Gwen Joins GCHQ at Eastcote

[TC note: In the latter part of the 1940s, most office-based staff in GCHQ were recruited as an 'A', 'B' or 'C' grade, depending on whether (A) they were the fast stream, tipped for the very top, (B) it was thought they would develop and become senior intelligence analysts or (C) would follow a pattern similar to mainstream civil servants. Progression through these grades was denoted by a roman numeral, so an AI (A one) was at the top of this particular tree, while a CVI (C six) was at the bottom. Up to 1945 Junior Assistant (JA) was the normal entry grade but for a brief period, the JA title was used for AIVs (AIV was the lowest A grade). JAs, then AIVs were usually called 'cadets'. B grades were called Departmental Specialists (DSs).  Believe it or not, this is a great simplification of a much more complex structure which, if I remember correctly, got to a point where there were more than 160 separate grade titles by the mid-1960s.]

Before dealing with my post-war Sigint career I should like to recommend Tessa Dunlop's book "The Bletchley Girls" — 16 of them, ranging from the obligatory member of the aristocracy to a Bletchley born girl proud to have been taken on as a messenger at the age of 14. For several of them the Bletchley experience changed their life, as it did for me.

In my last term at Oxford. I wangled an interview at GCHQ through the good offices of Pat Baber. It was Joe Hooper who interviewed me and obviously he didn't think much of me, as I was offered only a middling executive grade post. Even so, it paid more and it appealed to me very much more than the alternatives suggested by the Oxford careers officer. I trusted that the BP habit of promoting on merit regardless of background or gender still obtained.

After about two months I was amongst many people who had stayed on in Eastcote to appear before the Civil Service Commissioner himself and an all-male panel, which decided not only was I acceptable as an established rather than as a temporary civil servant, but also I was appointed to be a JA (Junior Assistant) — the fast track cadet scheme. ultimately destined for the lofty heights of an A (Administrative) grade. This was largely because John Burrough representing GCHQ on the panel had asked me a splendid question: "Which would you marry, Mr Knightly or Darcy?" Anyone who knows me will know what I replied, but I must have argued the case rather well, it seems to have impressed them all. Anyway every man likes to think he is like Darcy — experientia docet.

To be awarded a JA post sounds like an upward move, but in fact it involved a considerable drop in pay and after three months I blew the whole month's salary on a silver-grey suit in Knightsbridge [i] and asked if I could stop being a JA. So they gave me a CIV (still executive grade). Then at the beginning of the new promotion board season, I was recommended for a BIII, but they said "No, you've cheated, but you can be a CIII". But the next season I did actually pass the BIII board and I went on throughout my career in the Departmental Specialist grade.

Apart from these wobbles in the promotion stakes I was rebuked from all sides at the way I had come back. After only about two weeks Joe Hooper came rushing down from the Directorate to say "Why didn't you tell me you were going to get a First?" I mumbled: "Because I didn't know" [ii]. The Principal of Lady Margaret Hall also rebuked me for entering the Civil Service by the back door and for not following her advice to stay in Oxford and take a law degree, a ludicrous suggestion. Even my Middle English tutor wrote to me several times suggesting that I return to Oxford to do a B Lit. [iii]

Enough of this vainglory – my actual job on first returning was to take charge single-handedly of the Soviet Mainline two-channel Baudot links, which Yvonne and I had left in April 1946, but they were a shadow of their former selves. 

In the days after VE Day they had passed masses of traffic, as Moscow tightened its hold on the overrun countries of Eastern Europe. Now all links, except one to the Far East, were reduced to a few schedules every day, just for practice. As a log reader I was reduced to simply identifying which frequencies and which schedules belonged to which link and to making the tremendous discovery that the Moscow control operated a three-shift system which involved four teams exactly like Knockholt, and that the charge hands were distinguishable by very slight differences in their sign-off tapes. These were all variants on the very simple theme Tamli, tamli, tamli? ("are you there?" or in other words "what is my signal strength?") and a sequence of letters AGIPCh. (If anyone knows what AGIPCh means, will they please let me know, because it niggles.)

Then something more interesting happened. A new link appeared between Moscow and somewhere in Central Asia, which was talking in plain language Russian, even though guardedly, and included a number of references to a birch tree and an oak tree. I interpreted this as meaning they were referring to different kinds of aerials — the birch being a single tall mast and the oak a spreading array such as a rhombus. But I thought I'd better get a real linguist to check that I wasn't making an enormous mistake. But it was a mistake to ask him. He said that a birch tree was a birch tree and an oak tree was an oak tree and that was that. It was no use arguing with him that it was rather peculiar that a high-ranking engineer in Moscow should be talking to a colleague in the wastes of the Steppe lands of Central Asia, a sea of grass, about arboriculture.

Much later in my career I came across another potentially more dangerous example of tunnel vision. It was in the heady days when computer capabilities were rapidly expanding and young Turks were eagerly training themselves for a magnificent future in which computers would be applied to many more things than simply assisting cryptographers, wonderful though that had always been. I was asked to provide an example to see how far they might help with the work of the division responsible for the Soviet problem and I chose a Long Range Air Force exercise. I gave them all the air defence tracking and explained what that was, and gave them all the air-to-ground communications between the planes and the various airfields and explained what that was. And then sent them away to make of it what they would. A few days later they came back and proudly informed me that they had discovered that the aircraft did not fly at night. "Ye gods and little fishes" I was muttering to myself but restrained myself and asked them why they thought Tupolev should design a bomber aircraft which couldn't fly at night and if they could explain what sort of exercise involved the following pattern:

Day 1:    40 aircraft fly from A to B

Day 2:    40 aircraft fly from C to D

Day 3:    At least 25 (though evidence was more scanty) fly from E to F

I then reminded them that what GCHQ was studying was the communications of the Soviet Union and that this involved listening to them. But the plain fact was that we simply could not hear the frequencies they used at night. I must admit that later, of course, they did give us tremendous help, but I still remember in the early days having to beat off offers of the moon in two weeks' time. when what I wanted was a small piece of cheese by tomorrow morning. The plain truth of the exercise to a traffic analyst was that 40 aircraft had set off from a base in Europe and flown, by day and night hops, to another known base in the Far East to commence a proper exercise.

To get back to my early job, the Soviet printer network began to expand enormously with the appearance of single channel teleprinter links at lower echelons in both the Army and the Air Forces. By the time I moved on, I had three people to help me. They were still not doing anything interesting, but it was a good thing we kept continuity on them, because years later, long after I had left the section and we had moved to Cheltenham, suddenly the printer links sprang into life with the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. I was the only person who understood how they worked, so I was called back to read absolute scads of logs and pass on the traffic sorted by type to the cryptographers. Then I had to devise a week's training course on how to read Soviet mainline printer traffic.

Shortly after the move to Cheltenham I made what I think was one of my greatest contributions to the future of the whole organization by promoting a certain CA (Clerical Assistant - the lowest of the low) to CO. He was an ex-Signals corporal and by getting promotion to CO he was given an armchair like the other 19 members of the section. His name was Des L and people I hope will remember him as shooting up and being a wonderful liaison officer and being awarded quite rightly a national honour, because if anyone was ever born to do Sigint, it was Des. [iv]

Mentioning that Des was once a corporal reminds me that in the days of National Service several young servicemen from the Intelligence Corps were attached to GCHQ and of two stories about them. The first is about Corporal Alex Bennett. When I came back early from lunch one day in 1950, I found Alex in floods of tears. and when I asked him what on earth was the matter, he said want to dance". I got the story from him that at the age of 16 in Edinburgh he had first seen a ballet and decided that that was what his life was going to be. and had been seeking out a ballet class wherever he went. Fortunately for all concerned, as usual in GCHQ, there was someone qualified to help. She had belonged to the Sadlers Wells Company, later the Royal Ballet, until she broke her ankle. So Jolene organized an interview for Alex with Ninette de Valois. She said that she was very sorry she couldn't take him, but that he should try Marie Rambert, and Marie Rambert took him on the spot. To my great pleasure some years later I saw him dancing the premier role of Albrecht in Giselle at the Everyman in Cheltenham. He stayed with the Marie Rambert throughout his career and finished up as a choreographer.

The second instance reminds me that, just like BP and GCHQ. National Service threw a whole lot of people together who in civilian life would have belonged to very much divided classes of society – though not so divided as would have been the case before the First World War. This concerns two corporals who were in my section just before we moved to Cheltenham. Corporal Y came to me one day and said could he have a quiet word with me. So we went out into the corridor and he said Corporal X, with whom he was billeted, was. he thought, 'on the brink of a nervous breakdown'. I could see what he was getting at, because Corporal X had just deliberately tipped a whole bottle of ink all over his work, which I had just asked him to show to me. Anyway, Corporal Y, who was a raw-boned son of a miner from Lancashire, was worried that Corporal X, who was a Winchester public school boy with a scholarship at Oxford awaiting him, was terrified that the rest of the squad might find out that he was a transvestite. I thought it was very touching that Corporal Y showed such care and loyalty to this so different a creature from quite a different world. By some means or other I wangled it that Corporal X was given early release and I hope he was happier in Oxford.

Next time I won't ramble on so much and shall summarise as succinctly as possible the great move to Cheltenham.

[i] Three men had separately offered help in paying for that suit. Rather primly but wisely I refused.

[ii] To even have hinted at such a success would have been overweeningly arrogant. Of the 400 undergraduates sitting the final honours degree exam in English more than half were ex-service, matured beyond their age by up to six years of war. And the number of Firsts awarded was eight, that is 2%.

[iii] Kate Lea told me after Dorothy Everett 's death that 'Ev' had hoped that one day I would succeed her as a Middle English don. I burst into tears at the compliment but I thought then and do so now that she was irreplaceable as a scholar and as a person.

[iv] Des discovered a hitherto totally unknown fighter formation in the Transcaucasus, and pin-pointed its location by sweet-talking the DF pundits into giving him all the details of DF bearings instead of just their best guestimates. Also in the days when totally distinct and diverse formations shared the same call-sign book, he noted that some scraps found by general search operators seemed to form a continuity. He followed this up and thereby identified a whole new ring of air defence batteries deployed around Moscow, equipped with surface-to-air missiles. Many log readers who came across such scraps would have simply marked them 'not mine' and not cared about what thew were. But Des did care and I was privileged to hear him argue the toss against the very much senior team of              people who had some other different and highfalutin' theory about what they were.