大象传媒

My father, John Tucker (1918-2000), was born in Solihull, near Birmingham, into an electrical-manufacturing family. His father was a pioneer of amateur (鈥渉am鈥�) radio in the Midlands, and John caught the virus early. As a schoolboy at Charterhouse, he ran an amateur radio station; through all his adult life, from his call-sign G5TU, he continued to communicate regularly with fellow 鈥渉ams鈥� 鈥� including a conversation with Helen Sharman as she orbited the Earth in the Russian space station MIR in 1992). At the outbreak of WW2 (during which he acquired the nickname of 鈥淭ommy鈥� Tucker) his communications expertise took him into the Royal Corps of Signals. He organised discreet and efficient radio setups on board former French fishing-boats running agents from Cornwall to and from occupied France; later he did the same for boats running from Shetland to occupied Norway, and for boats running along the coast of Burma in the Far East.
Following some most enjoyable reunions in the mid-1990s with many of those whom he had known on the Helford River, 鈥淭ommy鈥� wrote down his war experiences for his family.
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PART ONE Cornwall and Scotland

In the early part of World War 2, as a Captain in the Royal Corps of Signals, I was sent to work on Radar, which was a very new weapon in those days. After a quick training course at the Anti-Aircraft Radar School (in Petersham, near Richmond, in Surrey) I was given responsibility for maintenance and repair of A.A. gunnery sites which had radar. After that I was moved on to radar-controlled searchlights, which I liked much better than the gunnery radar.
In late 1941 I was moved to a Special Communications Unit near Bletchley. From then onwards I was involved in carrying out work for the 鈥淪ecret Intelligence Service鈥� (SIS). The first job I was given was to inspect and - where necessary - repair the radio installations in two fishing boats, known by their registration numbers N51 and P11, that were lying at Falmouth, in Cornwall. From here, SIS were running operations to ferry secret agents, equipment and information to and from occupied France.
On arrival, I was horrified to find the state of the radio installations. P11鈥檚 radio receiver (AR-88), for example, was lying loose on a bunk alongside the SIS transmitter, with no table or shelf that the operator could use while writing down incoming messages or to which he could secure the Morse key when sending.
I then met the CO, a Frenchman called Daniel Lomenech, and his No 1, Richard Townsend. I told them what I had found and suggested alterations that would make life easier for the radio operator. They agreed, and I had to get the work started. I created a small radio 鈥渃abin鈥� for N51, built in the main hold. For P11, I had a special locker built on a bulkhead. (The installations were designed to conceal the equipment from enemy eyes, in the event of the ships being boarded during an operation.)
Shortly after, Richard Townsend was given his own command - a boat known as A04. An officer named John Garnett was appointed No 1 to Richard, and Paul O鈥橞rien took Richard鈥檚 former place as No 1 to Daniel. I got to know these four very well and we became good friends. (I installed the radio in A04 at Lady Bee鈥檚 Yard in Shoreham, using the same arrangement for a small radio cabin in the hold that I had devised for N51.)
N51, A04 and P11 were French fishing boats that had escaped from South Brittany in 1940. Now painted in naval grey, they were used as auxiliary vessels by the British Navy. Both N51 and A04 were trawlers, with reasonable accommodation for the crew, and a cruising speed of just 7 knots. P11 was a much smaller sardine boat with very little crew accommodation, but she had a speed of 11 knots. The SIS operations involved a boat sailing to the coast of southern Brittany to rendezvous with a genuine French fishing boat for an exchange of agents etc. (The occupying German authorities would allow no fishing from the Channel coasts of northern Brittany, so such a plan could not be carried out there.) Speed became enormously important for the missions these vessels carried out. A one-way journey could take well over 24 hours, and in the summer months there were not enough hours of darkness for boats as slow as N51 and A04 to remain unseen while crossing the second, enemy-patrolled half of the English Channel. They needed to keep 20 miles west of Ushant, and to be somewhere near the Ile de Sein before daybreak, so they could mingle with genuine fishing craft. With her faster speed, P11 could manage somewhat better, but an even higher speed would have been a great advantage.
The SIS鈥檚 French fishing boats could only operate on these voyages during the 鈥渘o moon鈥� period (two or three nights a month), which lessened the risk of being seen at night. Even this was not always possible, since bad weather could cause a voyage to be aborted.
The normal procedure for an operation was that the vessel selected would depart from the Helford River two or three days before the mission was due to start. Still painted its naval grey, with just its number painted in white on the hull, it would make a passage to New Grimsby, on Tresco, in the Isles of Scilly. After arrival there, the whole boat would be repainted in traditional French fishing-boat colours, with French name and French registration number, and the whole thing hurridly 鈥渄istressed鈥� so that the boat did not call attention to herself later among the genuine French fleet. Then, on the day that the operation was due to begin, a high-speed launch (HSL-119) would be despatched from the Helford River for the 2.5-hour journey to New Grimsby, carrying the two agents who would be transferred to our newly-painted fishing boat.
Once off Brittany, the agents were secretly put aboard the French boat to be dropped ashore in France, and two other returning agents would be transferred to our boat to be transported back to the Isles of Scilly, where HSL-119 would be waiting at New Grimsby. As soon as our boat arrived back, the two returning agents were put aboard HSL-119 and conveyed back to the Helford River, from where they were taken ashore and handed over to an SIS conducting officer and driven up to London. Meanwhile our French fishing boat was repainted in naval grey off Tresco and would return to the Helford River a few days later looking exactly as she did when she had left a week before. Many of these operations took place over a period of about two years.

In between visits to Falmouth I worked at other SIS areas. The first was a Norwegian Naval Air Force station in Scotland, on the south side of the River Tay, opposite Dundee. The Norwegians had a large Catalina flying-boat there which had to be fitted with a special SIS FM transmitter/receiver for communicating with the Norwegian Resistance organisation after flying over to occupied Norway.
The second was an operation rather similar to the Falmouth one, but using Norwegian fishing boats based in the Shetland Isles instead of the French type used in the Helford River. It was not easy to get to Shetland during the war, so the SIS people in Shetland sent the fishing boats down to Peterhead, in north-east Scotland, for installations.
I had never been aboard a Norwegian fishing boat before, and was very surprised to find that they all used single-cylinder engines. The cylinder was enormous when compared to English and French standards. The outer casing of the cylinder was about 24 inches in diameter so, when the engine was running, the vibration was enormous every time it fired and I had to obtain special anti-vibration mountings from Bletchley for both transmitter and receiver. I did the installations for three of these Norwegian fishing boats. (I heard later that they were known as the 鈥淪hetland Shuttle鈥�.)
In the meantime, back in Cornwall, Daniel Lomenech had managed to persuade the SIS in Falmouth and in London 鈥� and, through them, the Admiralty 鈥� that a boat must be built specially to look like P11, of which there were many still at work on the south coast of Brittany. She was to look exactly like our French sardine boat above the waterline, but be flat-bottomed and have two powerful engines to give her a cruising speed of 22 knots. The design was made by Laurent Giles, and she was built by Groves and Gutteridge of East Cowes, on the Isle of Wight. I went to deal with the installation, which was very well done by the builders, and then we mounted our radio equipment in the space provided. But, just two nights before the launch was due, a German aircraft that had probably been on a bombing raid to Southampton was racing away southwards back towards France and decided to release his remaining bombs. These fire bombs fell on Groves and Gutteridge鈥檚 yard and burnt out some buildings 鈥� together with the new SIS boat! The yard was very good, and immediately laid down a new keel and started to build all over again. This time it was built in a shorter time than the first one. I went there to fit a second lot of radio equipment, and all was well. She was launched and sailed to the Helford River, and was known as MFV-2023.
This was 1943, and SIS was to move from Falmouth 鈥� where security was very much aproblem - to the Helford River. At that time the large yacht Sunbeam II had been allocated to SIS, and I fitted her out in Southampton with more powerful radio transmitters than those installed in the fishing-boats at Falmouth. As soon as that was finished, one of the delivery crews 鈥� consisting of yachtsmen and others employed by the Admiralty to deliver ships 鈥� arrived. The captain realised, when he read his orders, that we were to join a west-going convoy for the Helford River the next afternoon. But had no signalman to handle Morse on lamp, so he pressed me into service! It was the only time I had been in a convoy. It was very slow, but we got there without trouble and the Morse lamp was much used - to the delight of Sunbeam鈥檚 captain. As a result, I never had any need to stay in a pub or hotel when in Falmouth; there was always a berth for me either in Sunbeam or in one of the other vessels.
Another person whom I had got to know during the previous few months was John Wilkinson, who was CO of the fast boat HSL-119, which cruised at 36 knots and had a top speed of 42 knots. At this time he was ferrying agents to and from New Grimsby, Tresco, and I made several of these voyages with him.
On my first trip from the Helford River to Tresco with John Wilkinson, he asked as we were passing Round Island: 鈥淗ave you ever been here before?鈥� I had been to New Grimsby on a previous occasion in A04, with Richard Townsend and John Garnett, and I remember Richard showing me on the chart how to approach Cromwell鈥檚 Castle from seaward, as there was a nasty rocky shoal off the north-west point of Tresco.
When I told John this, he immediately said: 鈥淵ou take her in, then, because this is my first visit.鈥� I argued that I was Army and not Navy, and that therefore it was his job to take her in. But it didn鈥檛 make any difference, so I was forced to act as pilot. I recalled Richard saying that Cromwell鈥檚 Castle should not be approached until it was on a heading of roughly south-east, and then to steer straight for it until the gap between Tresco and Bryher had opened up, when course should be altered to pass through the middle of the gap and on to New Grimsby. I did this, and all was well 鈥� but I didn鈥檛 like the idea of it at all鈥�
Then a new person arrived 鈥� Jean-Jacques Tremayne. I didn鈥檛 realise at first why he had joined all those on the river, but soon realised that he was to take over from Daniel Lomenech, who had decided to leave and to join the RN Submarine Service. I liked 鈥淛J鈥�, and we became good friends.
I suppose it was inevitable that if you were a radio man, like I was, you were automatically suspected of knowing about most things electrical. This meant that I got called upon to fix various things. The first was a fault with the governor on the old diesel engine in Sunbeam that was used for charging the batteries and for all domestic lighting etc. The second job, in John Wilkinson鈥檚 HSL-119, was a bit more complicated. HSL-119 had three Rolls-Royce Merlin engines (a Spitfire aircraft was powered by just one of these!). Being aircraft engines, the method of starting was twofold. To start, the spark necessary for the spark-plugs had to be generated by a coil system, which was in a separate box mounted on a bulkhead in the engine room (there were three boxes 鈥� one for each engine). Once the engine had started, it was standard aircraft practice to switch over to magneto ignition instead of the coil system, which gave a very much more powerful spark, especially at higher revs.
The Engine Room Artificer aboard HSL-119 had been experiencing starting problems. On inspection, I found that the coil systems were all suffering from the damp, salty atmosphere and were unable to generate sparks until all the contacts had been cleaned. So I got the ERA to unbolt the three coil systems from the bulkhead, and I took them up to the radio cabin in Sunbeam, which was lying alongside, took them to pieces, cleaned all contacts and reset them to the correct gaps. They were taken back to the ERA on board HSL-119 and left with him for reconnecting. This was during the middle part of the evening. John and I had a meal, after which we received a message from his ERA saying that all three units were reconnected and would be ready for test-starting whenever we chose. As it was already about 10pm, I suggested the next morning, after breakfast. John, however, would not hear of tomorrow, and ordered it to be done there and then. The first engine started normally, with a terrific bang and a great flame from the exhaust. Likewise, both the other engines started normally. Then they were all stopped, so peace descended once more. But next morning, John discovered that he was not at all popular!
My last visit to the Helford River was in December 1943, and I departed shortly before Christmas for a spot of leave at home and then to fly out to India at the end of the month, to do the same kind of operations against the Japanese.

[END OF PART ONE]
[SEE 4211759 FOR PART TWO]

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