Women of Intelligence: Winning the Second World War with Air Photos (44 page)

While waiting for her demobilisation at the end of 1945, Sarah Churchill accompanied her father on an election tour of the country and later, when he was voted out of office, went with him to Lake Como for a holiday designed to aid the recovery of his health and morale. In November she was released from the WAAF and on the bus taking her to the demobilisation centre:

I felt my heart singing like a bird but then I looked across at some of the younger WAAFS, still ACW2s and saw tears in their eyes. Were they thinking of lost loved ones, or was it that they would have to hand in their uniforms, of which they were so justifiably proud, to have them replaced with the rather dull ‘civvies’? They would have to return to the more monotonous everyday life of kitchen sinks and bus queues. For some years of wartime everything had been done for them: they had been housed, warmed and fed, they had mingled happily and naturally with new companions from every walk of life and worked alongside them in a great joint effort. My elation dimmed. Perhaps it was not going to be easy for them.
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Sarah returned to the world of theatre and films; she was an accomplished artist and published two books of poetry and a tribute to her father in addition to her autobiography.

Many group photographs of sections were taken at the end of the war. Second Phase, the largest and most international section, posed for a photograph on the terrace and steps of Danesfield House in 1945.

While awaiting their turn to leave the forces, personnel could choose to attend a range of educational and vocational courses set up at Medmenham and elsewhere, with the objective of getting a job back in ‘civvy street’. Some of the younger women filled in time by picking fruit and vegetables for local farmers and PIs at Pinetree worked on the captured German air photography, preparing it for cataloguing and storage. A programme of civic lectures was started, offering a wide variety of topics mostly presented by the resident personnel. Several women remember a particularly prophetic lecture about how the German ballistic rockets, the V-2s, had prepared the way for getting to the moon, which was predicted to happen in about fifteen years’ time.

At the demobilisation depot, at RAF Wythall near Birmingham, uniforms were handed in and clothing vouchers were given out to WAAFs; most considered this preferable to the standard ‘demob’ suit issued to the men. Millicent Laws used her vouchers to get a cerise-coloured tweed suit, made by Hector Powell, which she liked and wore to work for a long time.

With the defeat of Germany and the VE Day celebrations, the preparations for the invasion of Malaya and defeat of the Japanese continued. Six more WAAF officers arrived in Delhi from Medmenham. Elspeth Macalister wrote:

And then in August, the atomic bomb descended on Hiroshima and Japan crumbled. Trader’s reports were used as the Allies took over Malaya and South East Asia, so we did celebrate VJ Day by having dinner at our favourite watering hole, the Imperial Hotel. But for the majority of the Indian population, another objective had to be won, the ending of the rule of the British Raj in India, achieved in 1947. Trader and I married that same year!
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In Calcutta the three PI WAAFs Eve Holiday, Hester Bell and Margot Munn celebrated VJ Day together and Eve had dinner with Dirk Bogarde at the Saturday Club. With the end of the war there was no work to do in Calcutta or Delhi and all sorts of activities, such as lectures, plays and quizzes, were introduced to keep the staff there occupied. Elspeth spent time at the Museum of Asian Antiquity and worked on cataloguing and drawing many of the exhibits. ‘Trader’ soon departed for England and ‘demob’, but Elspeth was to spend several more months in Asia before travelling home. She was posted with a friend to the HQ South-East Asia Command at Kandy, in Ceylon. There was absolutely no work to do so they went sightseeing up into the hills to watch the elephants being bathed: ‘and took tea at the Queen’s Hotel. One day we even sat beside Peggy Ashcroft and Noel Coward!’ Then they were given the job of escorting fifteen WAAF to a naval base to fly to Singapore:

We took a long train journey right across Ceylon and when we arrived we were given a meal and ferried out to a flying boat. It was a typical romantic scenario – great moon, dark blue velvet sky, coconut palms all bending slightly in the right direction and white, white sand. We boarded the sea plane and it took off with enthusiasm. This was short lived however, as one of the engines spluttered and then gave up. So back we were ferried – consternation – what was to be done with all these unexpected women? The girls were put up on the floor of the Mess. Rae and I were allocated a small hut in the jungle – and it really was jungle.

Next morning Rae suddenly said that she had been bitten. I was really worried about her on the long flight in case I would find her dead beside me. It was a very long flight and no proper seats. We lay between the struts and as the dawn broke we looked down on miles of deep emerald green jungle. We re-fuelled at Penang and eventually touched down at Changi Airport. I had last seen Singapore, my birthplace, in 1926 from the rail of a P & O liner, which had taken us home to Europe.

Singapore was rather different after three years of Japanese occupation, although Elspeth saw familiar landmarks. One day she went to the Supreme Court to hear one of the trials of the notorious prison guards who had inflicted such cruel tortures on their prisoners. She met English people who had been prisoners of the Japanese in Changi and saw Dutch women and children waiting to be repatriated:

At last my demob number came up, and I embarked at the end of March 1946 on the Winchester Castle, a liner converted to a troop ship so there were six of us in a cabin designed for one. One girl had bought three fur coats in Kashmir and these monopolised our one cupboard – they nearly went overboard!! At Suez mail came on board, but there was nothing for me. Trader was always a slow letter writer, but I was a little sad.

The first sight of home … Arriving in a troop ship is always exciting as all ships are dressed overall, and when we drew alongside the quay there were bands playing. I looked over the rail, and there at the foot of the gangway was my beloved Trader. I rushed to the purser’s office to get a pass and tore down the gangway. As I fell into his arms I knew everything was going to be all right.

VJ Day at RAF Medmenham had been a quieter celebration than that for VE Day. Mary Harrison remembered that a bonfire had been made ready for VJ Day near their accommodation hut. She was leaving to go on duty when they heard the news of the end of the Japanese war; the bonfire was lit prematurely while people danced around it in their pyjamas. The ancient station fire engine, which they had never seen in use before, had to come to put it out. Later that evening everyone at Medmenham celebrated the end of the war round a huge bonfire and watched the fireworks.

By her own account, Jane Cameron took some time to come to terms with her wartime service, and finally took up a post in an engineering works where she met and fell in love with a Scottish engineer. They moved to Jamaica, where Jane recovered her desire to write and completed seven novels, all titled after friends, keeping them hidden in her linen cupboard. She sent the manuscripts to a publisher when her husband was very ill, and on his death she returned to Scotland. In 1959 Jane became a publishing sensation when Macmillan Publishers announced that they would be publishing seven of her books; the first one was
My Friends the Miss Boyds
under her nom de plume of Jane Duncan. She wrote many more novels, all based on her life and friends, and an autobiography. Jane’s books had a large readership, including many of her former colleagues at Medmenham.

Susan Bendon returned to the world of fashion after her work at Bomber Command in the war. In 1950, she changed direction and opened an antique shop where she founded the company Halcyon Days, which produced decorative enamel boxes, many of which Susan designed herself. She wrote three books on enamels and became a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. In 2009 she wrote about her wartime experiences:

Work apart, there was a great deal of fun to be had at the station and we held marvellous parties in the Sergeant’s Mess, to which many officers from Intelligence came. I think most people’s recollections of being in the forces during the war are the hilarity of so many incidents, and in spite of the tragedies we either were part of or observed, we seemed to have laughed most of the time.
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Charlotte Bonham Carter was one of the first to be demobbed. Hazel remembers:

She came back to see us at Medmenham from a conference in Oxford and not only told us exactly what she had eaten at some banquet, but went around all the sections eating their biscuits, or whatever they had. She was as thin as a rake!
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Charlotte was a doyenne of the London art world and a generous patron of the arts. In 1946 she inherited her family home, Wyck Place, in Hampshire, where many parties were subsequently held and Charlotte’s favourite phrase ‘My dear, isn’t that marvellous!’ was frequently heard. Peter Greenham painted her portrait in 1978 with Charlotte wearing a red gown designed by Fortuny, which she had bought from him in 1922. The portrait hangs in the Tate Gallery in London.

Having completed a course on Far Eastern PI in 1945, Ursula Powys-Lybbe’s plans of enjoying a posting at the Pentagon were thwarted, and she left the WAAF to resume her photographic business, taking up portraiture again. She chose to abandon London society, and instead took her ‘Touring Camera’ to the Australian outback of New South Wales, where for several years she photographed people in their own homes. She returned to England and in 1983 published
The Eye of Intelligence
, a book that relates the technical detail of PI successes at Medmenham and its major contribution to the intelligence gathering processes during the Second World War.

Loyalty Howard from the Night Photography Section went to New Zealand after leaving the WAAF, then travelled to Australia where she became the headmistress of a girls’ school. Sophie Wilson, who had worked in the white-tiled cubby hole in the basement of Danesfield House, also took up teaching and in the mid-1950s opened her own school near Tewkesbury which became one of her life’s great achievements. In the autumn of 2002 Sophie revisited Danesfield House and, with difficulty, located her old white-tiled office, now sandwiched between the wine cellar and the cleaning materials store, in an area somewhat like the bowels of a large ship.

Sophie’s two ‘W’ Section colleagues pursued surveying careers after the war. Ena Thomas worked for the Foreign Office on Antarctic survey and Lucia Windsor was appointed to the staff of the Directorate of Overseas Surveys computing section, later becoming chief computer. Lucia carried out much technical work on trigonometric adjustments and aerial triangulation concerned with mapping.

After the war PIs Mary Grierson from Second Phase and Ursula Kay from the Aircraft Section worked together as cartographers in a survey company. Ursula left to become a farmer and in 1960 Mary was employed as the official botanical illustrator in the Kew Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens. She had been encouraged by John Nash RA at a series of botanical painting courses held at Flatford Mill, and when he retired Mary took over. The Herbarium archive holds over 1,000 of Mary’s paintings and drawings, together with her meticulous record books. No doubt the same observational skills that Mary used throughout the war in examining air photographs were employed in her botanical paintings. She contributed to numerous books and publications, and was awarded five gold medals by the Royal Horticultural Society, an honorary doctorate from Reading University and, in 1999, the Kew Award medal.

In 2011, at the age of 99, Mary was asked which photographs she remembered from her wartime service. She replied:

The photographs of the Moehne Dam and seeing all the flooding down the valley, sweeping everything away, made a huge impression on me which I shall never forget. I remember too the very brave PR pilots, with no defence or guns, who flew into enemy territory in the days that followed to see what damage had been done.
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Fears that women had about loved ones fighting in Europe, and elsewhere, continued to the end of the conflict. In March 1945, just a few weeks before the war ended, Mary Harrison, the model maker, recorded that her brother’s ship had been torpedoed off Russia; thankfully he survived. Mary was working on a model of the naval port of Kiel as there were fears that the enemy might retreat into Norway for a ‘last stand’. A reconnaissance Spitfire did fly over Kiel on 8 May, VE Day, to see if there were any large ships in the port, but only thick plumes of smoke were seen.