The crew of U-249 stood on the deck of the boat that had been their home for the past five weeks at sea1, their hands raised in surrender, their backs turned from the English shoreline. The men were weary, their uniforms crusted and frowsy. On receiving Doenitz’s final message to his U-boats, U-249’s captain, thirty-three-year-old Uwe Kock, had, on 9th May, surfaced and raised a flag in surrender to an overheard plane. Kock and his crew had been escorted to Weymouth Bay in Dorset, on the south coast of England, by this Liberator aircraft of the Fleet Air Wing of the US Navy. When they arrived in harbour the following day, the men lined up on the deck to await further instruction.
While they stood in submission, breathing the fresh air of peace, the crew members heard the sound of a launch approaching from the harbour behind. A few of the Germans shared an apprehensive glance. Unable to contain his curiosity, one young man threw a glance over his shoulder, then immediately looked forward again, his eyes widened in disbelief.2
The German nudged the man beside him, who in turn looked back. Presently, each crew member turned to see what was happening. There, a few metres away, was a boat filled not with the kind of stern-faced naval heavies they’d expected, but with a clutch of Wrens, most of whom were in their teens, led by none other than Nancy Osborne.
Hearing news of the incoming U-boat, Portland’s senior naval officer, Admiral R. J. R. Scott, asked Osborne, the woman who had sent Christian Oldham on her course as plotter, and hand-picked WATU’s staff, to accompany him on his barge.* Together, he said, they would accept the Germans’ surrender. He asked Osborne to bring with her a few other Wrens, including a petty officer, a visual signaller and three Wrens ratings, saying that he thought it would be ‘very good’ for the Germans to see the Wrens crew.3
The scene of the young Germans stealing elated glances at the women would remain bright in Osborne’s memory for the remainder of her life. Years later, she recalled: ‘[Their] surprise and delight… had to be seen to be believed.’
Wrens were intimately involved in the long and arduous administrative work that was involved in ending a world war. Young women were dispatched to Berlin, Hamburg, Kiel and Minden, and a number of Wrens interpreters were also posted to work alongside the German-manned mine-sweeping operations in the Baltic Sea. Wrens officers worked not only as secretaries and PAs, but also as signal and duty officers responsible for finding and cataloguing any naval war material, much of which had been hidden, that was discovered. Wrens helped to organise the scuttling of ships loaded with poison gas shells,4 the repatriation of German soldiers from Norway and the identification and reclamation of Allied ships that had been commandeered by the Germans.
Once collected, the German naval papers were sent to France to be translated and evaluated for relevance in the Nuremberg trials. This work was carried out by a unit that included Wrens, special-duties linguists who had been part of the first contingent of servicewomen sent to France after D-Day.5 There they had holed up in an old farmhouse in Courseulles-sur-Mer. Evelyn Glazier was a member of the unit, tasked with reading through an estimated 50,000 German files. She was responsible for identifying evidence that was later used in the trials of twenty-two Nazis at Nuremberg. She also translated documents that included Hitler’s recorded testimony.6 Among these stacks of evidence one of Glazier’s colleagues found the identity of U-30, the U-boat that sank the Athenia on the first day of the war, when 117 civilian passengers and crew were killed in an act that was condemned as a war crime. So efficient was their work that an American commander wrote to Vera Laughton Mathews to ask whether Glazier and one of her Wrens colleagues might be spared to work as translators at Nuremberg as part of the US delegation, a request to which Laughton Mathews consented.*
Following Germany’s surrender, not all of the 63,000 Wrens still in active service were needed.7 As the summer drew on, many Wrens began the business of demobbing to return, ostensibly, to the civilian lives that had been placed on indefinite hold up to six years earlier. Most of the women found, however, that those lives no longer existed.
‘You’d left all your friends, the atmosphere was different, and people weren’t so keen to help each other anymore,’ said one Wren of the sorrowful transition. ‘There was no counselling and it was so difficult to settle back in to civilian life… it was an anticlimax. We were just left to get on with life as best we could.’8
War, in its way, imposes a certain form on the formlessness of life; it binds people with a common purpose, a project into which each person lends their particular strengths, be it fighting in the trenches or mending uniforms. When war ends there is, seemingly, a first flush of relief, a joyous moment in which to celebrate the birth of this new, longed-for peace, seen in every VE Day photograph, with its smiles and streamers. Then more complicated feelings arrive, ones that cannot be so easily captured on film. These feelings have to do with the death of a shared resolve, one that for six painful, perilous years, transcended generations, class and gender.
‘Whether they can put it into words or not, this was the tremendous gain: the sense of having taken part in something of enormous importance, of having justified their existence,’ wrote Vera Laughton Mathews of war’s unexpected gift. Peace had come, but at the cost of purpose. This was the unmentionable loss of the Second World War, the death that could not be mourned. After all, the purpose of the war was to bring about precisely such an ending. Nevertheless, across jobless Britain, a vacuum was keenly felt.
‘The end of the war was a blow in lots of ways,’ said Peggy Hill, a Wren based at Swansea naval base. ‘Everybody felt the same. It was the end of a completely different way of living, like coming back to earth again. The missing went on for years.’9
None felt ‘the missing’ more keenly than the women who, via war’s arrival, had been given an unprecedented opportunity to occupy spaces and roles that had been closed off to them. They had entered the war as one thing and exited as quite another.
‘The Wrens have carried out duties once thought to be completely outside the scope of womenkind,’ wrote one journalist for the Western Morning News in October 1945.10 ‘They have kept secrets, so vital, that at times the fate of the nation depended upon them. They have been positioned to watch great dramas of combat mirrored on huge maps which told Britain’s peril from the U-boats.’
For the Wrens, the arrival of peace meant somehow relinquishing a new-found identity. As she handed in her uniform, one young woman was seen to pat her sea boots and mutter: ‘Cheerio, old pals.’ Wrens seemed, in war’s crucible, to have been profoundly shaped and unified by their chosen service. When she died in 2015, at the age of 93, Mary Poole, the Wren officer who ran the torpedo simulator in Liverpool, still kept her Wren headdress on her bedside, next to a photograph taken in 1943 of her in uniform.11 For many of these young women, their time in the Wrens was both formative and definitive.
‘I am going home to my husband, himself just released, and that is a great thing,’ said one Wren on the day of her demobbing. ‘But I would not have missed this wonderful experience, this great sisterhood, for anything.’
When they arrived home, however, many of the young women found it difficult to reintegrate with former contemporaries.
‘They didn’t know what my life had been,’ said Claire James, a plotter who became a leading Wren. ‘I’d led a totally different life to anybody at home. I’d gone through things people at home hadn’t. I found it very difficult, settling back.’12
WATU, its identity now public knowledge, earned its own mention in the news reports.
‘This team spirit was reflected in another sphere, for at the Officers’ Tactical School at one of the great ports Sir Max Horton schemed and planned to beat the U-boats,’ read one. ‘In that school they constantly played a “game” which took place on the floor. It was a game that, played properly, saved countless lives. In this great work the Wrens cooperated to a remarkable degree, plotting and recording with skill, speed, and precision, which won the admiration of all who were privileged to see them at work.’13
The fresh opportunities that the country had, for a moment, afforded women in war were widely rescinded. Many firms, together with the teaching profession and the Civil Service, operated a marriage bar after the war, leading some women to slip off their wedding rings in order not to have to vacate their positions.14 When the men returned, the women were expected to meekly retreat to their former roles, as homemakers and keepers. This was in addition to the challenge of finding peacetime jobs to which the young women’s new-found skills might transfer. Having given many young women a profession that was, at least in the case of the plotters, particular to a now vanished moment, many Wrens were left without a vocation.
‘The things I learned were completely useless after the war,’ said Christian Lamb, who, after a stint at the plot in Falmouth, where the Oribi was undergoing repairs (again, she was looked after by Nancy Osborne, who gave her the appointment so that she could be close to her new husband), gave birth to her and John’s daughter, Felicity. ‘I really had no qualifications.’
This was, seemingly, less true for the women of WATU, who, through game-playing, had acquired numerous transferable skills. Laidlaw returned to London to continue her career as one of the country’s first female chartered accountants, eventually retiring as chief accountant for the firm of solicitors Baker & Mackenzie. Her time in the service inspired lifelong loyalty to the Wrens; she advised the organisation on financial matters throughout her life, and left money to the Association of Wrens when she died.15 ‘This was more than wartime,’ her nephew Bill Laidlaw said. ‘This was something to do with her identity and who she was.’
Janet Okell, who lived in the Liverpool area until her death in 2005, became office manager for the manufacturing company Heap & Partners. According to her niece, Okell was ‘very fond of the girls’, no doubt employing many of the managerial techniques she witnessed, first as a Wrens rating and then later as a leading Wren.*
After the war Nan Wales, who never married and, like Laidlaw, was described by her family as ‘a very private person’,16 returned to her home of Hull, but remained in the Wrens. She became first officer of the Hull shore establishment HMS Gaeatea, continuing to play hockey at county level, and eventually teaching sport in a high school, thereby keeping her hand in game-playing for years.
June Duncan was told that she was ‘too thin’ and lacked ‘the physical strength’ to pursue her dream to become a professional actor after the war.17 Instead she turned to modelling, gracing the catwalks of London, Paris and Rome, and the pages of glossy fashion magazines such as Vogue (‘It was a hell of a life, but damned hard work’).18 Later, she became the assistant editor of Harper’s Bazaar magazine and, after she retired and moved to Devon, returned to her first love as theatre critic for a local newspaper. Ostensibly Duncan’s work at WATU had nothing to do with her chosen career, but in interviews she would often credit Roberts for his belief and support in her.
‘He was a very hard task master,’ she once said, ‘but a brilliant man. The way he worked out tactical games was astonishing. I feel proud to have been a member of a team which did so much to help win the Battle of the Atlantic.’19
Many of the relationships forged in WATU endured. Fred Osborne and Liz Drake were married on 4th November 1944, and, at the end of the summer of 1946, sailed to Australia, where Fred became a government minister in the Liberal Party. William Tooley-Hawkins and Elizabeth Hackney, who attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London before joining WATU, married in 1947 and became publicans, running the Traveller’s Rest in Reading, and later the Red Lion in Brixham, Devon. Peter Gretton and Judy Du Vivier remained married for the rest of their lives, as he rose up the ranks in the Royal Navy to become a vice admiral.
For Laughton Mathews, who had devoted her life to the ennoblement and promotion of women, victory altered her guiding question.
‘How to encourage the virtues of war, the heroism and sacrifice, kindness, endurance and fidelity,’ she now wondered, ‘absent of its horrors?’20
For Laughton Mathews those horrors were not second-hand knowledge. She had known grief in her role as leader of the Wrens, of course, particularly following the deaths of the young women killed on the SS Aguila. And when visiting a London establishment ostensibly for the training of Polish Wrens rescued from the concentration camps, she had seen the ‘suffering and degradation… written in their grey shrinking faces’. But it was only when she travelled to Nuremberg, in part to see the work of her crack interpreter Wrens, that she understood the outlandish kind of evil that had been perpetrated by the Nazis.
There Laughton Mathews visited a room known as the ‘Chamber of Horrors’, a funfair moniker for a place displaying a panoply of harrowing artefacts: soap made from human fat, lampshades made from tattooed human skin and photographs of the piles of children’s shoes stacked outside the gas chambers. After she returned home, Laughton Mathews wrote that she did not sleep for a week. One photograph in particular kept her awake. It showed a group of young Jewish girls, running in a circle while armed German soldiers looked on as they decided, she imagined, on whether the children’s fate should be ‘the crematorium or the brothel’.
In the nights that followed, Laughton Mathews wept every night for those girls, knowing that they were likely dead, but hoping that, in some mysterious way, her grief might retroactively ease the girls’ suffering in the moment the photograph was taken, the kind of magical thinking required to contemplate the unconscionable.
‘I was filled, too,’ Laughton Mathews wrote two years later, ‘by a helpless agony that men should have the power to inflict such humiliation on women.’
This is what she had always been fighting for, ever since being spat on by passers-by while standing in the gutter selling copies of the Suffragette: an alternate ‘conception of womanhood’, one that existed not only counter to that promoted by Nazism, but also, in a quieter but no less meaningful way, promoted at home, in the workplace and in society at large.
On 8th June 1946, 200 Wrens took part in the London Victory Parade. The four-mile long procession, which included representatives from all of the armed forces and more than 500 vehicles from the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force, British civilian services and the British Army, was led by Wrens dispatch riders on their motorbikes. The procession marched at a leisurely pace. Fire engines trundled. Scottish and Irish pipers piped. Laughton Mathews, accompanied by the two other directors of the Wrens, Dame Leslie Whately and Lady Welsh, sat in the Royal Stand behind Queen Elizabeth, King George VI, Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill awaiting sight of the main Wrens contingent.
First came the sailors. Then the Marines. Now a small contingent from the naval nursing service. Finally, in white caps, the Wrens. As they passed the king and queen the women turned their faces in well-drilled unison. The sound of the bands, the cheering, the applause, muffled to silence in Laughton Mathews’ ears. While everyone else saw the pristine uniforms and mechanical precision of the marching, Laughton Mathews saw the women in sweat-soaked boilersuits and ripped overalls, their faces smudged with engine oil. She saw her Wrens in bell-bottom trousers, tearing fleet-footed up ladders to deliver urgent messages, while sailors leaned over the handrails. She saw her Wrens in leather-strapped tin helmets, leaning into lingering corners atop motorbikes, the sound of bomb-fall crackling in their eardrums.
And she saw her Wrens in a Liverpool attic, on bended knee, watchfully pushing wooden ships across the linoleum floor, hundreds of miles from the terrors of the Atlantic, yet close enough that they could feel the salt water crusting on their fingertips.