Lytton (Sinclair)

Joining the WRNS I had won a scholarship to the best school in Altrincham which was a very good private school and had been set up by the governors to the Princess of Wales. When the war came, I was itching to leave school and do something to help the war effort. I was very dedicated; at 14, I was pulling pints for the Home Guard, making cups of tea, and going farming; we did all sorts of things. So I sort of pushed my parents into letting me leave school at 16 and I went to work at Barclay's Bank in Altrincham. I was taking a man's job and I wouldn’t have been called up I suppose, but I was still keen to get into the forces. My sister had been called up to the ATS and I'd always fancied the Wrens, so as soon as I could, when I’d just turned 17, I volunteered. Once I turned 17 ¼ I joined up at Liverpool, at the beginning of 1944. I think several things made me choose the Wrens. It was the senior service; from the female point of view, the uniform was nicer and my boyfriend was in the Navy. I knew one or two much older girls than me who were already in the Wrens, who told me that it was easy-going; you weren’t put on a charge if your hair touched the collar though you might be told to get it up a bit. You bought your own uniform and things after the initial dole out of clothes. You were given a little bit more money and you then did all your own replacements. You were treated much more like a human being. So that's why I liked the Wrens. I was taken on fairly quickly. I went back to the bank and my call up came just after D Day because I can remember on 6 June phoning my mother to say they’d just landed in France so it must have been after that. And then I went down to Mill Hill in London for the initial training. Training It was quite funny because I had family living in Mill Hill, and I had a very handsome cousin who was an officer in the Army. Of course, he wasn’t supposed to carry cases or do anything like that but he took me into Mill Hill and carried all my suitcases. And because I didn't know any better, we walked right across the parade ground instead of walking round it. We were in a school that had been evacuated so it was my first time of communal ablutions and as it was doodlebug time, we were up half the first night, sheltering in the corridors with air raid sirens going. The training there was pretty general. We didn’t seem to do much, a bit of marching, and we all had to do our share of cleaning out the toilets all the way through. I can remember in Eastcote once, we paraded through the streets and the officer in charge said “Oh stop! Help! You might as well stop!” as we sort of strolled through the streets! When I volunteered I didn’t put down to be mobile. I think mainly because I thought my parents had been very good to say I could go into the Wrens when I was underage. My mother worried enough about me joining, never mind going abroad, so I thought I’d better not do that. When I went down to London; she probably thought I was going to be killed instantly by a doodlebug. Which of course at times we nearly were. I think we were at Mill Hill for two weeks. I remember we all went to listen to Myra Hess playing the piano for us once. Being in London, they used to have quite famous people coming in to do things like that. I remember that very clearly. Eastcote and Working on the Bombes We weren’t interviewed when those two weeks were up. I think it was just a case of your names being read out and you were put on the back of a wagon - no windows and a curtain across the back - so you didn’t know where you were going. And after half an hour or so you got out and were at Eastcote. I didn’t know where I was to begin with. I think we’d been told it was HMS Pembroke V (P5) and it was secret but we didn't have any real idea of what it was, not at all. I think I’d heard of P5 - you’d no idea what it was but you’d heard people say that P5 was the thing to get into. I can remember all congregating in a hallway, perhaps a dozen at most; and a couple of officers came along and, one of them looked at me and another girl and she said “The officers are giving a cocktail party tonight and we need help getting it ready. You two look like you know what you are doing so you can get the party ready”! That was my first induction into the Wrens at P5! So I went and had to put the glasses out and organise the drinks. I don’t know whether it was good or bad that officer looking at me and thinking I knew what I doing! We were allotted a bed, and on the next day we were taken down to the lecture room and they started teaching us – showing us the Enigma machine. First of all it was pictures and lectures – very informal - I remember this girl just telling us all about it and how they had got hold of an Enigma machine. This went on for a couple weeks. Then we were taken across to a Bombe and shown how to wire up the back and how to keep the drums working. Later, whenever I was helping the boys with their Scalextric, it reminded me of that. I was a dab hand at getting the wires straight. They told us everything, completely, absolutely. We knew all about the codebreaking and what we were doing. And we were put on it quite quickly as they were pretty desperate in those days because we were so busy with messages. Every so often someone would come and say “You did a good job there. The message got through and you saved so many lives” and another time, they’d come through and say “Just lost a whole group...”. So they would and tell you both good and bad news. The girl in the office, I can’t remember what rank she was, but not an officer, would come in and tell us because Bletchley would have told her. On each shift we were usually given a menu of the work we were to do. If you were taking over from somebody else you’d perhaps finish their job but otherwise if they'd finished a job you were given a new menu. This would give you all the settings for the drums so one of us would start taking them off from the last job, and tweezing them and you were also given a menu for round the back to plug up all these long whatsits. There’d be two of us - one would do the front, one would do the back and as soon as one had finished they’d go and help the other. I think the front took the longest because there were so many drums to do. On the whole, if you knew what you were doing, you got the back done fairly quickly. I felt a total fraud with all the adulation I got at Bletchley Park recently because when you were doing it, it didn’t seem difficult; it seemed very easy. We set the Bombe going and the drums went round at their different speeds. You were waiting for what they called ‘stops’. At the side there was a bit where, when the machine stopped, there would appear a row of numbers which you would write down and then nip into the other room where there were little machines, not much bigger than typewriters, into which you put these numbers in and see they were any good. I might be a bit wrong on this but if you pressed the numbers in and they came up the same, you would then quickly get it off to Bletchley, thinking that was probably a good start to them cracking a code. And if you put the letters in and out came a jumble, you knew it wasn’t any good. On some of the jobs you got, there’d be stops every two minutes and on others, you could go through the whole caboodle and sit there twiddling your thumbs. In an eight hour shift you could do quite a lot of jobs. The group I was with were all kept together more or less. There were about 12 of us then my friend Pam Brunstrom arrived. Mainly we worked with the same person and when Pam came, we instantly hit it off and we worked together very well. So unless one of us was on leave, they kept us together. If you were by yourself, you’d fill in with another girl. You weren’t always on the same machine; there was a list which would tell you which machine to go to for each shift. But on the whole, it tended to be the same bay. In each bay there were eight or ten machines. Each bay was named after an allied country and each Bombe after a city. We were mainly on Cracow I think. If you had a fault and it broke down you would go off to get one of the RAF technicians whose job it was to fix it. The People and Outside Work I know a couple of people joined because I was in and liked it and so they volunteered. One of them came to Eastcote but I just saw her once because she was on a different shift to me. I think we met once washing shirts or something! I’d said I was enjoying being in the Wrens and they wanted to do something and they asked me what I thought of it and I probably said “Well if you get a choice suggest P5”. Because everybody talked about P5 wherever you went outside that wasn’t secret. Whenever you went out into London, when you met up with other people in the forces, the first thing they said to you was “What do you do” and you would say, “Oh, P5” “What’s that?” I said “Secret” and they all used to say “Uh, I bet you’re cooks or stewards and you’re too snobbish to say so”. So we just grinned. But they all knew P5. I think we said once naval intelligence which is what we were told we were and they all said “pull the other leg. At your age? Don’t be silly”. I can remember 3rd Officer Jelf. She was always on at Pam and me - our hair was “too long” so eventually we went off to Dover Street which was very posh in those days but they did a special thing for Wrens and we had it cut very short and I remember her coming up to us and saying “That’s lovely, girls”. I also remember Petty Officer Betty Player who did a lot of our instructing. There were two girls I joined up with and stayed with all the time. One was called Audrey Mogridge; she came from Dorset. The other was Audrey Mordant, though I can’t remember where she came from. Pam and I shared a double tiered bunk; there were four lots of double tiered bunks in a bay, a bit like today's hospitals where there’s four beds with a central open corridor. We thoroughly enjoyed working three shifts, we loved it. It was rather nice because on the day shift, 8 am to 4 pm, when you finished you could go off to London for the evening. And then on the 4 pm to midnight shift, you could have a day shopping or go out before you went to work in the afternoon. And on the midnight to 8 am, – you were a bit bleary eyed but then you got about three days off at the end. So we got masses of spare time. And, when you’re that age you don't need sleep the same. Sometimes to go out and enjoy ourselves we’d go two or three days without sleeping. I couldn’t do it now, crikey! I suppose, when you think all our teenage years were through the war, and being near Manchester we soon got air raids so I was used to not sleeping. You got used to it and got on with it. Looking back, there may have been more security than I noticed. It may have not been obvious as if it’s too obvious people then know there’s something afoot. So I think it was very low key to put people off the scent. There were guards on Block B but I don’t remember anyone - we were too busy talking! It wasn’t easy sometimes, walking through there in the dark by yourself. We were near Ruislip Woods because we used to walk across to Ruislip Lido to swim so it was very countrified when once you got to that road. As the war was slowing down, we had a lot more spare time because there were less jobs coming in. Pam and I used to go round to help keep people awake on night shifts and do daft things like country dancing or trying to do the Can-Can, in a Wren skirt! Stupid isn’t it? Pam, who’d come from a very swish home, her father was a ship owner, could do the most wonderful Geordie accent and the broadest Geordie jokes and she used to go round doing this! So there was a lot of free time in the last few weeks. The Bombe machine didn’t worry me, though I know it did worry some. I don’t remember it being particularly hot and noisy. I’m not technically minded in the slightest really but I enjoyed it and there was a lot of camaraderie Pam and I worked well together because we made a good pair. I was steady, solid, dependable and accurate, and she had flashes of inspiration and she’d do it all so quickly; this is what the officers said. And so we got on beautifully in spite of our vastly differing backgrounds. She was about four years older than me and a similar age to my sister so I probably got on better with older people as I was used to it a bit more. But Pam made all the difference. Some of the girls must have found it very stressful work because the girl training us said that a lot went almost mental doing it. It may have been the repetition. Our medical officer was a Harley Street psychiatrist - we didn't have an ordinary GP, because a lot of girls were having problems. Maybe it was the stress of thinking that if they didn't do the job properly they might be condemning someone to death. On the whole the girls there were a very “nurtured” lot, from very careful homes, not very worldly-wise. And maybe they took this to heart more. Most of them were from much grander and wealthier homes than me; they nearly all had had servants and nannies and I worked with Lady Astor’s niece. She was a nice girl, very shy. If you got a pass out to go out, you were only supposed to stay out in London for the night if you had relatives there. People put down where they would be staying; one Wren was going to Lady Oranmore and Browne, who was one of the Guinness family, – and then there was me. There were one or two from stately homes who were frightfully “county” you know. And their accents! You have no idea how affected they were. I remember one of the RAF people standing listening to one of these girls going on in a terribly cut glass accent and I said to him “Don't worry; it’s quite natural and normal”. He said “That’s the point - it's not!” We had a very up market lot of girls, and there was me from Manchester! I often wonder if I was taken on to the work partly because, working in a bank, I could keep a secret, dealing with accounts for all the neighbours and the local people. At home people didn’t ask too many questions. I think most were pretty sensible; realising there was a war on and some jobs were secret. I think people went by all the posters saying “Careless Talk Costs Lives” What we did in our time off varied. One day there were about four or five of us going out shopping in the morning; we must have been on the 4 pm to midnight shift and we were stopped by a lady who said “Are you free this afternoon for a couple of hours? My son’s 15 today, would you come to tea?” We said “Yes “and she said “It’ll give him such a boost amongst his friends”. We went and she gave a lovely tea, bearing in mind the rationing and I remember us all washing up for her. So we spent a fair bit of time locally. If you we had more time, we went into London and if the weather was nice, we’d go swimming at Ruislip Lido. When we went to London, we ate, as the food was pretty awful in the Wrens! There was a salad bar where, for two shillings, you could eat your fill and keep going back and eat for more. I think it was in Leicester Square. You met up with other people. I had been to London before but not as a grown-up and so we went round all the dives, the Coal Hole was one of our pubs and we used to go to Shepherd Market. Everyone was in uniform and it's amazing how often you would meet people from home. London was a great passing place. I can remember being sat in Leicester Square one lovely day, on my own, and I met two men I knew from Altrincham Grammar School on leave from the forces. We often went dancing; could you believe I’ve danced at the Royal Opera House, because they made it into a dance hall for the forces. You could leave your coats on the seats and go up on the stage. We used to go to the American Club at Rainbow Corner and drink real Coca-Cola which was totally different. We went to the theatre or cinema occasionally. We couldn’t afford it ourselves but sometimes Pam’s father would come down to London on business and he would stay at some swish hotel. We used to go there and have a bath and then he'd take us for a good meal and to the theatre. If we stayed overnight it would be in a hostel. There was one particular time, when I think Pam had gone off with someone and I had a date with somebody else and when I was coming back, could I remember where the hostel was!? But fortunately the chap I was with remembered. He was honourable; we found they all were, whatever nationality, they were all very friendly. Just lonely and far from home. I can remember going into the old Hippodrome that became The Talk of the Town where there was dancing on the stage and it was sixpence to go in. A couple of the girls didn’t have any money so we had to stand them their sixpence. I remember exactly what I was paid, a pound a week. I think my sister got 10 shillings in the ATS, but the extra money was because we had to buy all our own replacement uniform and underwear and the other forces didn't. I went with Pam to Conduit Street once because her father decided she ought to have a proper tailor-made uniform and not just Wren issue! And I can remember coming out and being blown almost across the road by a buzz bomb. We had a few of those, especially during the night watch. They buzzed over and if one stopped it was coming down and you’d think if you count to so many and we’re still here, it’s not us. We didn’t leave our work and go to air raid shelters, we just carried on. We also had V2s, but at 17 or so, you don't worry; it’s never going to happen to you, but I could understand how my mother was worried. I know what I’d be like now, I’m terrified now of what's left of my family working in London because of the idea of terrorists. The Americans working with us gave parties for the local children, with ice cream and chocolate. We used to go over to help with all these little kiddies because there were no girls with the Americans and we’d get our fill of ice cream and chocolate! The Americans were a nice lot. We had them in Altrincham when they first came to England, they were on one of Dunham Massey’s parks and so for months they were all round Mobberley and Knutsford. When they first came over they were not paid for a few weeks and then got such a massive amount of money, that a row of armoured cars came to Barclays Bank in Altrincham and soldiers sprang out and stood outside with guns at the ready, to collect it. The Americans wandered around and talked to everybody and wherever you went you got to know them. Lots of these lads, only 18, were from the Midwest, and had never been away from home Pam and I went for a meal when we were on night watch, in the middle of the night but the food was so disgusting. The plates were dirty because every Wren was supposed to wash her own which meant you held it under a hot tap for a second, and some girls had never washed up in their life. Pam and I would often settle for a round of bread smothered in mustard rather than eat the food. It wasn’t good, not fit for pig swill. The Americans got their own food, which we could have when we went over to help with the parties. I think the officers got it too as they were very friendly with the Americans, yes most definitely! VE Day and After the War I had joined in July 1944 and the war finished the following May. Pam and I had gone for a bit of a walk, we had nothing much to do and it was a lovely day, and we happened to hear somebody’s radio. And we actually heard Churchill saying “The War is over”, so we went rushing back to tell everyone because we were the first to hear this. By that time we were virtually starting to take the place to pieces. Right at the end, we all sat in a semi-circle and unscrewed every last drum and every last bit. As we were doing this Pam and I went to the Leading Wren in the office and as we were all getting a bit bored, the weather was nice and we were longing to get out we said “Can we read to amuse them?” So before “Music While You Work”, we would read out things like “Three Men in a Boat”. We took everything to pieces to get rid of it as quickly as possible so that nobody would find out about it. I think it was on VE Day itself that I went home on the night train, got off at Altrincham and took a taxi and the driver wouldn’t charge. At the bottom of our road, there was a cricket and tennis club that I belonged to, putting on a big celebration, which was marvellous. We had a wonderful time and I went back to Eastcote the next day. I remember getting off the train at Euston station which was absolutely thronged, and I was dragged off the train by a group of people and pushed into the bar. In no time at all, I had about 20 drinks lined up and was being lifted up with people saying “Our Wrens, aren’t they marvellous!” People were wonderful. I don't know how long the Bombe dismantling lasted because about this time, I started to have family problems and I was on sick leave quite a bit because my sister, who was in the ATS, had done the classic thing and come home, got married and then found that she was pregnant which really upset my mother and I was released on compassionate grounds. By June or July it was all totally dismantled at Eastcote. After The War I then stayed at home for a while helping my sister with two very tiny babies and then I met this chap and within about six months I married him. He’d been away in the Army for six years and, like many all he wanted to do when he got back was get married and start a family, so that's what I did. I was widowed at 40 and my first husband, like many men in those days, didn’t like his wife going out to work; it wasn’t done. In a lot of jobs, including the bank, except for during the War, if you got married, you had to leave. They didn’t accept married women in a lot of things. After I was widowed I did mainly voluntary work, when I had time with the children. I had two fairly close together and then when they were 12 and 10, I had the youngest one. I did a lot of voluntary work: National Trust room stewarding and I was a founder member of Altrincham's Citizens Advice Bureau; you could do things but you couldn’t get paid – it was infra dig. My second husband was a lot younger – he was my toy-boy! He was quite happy for me to work and I did all sorts of things then; times had changed. Pam and I used to stay with each other regularly but I didn’t keep in touch with anybody else. The Secret Comes Out It was in the mid 1970’s that people started to talk about it. Before that they knew I was in P5 and that it was secret but no more. I said we were helping to break codes and I think they knew it was called Enigma but I didn’t tell them anything else, not until Bletchley started to open up to the public and there were films and talks about the Bombes. I first went to Bletchley Park some years ago was it when it was still a wreck and they wanted to buy it for housing. John and I went down there but then at Easter 2016 when I was with my son in Buckinghamshire, he said let’s go and see what it's like now. All my family that came with me that day were so impressed, it’s huge and we only saw part. I've got two very clever grandsons, one of them is a consultant anaesthetist and he bought all the books and he kept phoning me up “This is wonderful. How did you do all that?” I think they’d got the idea that working a Bombe was like a slightly bigger than usual typewriter so when they saw it and how tall it was – you could hardly reach up to it - they were so impressed. I bought a brick; I thought I’ve got to have one of those.

Tickets

Plan a Visit

Support Us

Doreen

Lytton (Sinclair)

Summary of Service:

Service Certificate:

Bletchley Park Oral History Project interview with Doreen Sinclair, May 2016.