Gwen Gibbs' (nee Sidwell) Secret Wireless Work.

I was a Special Wireless Operator, Intercept Operator, at Bow Manor. We were sending these interceptive messages to a place that we knew as BP or Bletchley Park, or even station X, but we had no idea that it was anything to do with the Enigma Code. That came later in 1984 when articles appeared in the papers and my husband was reading a book about codes and said, “You were at Bo Manor. You didn’t tell me you had anything to do with Ultra and Enigma.” I said, “I’ve never heard of them.” And he said, “Well, 400 girls were at Bo Manor intercepting messages under difficult conditions.” And I said, “That’s right.” And then we had a marvellous Enigma reunion and that’s when we learnt about we did. We went to Bedford and I saw people I hadn’t seen for 50 years. The following year one of our own operators organised a trip to Bo Manor and we went back to the ?set room. It was absolutely fabulous. The Intelligence had taken it over from us and they gave us the most wonderful welcome. The cooks had made cakes for us and they all said how wonderful we which made us all feel wonderful too! The operators I worked with were the most marvellous people. We were together for 5 years, we couldn’t talk to anyone outside about what we did, and the shift-hours made our social life very limited, so we were like a family. But we were all young and unmarried, and we enjoyed ourselves. We’ve had more reunions since then but sadly there are now only 6 of us left. But we have frequent phone conversations and chat about our arthritis, our eyesight, our whatever!

At first when we were training we didn’t know what we were doing. We went to Trowbridge and we were trained to take high-speed Morse and the trainers just said they would tell us later what we were doing. We had a test at the end which was quite difficult. We had to take very high-speed Morse for, I think, half an hour non-stop, and we were only allowed 2 mistakes. There was no leeway at all. After we had done our test, we were called into a room and told that if our name was called out we had to go into a corner. 10 of us got through. We asked where we were going and first of all they produced and told us we had to sign it. Then we were told that we had to get on a train the next day to go to our next destination but they still didn’t give us any information so all we knew was that it was Loughborough. So we decided we were spies! Then we were sent to Quorn in Leicestershire and that’s where we were based for most of the time. We had another lecture when we arrived there and were told that under no circumstances were we to tell anyone what we were doing, not the villagers or our families or friends. None of us ever told — we just said we were wireless operators. (My family never knew, and when my husband asked afterwards what I did, I just said I was a wireless operator. He just said, “Oh, yes.” Because you see, men won the war and they weren’t really interested what women did!) We went on watch still not knowing what we were doing. I remember going in the Set room and it looked very odd. I was told to go to the back. At that time there weren’t many ATS doing that work and they had some men there. I sat down next to this man who was taking a message down, obviously at great speed, on a form I had never seen. He said, “Do the log!” I looked at another form I had never seen and I picked the headphones up and all I could hear was a lot of noise. He said, “Tune it in!” I had no idea what I was doing and I wanted to go home to my mum!

And that was the start of it. It was such a secret course that they couldn’t tell us what we were doing until we actually got on the job to do it because they couldn’t have people who failed going back and saying, “Oh, I was learning very funny Morse and it was something to do with the Germans.” They did revise it later and the people who came after us had a 2 months training before they went on the job. But we just had to get on with it It was very tiring work. We worked in 6 hour shifts, 24 hours. We didn’t have any days off or anything like that. Night shifts were very difficult because quite often there wasn’t very much work, and you weren’t allowed to eat or drink but we could smoke. We used to do crosswords and write letters home under the pads.

Looking back, I am proud of what I did and also very glad I did it. I marched at the cenotaph on the 50th anniversary and I felt marvellous.

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