- Contributed by
- Bemerton Local History Society
- People in story:
- Trudy Ensor
- Location of story:
- Bently Priory; the Cabinet Offices
- Background to story:
- Royal Air Force
- Article ID:
- A4255580
- Contributed on:
- 23 June 2005
It was a glamorous thing for girls to want to join up, so, as soon as I could, in 1941, I volunteered for the WAAF. I went along with my mother to the recruitment officer who asked me all sorts of questions about my education and background and then said, “There`s a hush-hush job which you would do very well.”
I was sent off to train as a plotter. Our job was to receive information of aircraft from radar stations, which was still a secret, and to plot the positions on a graph. We had magnetic rods and used little metal arrows to indicate on a map the location of aircraft, different colours for friendly or enemy and a change of colour every fifteen minutes.
I worked at Bentley Priory Fighter Command HQ in Middlesex, in a vast room, deep underground. There was a gallery all the way round from which RAF officers watched our plotting down below and then sent commands out to areas which looked as if they would be attracting the interest of the enemy so that the sirens could be activated or fighters scrambled. Each of us had our “corner” or area on the huge map of England and if the raid was headed in our particular corner we had to work terribly hard and very fast. We worked in shifts and I was billeted in Stanmore. A lot of the young women I worked with were debutantes or titled and were very interesting; it was amazing.
I was at Bentley Priory for about eighteen months but eventually I asked if I could move - I felt rather claustrophobic in the underground ops room - and was sent to Tangmere. Our room there was above
ground and, although the work was basically the same, we
had a more localised area to deal with. Again the RAF officers despatched orders according to enemy activity which we were relaying on the map; how often did I hear, “Scramble, Squadron X.”
There were Observer Corps stations dotted about the country to whom information was fed as well, but there was one secret news which they were not given: from time to time Lysander aircraft would fly out to France in the night to take an agent or supplies. We knew what was going on but the Observer Corps was not informed. Sometimes they would call up and say, “A Lysander is flying over,” and we would deny it, insinuating that they had made a mistake. There would be an agonising wait for the plane to come home and such relief when it did - but, of course, sadly, some did not return.
Then, in the beginning of 1944 I was sent to OCTU for training as a code and cypher officer. After a spell in Windermere for training in the legal side of being an officer I passed out and was sent to Portsmouth to the combined headquarters for the D-Day landings. I worked in Fort Southwick and was billeted in Fort Wallington. It was tremendously exciting as we received the messages from the landing forces as they arrived in Normandy. We had very high-ranking officers breathing down our necks for news as we tried to decypher the code.
About five months later I was loaned to the Cabinet Offices: Churchill was about to go to Yalta for a Summit Conference, taking with him several of his code and cypher officers. I was to be a replacment for three weeks. I returned to Portsmouth for only six weeks and then I was posted back to the Cabinet Offices; what a wonderful job! I knew so much which was top secret - the atomic bomb, for example, long before it was dropped. Of course I had signed the Official Secrets Act when I was first trained as a plotter. We had a direct line to Washington with a special machine straight into Truman`s office. It was so exciting but I suspect that, because we were women, we perhaps didn`t take it all as seriously as men might have.
Again we worked shifts; if I was on night shift I`d see the people waiting for the last tube trains to pass so they could settle down in the double bunks which were permanently there and sleep safely underground. I was billeted in a mess in St. John`s Wood; for social life I would go to a Baptist church and I`d walk round the shops - not that there was very much in them at times. A treat was to take myself for coffee in a posh place - I was very fond of Fortnum and Mason and sometimes I`d visit Harrods. My pay certainly didn`t allow for lunches! And, of course, I spent much of my spare time writing to my fiancé whom I`d met when at Tangmere but who was now in India.
I have found it difficult to relay to other people my thoughts and feelings about much of my work; I have revisited the Cabinet Offices but I always went alone.
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