriend to friends and guests, saying, ‘Now Lootenant, perhaps you would give us the British point of view…’, Lamb would have to summon the formidable concentration of the inebriated and, in deliberate words, speak for queen and country.
A few days before Lamb visited the Park Avenue apartment block that spring, a New York bachelor friend had asked him to summon a delegation of British naval officers to come for drinks. Lamb expected just such an evening lay ahead, as he and his comrades rode the elevator up to the penthouse and knocked on the door.
As it opened, and warmth and light spilled into the corridor, Lamb was greeted with a dreamlike scene, something at once celestial and devilish. Flanking his host stood a phalanx of tall and pristine giantesses, a ‘bevvy of beauties’, as he later recalled.6 He did not know it yet, but they were the Powers Girls, members of the world’s first modelling agency, founded by John Robert Powers. On a deep sofa behind the women sat their chaperone, Condé Nast, editor of Vogue.* The two groups, separated by a universe of background and experience, greeted one another, then made faltering small talk through the evening. At last the officers bade their hosts goodnight and left the building.
‘None of us made future dates,’ Lamb later recalled. ‘We were not in the same league, we thought–certainly not financially.’
Like a dream within a dream, the curious texture of that night with the world’s most notable magazine editor and his models slipped away when, long before the end of summer, Lamb received news from Brooklyn Navy Yard that his ship would not be ready for weeks. The crew could not be spared the wait and he was to set sail on the next available boat.
‘All good things must end,’ he wrote.7 Lamb would have to trade the reverie of his heiress girlfriend, unrationed drinks and high-rise parties for the Atlantic Ocean, with all its exigent weather and assassins.
In November 1942, while Roberts was enjoying the afterglow of His Majesty’s affirmation (‘seeing stars,’ as he put it8) on the top floor of Derby House, Admiral Max Horton, incoming commander-in-chief of Western Approaches, sidled up to the captain, the rumour of a smile on his lips.
Horton, who had advised Roberts over the telephone a few months earlier about the range of a German torpedo, was a different sort of man from the outgoing Sir Percy Noble. Noble, who had commanded cruisers earlier in his career, was easy-going, urbane and cherished by his staff, whose names he knew by heart and whom, as one staff officer put it, he managed with ‘graciousness’ and ‘adeptness’.9 Despite their early relationship being characterised by painful misunderstanding, Roberts later described Noble as ‘a great diplomat’ with ‘tremendous charm.’10
Horton, by contrast, was squat and bullish, and had the temperament and tenacity of a great submariner. Western Approaches staff nicknamed him ‘the Elephant’, a reference to his blunt, charmless power. Horton addressed the women of Derby House not by name but with the rude and rankling bark ‘Wren’. The smile–‘catlike’, as Roberts described it–became notorious in Derby House corridors; one never quite knew whether it was going to bloom into a snarl or a purr.
According to one member of his staff, he was ‘ruthless’, not only in his dealings with staff, but also in his offensive-minded approach to fighting the Germans. The misery of the Holocaust had been neither fully realised nor revealed at this point in 1942, but enough was known about the Nazi treatment of the Jewish people that Horton, a Jew via his mother’s side of the family, fought not just with the intellect, but with the blood. Horton developed an eccentric schedule, waking late morning to play golf all afternoon, retiring after dinner for bridge before arriving at the office around 23:30, just when the night-time battles preferred by the U-boat captains began. He typically arrived to work in worn and split pyjamas and with a tall glass of barley water in his fist, ready to direct the convoy battles on the huge plot.
There was one thing he shared with his mannerly predecessor, however: a scepticism toward this rogue group of game-players squatting in the roof of his new headquarters.
‘And what duty do you think you perform on my staff?’ Horton sarcastically asked Roberts after the king and queen had left the room, apparently having forgotten their phone-call, several months earlier. WATU had been training naval officers for more than nine months by this point, but apparently word of their work and success had passed by the incoming commander. Roberts bristled at the question.
‘I am the director of the tactical staff,’ he replied. ‘If you want to know further, I suggest that you find the time to come and see what we do.’11
‘Yes, I will,’ Horton replied, curtly.
The following Monday, he appeared at WATU’s front door, ready to take the course, not as an invigilator but as a student. As the week progressed the frost between the two men thawed. Just as Roberts had promised, through game-play Horton was able to both see and experience the value of the unit’s work, the growing expertise of the Wrens and Roberts’ own increasing confidence as ringmaster of the operation.
‘It was only a game,’ Horton later wrote of his conversion, ‘but the lessons were driven home.’ The ‘ghastly mistakes’ that players made on the floor would arm them with foreknowledge that would ‘put them on their guard and give them confidence when they took their ships to sea on the morrow’. Roberts did well to impress Horton, who had dismissed or redeployed from Derby House a clutch of other officers he considered to be deadwood.
At the time of Horton’s arrival, the Wrens, of whom there were now more than thirty at WATU, were becoming ever more knowledgeable. Week by week they were accruing dozens of hours’ virtual combat experience, testing and perfecting anti-submarine warfare at the bleeding edge of tactical design.
‘These girls became so experienced in the tactics of convoy battle that they were able to save many a salt-encrusted sea-dog from making the errors which would inevitably lead to disaster to their convoys of model ships,’ wrote Donald Macintyre,12 who had captured Kretschmer the year before and was by now a regular face at WATU, attending as both player and observer.
Through their vicarious experiences in the game the brightest and most diligent Wrens, including Laidlaw and Okell, were quietly becoming some of the most fearsome U-boat hunters in the British Empire, even if the U-boats happened to be little wooden models, and the sea a linoleum floor.
Soon after Horton’s arrival, Roberts was busily working to expose what he believed was another of Captain Walker’s ill-conceived tactics. This manoeuvre, which Walker had dubbed ‘Alpha’, involved ships performing a sweeping zigzag search in an effort to sink a so-called ‘sighting’ U-boat, which was suspected to be shadowing a convoy while directing a wolfpack toward its position. Roberts had tested Walker’s tactic using the game and ‘it didn’t seem too logical’.13 Roberts reported his misgivings to Horton.
‘Well,’ said Horton. ‘You will do better, will you not?’
During the next few days Roberts and Laidlaw began to develop a replacement tactic, which involved exploiting the U-boat captain’s natural caution by tricking him into ordering his vessel to dive to avoid an escort moving into potential spotting distance. Hearing the escort pass by and believing that he had not been seen, the submerged U-boat would then move to what it assumed was a safer location. Wargames and experience suggested this would be a slow turn designed to place the U-boat in a position parallel to the convoy while conserving its batteries. The escort ships would dash towards its predicted position, using the rumble of the convoy ships’ propellers to mask their approach. The idea was that the U-boat, having realised that it was not under attack, would be too occupied with the wider convoy battle to notice the redirection of its adversary.
After tweaking, replaying and further tweaking the manoeuvre over and over again, the pair were happy with the tactic, which they dubbed ‘Beta Search’, named after the fact that U-boat transmissions always began with the Morse B (Beta), or B-bar, and Roberts invited Horton up to WATU not only to hear about their plan, but to be one of the first outsiders to experience and test its usefulness.
Before Horton arrived, Roberts summoned Janet Okell and Jean Laidlaw, and informed them, to their dismay, that they were to play as the commander-in-chief’s opponent. Laidlaw would work in a side room, passing advice to Okell, who would play as the escort commander in the main room, hidden from Horton’s view behind one of the canvas sheets. Roberts’ decision to give a junior Wren such an important role was controversial but based on her having repeatedly demonstrated an instinctive grasp of U-boat tactics.14 He was certain that she would be a worthy opponent to Horton. The two women huddled around the sheets of paper in Laidlaw’s office, onto which the instruction for Beta Search had been written, to coordinate their plan.15
Peeping through the canvas porthole, Janet Okell looked even more schoolgirlish than usual, like a lookout at the classroom window poised to signal the arrival of a furious teacher to her chalk-hurling classmates. On the other side of the room, studying a fleet of tiny wooden ships on the lino-covered floor, stood fifty-nine-year-old Horton, the greatest living British submariner. Twenty-year-old Okell, by contrast, had never been in a submarine. In fact, she had never been to sea.
When Horton arrived at WATU, Roberts asked him whether he might like to play not as the Allied escort ships, but as a U-boat captain. It was a shrewd suggestion. The efficacy of Beta Search–and of WATU and its games–could be irrefutably proven if it could be shown to beat one of the most highly decorated British submariners. As much as Derby House staff had come to fear Horton, nobody doubted his extraordinary talent for submarining; time and again he had anticipated U-boats’ behaviour on the real plot with ship-saving prescience.
Okell fixed the admiral with a determined stare. Her objective was straightforward: sink Horton’s U-boat, its position hidden from her view, taking pot-shots at her ships. Turn by turn Okell, standing behind the canvas sheet, and supported by Laidlaw, directed her escort ships, executing a perfectly planned Beta Search. Five times Horton attempted to escape the escort ships, and five times Okell and Laidlaw destroyed his U-boat.* On the fifth sinking, Horton, who had become increasingly flustered with each loss, erupted.
‘You can see, and I can’t,’ he roared. ‘You just rigged it, didn’t you?’16
Roberts indignantly explained that, no, the game had not been rigged. Then Horton harrumphingly asked to see who, exactly, was standing behind the canvas, laying waste to his submarines. To his disbelief, a young woman stepped out. The submarine ace had been beaten by someone who was barely out of school, who had never been on an escort ship, had never seen battle, and who, worse still, wasn’t even an officer.
Finally, Roberts led the smarting Horton into the Wrens Officers’ Staff Room, where Third Officer Laidlaw sat at a desk, her handwritten notes outlining Beta Search splayed out in front of her. Laidlaw and Okell shared a smile, and in that moment Horton’s admiration for the Wrens surely overtook his dismay.
In the months that followed, the training establishment at Liverpool grew and grew, with WATU as its centrepiece. Such was the Wrens’ effectiveness in running The Game at WATU that when it was time to expand the training facilities with new kinds of simulation, the Admiralty chose to appoint a young woman to oversee and orchestrate the work.
Mary Charlotte Poole arrived in Liverpool in the late summer of 1942, having been chosen to establish a new division within the anti-submarine school. Poole, who was born on Christmas Day, 1921, was an exceptionally bright young woman, forced by war’s arrival to turn down the offer of a place at Cambridge University. She had joined the Wrens aged 20 and in December 1941 was posted to the tunnels under Dover Castle to work as a signals watchkeeper. On one of Churchill’s visits to the Naval Operations Room, he asked Poole if she was frightened when the German cross-channel guns shelled Dover.
‘I couldn’t quite believe that this man was asking me the question,’ she later recalled. ‘As I stood in front of him, I burst out laughing saying “Good gracious no, Sir!” I got into dreadful trouble for laughing in front of the Prime Minister, but it came from the heart. It had never entered our heads; it was part of the job. There was no fear, no nothing attached to it at all.’17
After completing her officer’s training Poole left for Liverpool. On arrival she was shown to an enormous, empty warehouse on Gladstone Dock, a few hundred metres from Derby House. This hangar was, Poole was told, to be her new school. Captain Roberts invited Poole, who knew nothing about anti-submarine warfare and took the post simply because she thought ‘it’d be lovely to be among the ships’18 to his school, where she was to become the first woman to undertake the course, not as a helper but as a student.
Poole arrived at WATU on a Monday morning, a little later than the other students. As she walked into the main room, she was confronted with the sight of forty-nine naval officers–sub lieutenants, lieutenants, a few lieutenant commanders as well as ill or injured members of escort ships, who were made to take the course while they recuperated–sitting in chairs around the edge of the game plot, with Captain Roberts in the centre of the circle. On cue, every man politely rose to his feet.
‘I didn’t know where I was or what I was supposed to be doing,’ Poole later recalled. ‘But I did learn. It was an extraordinary way of teaching.’
The course completed, Poole learned that her offshoot school was to teach the captains of escort ships how to make evasive manoeuvres to dodge torpedoes. One of these torpedoes had been captured by the Allies and dismantled.* Through this process, the Allies figured out that the German torpedoes had to keep within a certain angle of approach, or lose their target. It was therefore possible to outrun a torpedo, providing the target executed a particular zigzag pattern.
To teach the men this evasive manoeuvre, Poole was given a giant simulator. A ship’s bridge, almost full size, was built and installed in the warehouse at Gladstone Dock. It sat within a see-saw mechanism that allowed it to simulate the movement of the sea. Poole would run the game with a ship’s captain, flag lieutenant and navigator, who were used to working together at sea.
‘The [players] would all be swanning around doing nothing, then the ASDIC would pick up the torpedo,’ Poole recalled. ‘Then it was action stations, and all began to happen.’
Through a pair of speakers, the warning signal would sound and a pre-recorded ASDIC ‘hit’ would play, indicating the angle of the incoming torpedo. The crew would have to perform evasive manoeuvres using the giant apparatus. If they failed to outrun or dodge the torpedo, an obnoxiously loud banger known as a thunder-flash was let off by one of Poole’s fifteen staff members.* They would also release smoke capsules to mimic the disorientating effects of a direct hit, when the alarms howled, the floor tipped and, in the most extreme cases, visibility shrank to a few feet.
‘It was as real as that,’ Poole later said.
Poole, like Roberts, designed a clutch of different fake battle scenarios–eight in total, which lasted forty-five minutes each–and the ship’s crews would often return to replay through each variation. As with WATU, word of Poole’s game spread quickly. Soon she was training the majority of escort crews that came through Liverpool, including those of aircraft carriers and, much later in February 1944, the senior officers of the giant battleship HMS King George V, who took three lessons in total. Unlike WATU, however, Poole’s outfit was never given a formal title. To allocate a woman to such an operation was unprecedented and represented a significant victory for Laughton Mathews in her secondary campaign to loosen the tight constrictions on female opportunity. Poole was one of the many Wrens who, as Laughton Mathews later put it, ‘had started in very junior positions and had developed ability and qualities of leadership of which they themselves were quite unaware’.19 Her role was significant, her work vital and yet, without a man like Roberts at the project’s centre to fight for legacy, Poole’s work was forgotten.
‘We were in this great big building at the end of the dock,’ she later recalled, ‘everyone knew where we were, but we never got a name.’
Elsewhere at the training facility, the men responsible for setting the timers on and firing depth charges were drilled till they could fire full patterns of explosives at fifteen-second intervals, building efficiency that would, at sea, often mean the difference between a hit and a miss on a U-boat. Teams responsible for operating the ASDIC sonar systems hunted imaginary U-boats on the synthetic attack teacher while, in a hut at Gladstone Dock, next to Poole’s torpedo-evasion trainer, communications staff were taught how to use a new cypher machine. According to Kretschmer’s captor Donald Macintyre, the ‘pleasantly secluded’ hut was run by a ‘very glamorous Wren officer’, and his younger officers made ‘remarkable… slow progress’, requiring ‘a great many lessons before the intricacies of the machine were mastered’.
Liverpool became a training hive, with hundreds of individuals and teams practising and perfecting their various roles in the art of U-boat warfare, from the wet-work of hauling explosive barrels overboard, to the bird’s-eye strategy taught at WATU.
Roberts was also eager to develop his talents.
‘You can’t put anything over unless you impress on those who are tired… that it is something of the highest interest,’ Roberts later said. ‘If you imbue them with [excitement], they will play and fight and work to the best event.’20
In seeking to improve his communication skills, Roberts appealed to the best-loved entertainer of the moment, Tommy Handley, a Liverpudlian turned national institution. Every Thursday at half-past eight, millions of Britons would gather around their radio sets and listen to Handley’s radio show, It’s That Man Again. ITMA, as it became affectionately known, provided the unique salve of comedy to the national consciousness, an oasis of absurdity in a world that had become unbearably severe. In ITMA, a nation so used to collective grief now had a chance to laugh together, and the programme soon broke the record for the largest radio audience show, one that has remained ever since.*
Part of the appeal lay in Handley’s talent for imagining comic characters. He would exaggerate clichés and tie them off with catchphrase ribbons. These would spread, meme-like, through the streets, factories and ships. Colonel Chinstrap, a character who lived on after Handley’s death with appearances in The Goon Show, was an army drunk, inhaling fingers of whisky with a ‘Don’t mind if I do.’ Mrs Mopp was a lewd charwoman (a progenitor of Mrs Slocombe from Are You Being Served?), forever inquiring ‘Can I do you now, sir?’ Signor So-So would skitter indecisively (‘I go–I come back!’) while Frisby Dyke had a treacle-thick Liverpool accent. Handley’s triumph, for the wartime context at least, was Funf the Spy, a foreign operative who would uselessly attempt to muffle and mask his reports by speaking into a glass mostly pressed over his mouth.
It was while ITMA was at the height of its popularity that Handley, who had served with a kite-balloon section of the Royal Naval Air Service during the First World War, received word from Captain Roberts. Roberts wanted to know how Handley was able to capture and hold the attention of millions, and how he might employ some of the same techniques to inspire the war-weary sailors arriving at WATU’s door.
Against all regulations the pair arranged to meet up. Roberts invited Handley to WATU’s confidential premises on a Sunday and explained the difficulty he was finding, as a ‘chairbound fellow’, in capturing the attention of his exhausted students who, after multiple trips across the Atlantic, were often in desperate need of rest and relaxation. Handley gave Roberts a number of ‘gimmicks’ to deploy with his hands. ‘He was immensely good at telling me how to talk and excite their interest’, Roberts later recalled.21 Comics transmute the angst and sorrow of their lives into comedy; they spill their guts on stage in the hope and belief that the specificity of their experience will prove, somehow, universal. Roberts was not telling jokes on the radio, or in front of booze-loosened crowds, but there was a symmetry in his and Handley’s roles: to pull, from the darkness of the imagination, scenarios that brought the listener to attention. Handley’s advice proved effective. The Canadian officer A. F. C. Layard later described the WATU director as a ‘very good lecturer, very theatrical and, of course, would like you to know that he was seventy-five per cent responsible for the recent defeat of the U-boats in the North Atlantic. He’s probably right.’22
By the end of 1942, as many as 200 naval officers per month were playing The Game. Horton was by no means the only luminary to graduate. There was Davey ‘Potato’ Jones, a Welsh captain in the British Merchant Marine who had gained notoriety in 1937 for almost embroiling the Royal Navy in Spain’s civil war when attempting to smuggle guns into Bilbao hidden under sacks of potatoes. There was Peter Scott, the naturalist painter who one of the WATU Wrens remembered for drawing ducks all over his navigational chart.23 And there was a young Philip Mountbatten, future husband to Queen Elizabeth II.
The dashing Mountbatten’s presence around the unit brought many of the WATU Wrens ‘unending delight’, as one put it.24 He too apparently enjoyed his time there; not only did he finish the course, he also supported Roberts on the plot for a few weeks while waiting for his ship to be made ready.* So too did the journalist turned naval surgeon Nicholas Monsarrat, who had seen first-hand the devastation that U-boats could cause when uncontested, not least in the deaths of the Wrens on the SS Aguila. The author’s time on the course made an indelible impression. In his 1951 novel The Cruel Sea, Monsarrat sends his fictional captain, Commander Ericson, on a ‘Commanding Officers Tactical Course’, clearly based on WATU. Monsarrat describes in detail a ‘convoy game’ played out with models on the floor of an empty room:
‘U-boats crowded round, and their escorts had to work out their counter-tactics and put them into effect as they would do at sea. A formidable RN captain was in charge; and a large number of patient Wrens stood by, moving the ship models, bringing the latest “signals” and sometimes discreetly advising the next course of action. Rather unfairly they seemed to know all about everything.’
By late 1942 there were thirty-six Wren officers and ratings working at WATU and, with such a large number of eligible young men and eligible young women working together in a playful environment, there were inevitable romantic flowerings.
That year Fred Osborne–brother of Nancy the first chief officer of the Wrens, and captain of HMS Gentian, a member of Donald Macintyre’s escort group–took the WATU course and caught the eye of Liz Drake, one of the Wrens officers who had helped establish the school. When Fred returned the following year as a teacher on an eight-month posting, the couple became engaged to be married. Engagements like these became a pattern, and many of the Wrens would later attend each other’s weddings, occasionally in a formal role, as in the case of Janet Okell, who was a bridesmaid to Doris Lawford.
During his time game-playing, Peter Gretton–lieutenant commander of the destroyer Wolverine, who alongside Walker and Macintyre became one of the great U-boat hunters of the war–became enamoured with Judy Du Vivier, the young Wren whom Bob Whinney described as a ‘particularly clued-up girl’ after she corrected one of his mistakes in the game. After his coup de foudre, Gretton–later a major player in the Battle of Birds and Wolves, the decisive confrontation of the Battle of the Atlantic–asked Du Vivier on a date, and the pair met formally at a Liverpool restaurant on Trafalgar Day, in late October 1942.
Promptly thereafter Du Vivier fell out with a Wren officer at Derby House and was ‘disrated’ to ‘ordinary Wren’ after she was minutes late to an appointment (Du Vivier believed this disproportionate punishment was the result of romantic jealousy triggered by her relationship with Gretton25). To Gretton’s dismay, Du Vivier was posted to the Londonderry Tactical Unit, a spin-off group that was beginning to run training courses in the mode of WATU’s work. There, together with a Wren officer and two other Wrens ratings, Du Vivier helped to plot examples of convoy operations for the training of officers, just as she had learned to do from Roberts.
William Tooley-Hawkins, a handsome corvette captain who joined WATU staff in October 1943, became one of Roberts’ most dearly loved colleagues (in his diary, Roberts refers to him as ‘my loyal Tooley-Hawkins’). Tooley-Hawkins, who was married with a young son, fell in love with Elizabeth ‘Bunch’ Hackney, another of the school’s Wrens, and soon and scandalously left his wife to be with her.
War, combined with the unexpected freedom it bestowed on many young women, created a boiler-room atmosphere in which relationships could thrive. Wrens, like the eligible male officers they courted, were aware of their youthful nubility, and often chose uniforms a size or two too large before taking them to Mama’s tailor in the city in order to secure, as Mary Carlisle, the Wren who worked the plot at Derby House put it, a ‘slinkier fit’.26 Many of the Wrens delighted in tying the bows on their hats, on which the name of their shore establishment, HMS Eaglet, was printed in such a way that the ‘t’ was masked, so it read ‘Eagle’, which they believed sounded more fashionable. Sailors were expert in tying bows, Hall explained. ‘One could always find a friend in Derby House to oblige.’
The complex social negotiations between men and women who were serving in close proximity, often for the first time, was illustrated in a popular anecdote widely shared between Wrens. It involved a group of Wrens who worked with the Fleet Air Arm, and the pilot of a Fairey Swordfish biplane.
The pilot had landed his plane, fresh from action. As the group of Wrens approached, the pilot refused to disembark while ordering the Wrens to go inside. Only after the Wrens had left the scene would the pilot allow himself to be helped down by a colleague.
‘My God, man,’ the colleague said, ‘you’ve been shot!’
‘Thank God for that,’ the pilot replied. ‘I thought I’d shit myself.’27
At sea, Monsarrat wrote, the sailor’s reputation for lascivious talk was earned (‘the tone of conversation does not exactly reflect a humble worship at the shrine of womanhood’, he explained).28 Ashore, however, the writer-lieutenant maintained that all the talk of ‘torpedoing’ and ‘other inelegant exploits’ dissipated, especially when a sailor was in the position of having to talk to a woman alone, a situation that transformed the man, Monsarrat maintained, into a ‘model of deference and attention’. Only when with his pack would a sailor ‘lack the courage or the initiative to treat women as normal human beings.’ Monsarrat also noted the sailors’ ‘special affection’ for Wrens, who were ‘looked on, not as fair game but as part of the Service, and thus to be protected and preserved from outsiders’.
Not all men were so chivalrous. The ebullient Nancy Spain, who worked as a driver before her promotion to Wren officer, wrote of an incident when two cadets pinched her bottom. In response, Spain banged their heads together so hard that they attempted to report her to the sick-berth petty officer. Nothing came of the matter, other than Spain ended the war otherwise unmolested.
Pamela Bates, a coder at Bletchley Park, remembered some of the British sailors arriving on shore ‘rather short on sex’, and expecting to be met with open arms and warm beds, having read that the ‘Americans laid every single girl in Britain’.29 Mary Carlisle, one of the first Wrens to arrive in Liverpool, received the advice: ‘Always beware of a sailor who asks you to talk with him on a fine day, and carries his raincoat: he’s up to no good.’*30
On shore leave, away from the horrors of the Atlantic, sailors would drink heartily. Gladstone Dock, where Mary Poole ran her ASDIC trainer, became a popular haunt for lower-deck sailors. At night, the only illumination the shaded gangway lights of the docked ships, sailors could stumble through a small door, through heavy blackout curtains and into the heat and bustle of the Flotilla club, a long wooden shed with a refreshments counter at one end, and a bar at the other. The canteen was staffed by women volunteers. Packed each night, ‘the noise, the fug, the pilchard sandwiches and, of course, the beer’ all made, as one signalman put it, ‘a haven of rest where we could forget our troubles for a short time’.31
Spilling drunkenly from such bars after hours, some of the men would look for other, more intimate ways to forget their troubles, and in this context, more serious sexual assaults sometimes took place.
Bates recalled her and her friends having their arms grabbed on numerous occasions by a sailor who would say ‘Back of the ambulance?’, indicating that he had a nearby location for quick sex. Reports of rape were uncommon, yet often dealt with in ways that reflected the punitive sexual attitudes toward women at the time. One Wren recalled a young ‘unsophisticated’ colleague who was asked to be taken home by a sailor with whom she had danced at a party at HMS Grasshopper in Weymouth.32 As the pair walked the man leaned in for a kiss, which she reciprocated. ‘He then raped her,’ the Wren recalled. The victim reported the assault the following morning and the sailor was charged but acquitted by the judge, who ruled that she was partly to blame, having encouraged him by allowing the kiss.
Laughton Mathews was firmly against the distribution of condoms to sailors, which despite being limited in supply and ineffective were, according to one medical Sister, ‘in great demand before a dance’. Despite her progressive politics, Laughton Mathews believed that the handing out of prophylactics ‘lets it be known that the lowest [standard of conduct] is expected and prepared for’.33
Still, whenever a Wren had ‘loved unwisely’, as Laughton Mathews put it with extreme delicacy, the senior Wrens officers would fight their subordinate’s corner to ensure that the blame was not hoisted onto the young woman, who typically sat at the lower end of a power balance tipped by both age and rank. When one naval officer’s wife phoned a Wrens superintendent to complain of a young rating who had become involved with her husband, she was surprised to be told: ‘If I were the girl’s father, I should horsewhip your husband.’34
So great was the taboo of lesbianism at the time that same-sex romance within the Wrens goes unmentioned in official policy documents. Laughton Mathews’ history of the service contains no reference to lesbianism, nor does the autobiography of Wren Nancy Spain, who later became a prominent broadcaster and whose homosexuality was public knowledge. Anecdotal evidence of lesbianism within the service exists.
‘There was this case of two lesbians,’ recalled Norma Deering, a coder from Bletchley Park, in 2010.35 ‘Two girls were found in one bunk together, they were separated of course, one was sent somewhere else, that was terrible in those days.’ If Jean Laidlaw, who lived openly with a female partner in the 1960s, recognised her sexual identity while working at WATU, she seemingly did not act upon it, either to conform to societal views about the immorality of homosexual behaviour at the time, or to avoid the risk of being caught and relocated.
Roberts, for his part, adopted a fatherly stance toward many of his Wrens.
‘Many a time I heard him dressing down some senior regular service officer because one of his “little wrens” had been subjected, in his opinion, to intimidation,’ said George Phillips, who wrote and delivered Roberts’ eulogy.36 As well as frequently (and seemingly innocently) taking the young women of WATU out for dinner,37 he would often write them personal notes of encouragement.
Roberts took particular care of June Duncan, a waiflike Wren who had joined WATU in its first months. The daughter of one of Liverpool’s most successful fishmongers, who supplied cruise liners with fish imported from Iceland, Duncan was one of the youngest Wrens at WATU. On holiday on the north coast of the Isle of Man at war’s outbreak, when she was just fifteen years old, Duncan’s parents left their daughter in Ramsey with a doctor and his family. There she studied shorthand, attended Red Cross lectures and gathered sphagnum moss on the mountains to be used in splints. She knitted hospital stockings and balaclava helmets, before returning to Liverpool, where, having caught German measles, she spent several weeks living in the family’s air-raid shelter, a converted washhouse. Hoping to join the Wrens, Duncan took a secretarial course at Miss Foulkes’ Secretarial College for Young Ladies, returning to school to take her School Certificate.
At seventeen, Duncan applied to join the Wrens, only to be twice rejected due to being underweight. Determined to find a way into the service, Duncan and her mother plotted to cheat the system on her third attempt. Duncan’s great-uncle was a sea captain who, after a sojourn, had brought home a handful of weighty Siamese silver nuggets. Duncan’s mother sewed the nuggets into the hem of the young woman’s coat. At the medical, Duncan gingerly stepped on to the weighing scales, which, thanks to the hidden trinkets, tipped over the threshold.
Early in her career at WATU, Duncan spilled an armload of heavy books, known as ACIs, onto the floor. As she knelt to tidy the mess, a man appeared beside her to assist. To her astonishment, it was Philip Mountbatten, whom Duncan and the other non-officer Wrens had been instructed never to address.
‘I broke all the rules by thanking him profusely, nearly dropping them again,’ Duncan wrote in her diary.
Duncan was keen to serve, but her passion was in the performing arts, not the military. A nervous, sensitive child, when she was three a doctor had advised the family to send her to dancing lessons to increase her self-confidence. At first, Duncan had sat ‘cringing beside my mother’ as the other children ‘waltzed, galloped and polka’d up and down the room’.38 Eventually she left her mother’s side to join in, and her talent for dance was revealed. Later she attended Liverpool’s Shelagh Elliot Clarke School of Dance and Drama in the evenings, and when she was twelve made her professional stage debut in a musical revue at the Liverpool Empire.
Duncan’s artistic temperament, combined perhaps with her catwalk looks, ostracised her from many other women at Derby House. When she was performing, men in the audience would routinely leave notes for her at the stage door asking to meet her; after the war she became a top model for high-fashion magazines, including Harper’s Bazaar and Condé Nast’s Vogue.
Unlike many of the women, who maintain that their lives were invigorated by their time in the Wrens, Duncan struggled. She later wrote in her diary that she ‘hated every minute’. Given the warm memories Duncan recounts elsewhere in her diaries, this was perhaps something of an exaggeration. Roberts, an astute leader, encouraged her to join the WRNS Dramatic Society and Concert Party. There, among her people, she thrived, acting and singing in local repertory theatre, culminating in the performance of a song written especially for her on the BBC radio programme Navy Mixture.
Roberts attended Duncan’s numerous performances, often writing her encouraging notes. ‘Our most sincere congratulations on a very fine performance in your show last night,’ reads one typical example. ‘It was absolutely grand, and we all enjoyed ourselves immensely.’
Whatever animosity Duncan felt toward the other women of WATU was not directed at her captain, whom she remained in contact with throughout the remainder of their lives, another love that outlived the war.
Love came, too, for John Lamb. Following his safe return from New York City, he was dispatched to the South Atlantic as part of Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa in November 1942. When he returned to the North Atlantic at the end of the year, the change in climate was painfully pronounced. To compound the issue, the Atlantic Ocean was experiencing an extended period of preternaturally bad weather.39
Scores of corvettes were sustaining considerable damage, while the convoys were routinely forced to slow their speed, thereby increasing the amount of time it took to cross the ocean. These delays had knock-on effects: the men had less time in port to recuperate before the next escort mission. Even when Liverpool’s dockyard workers were recruited for boiler-cleaning duties to save time, the crews of escort ships, who often also had to fit in a tactical course at WATU, returned to sea unrested. Tiredness at sea, as on the road, is a killer.
Lamb’s ship was the new fleet destroyer HMS Oribi. After the first lieutenant’s previous vessels, the aged Vanoc and the damaged Glasgow, the speedy Oribi was a new and welcome home. But even this ship, captained by the experienced and competent Commander J. E. H. McBeath, a man who was reputed to have run away to sea as a boy in South Africa and worked his way up to commissioned rank, could not fend off the violence of the Atlantic in the exceptionally tempestuous early months of 1943.
The ship ‘rarely ceased from pitching, rolling and shaking’, Lamb recalled. Water constantly washed round the mess decks and cabin flats, and the upper deck was ‘untenable’. During one sortie, in the far north, the Oribi’s rigging and guard rails iced up ‘as thick as a man’s arm’, and ‘when she rolled, she would often hover at the point of no return before deciding to right herself, decks awash and the sea sometimes even lapping the wings of the lower bridge.’ It was, as Lamb later recalled, ‘much worse than the enemy’.40
Yet the enemy was not to be discounted. The steady production of new U-boats had grown Doenitz’s fleet such that wolfpacks regularly comprised more than a dozen well-coordinated vessels. In early 1943, Oribi fended off an attack by five U-boats losing just one merchant ship out of forty-five in the action;41 a few weeks later, the ship helped drive off seven U-boats that were attacking the fifty-seven-ship convoy HX.233. Immediately thereafter, the weather turned, and equinoctial gales inflicted severe structural damage on the Oribi while steaming at high speed into heavy seas. A crack extending about one third of the way across the ‘iron deck’–the toughened steel deck amidships over the engine room on which the two quadruple torpedo tubes were secured–was discovered. If left unattended, it was a category of wound that could lead to a broken back, and the end of the ship’s life.
On 30th March 1943 Oribi detached from the escort group, returned to Londonderry and, from there, limped around the north-eastern coast of Northern Ireland to Belfast.42 Christian Oldham was in Belfast Castle, finishing a shift at the plot when a signal announced Oribi’s arrival.
‘I paid no attention,’ she said. ‘It was just another ship.’
Then a call came through to the Wrennery inviting the Wrens officers to join the officers of the Oribi in the wardroom after sundown. Never one to refuse an invitation to a party, Oldham joined the delegation of half a dozen Wrens that made its way down to harbour, across the gangway, onto the beleaguered boat and, it would transpire, into a new future.