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ATS memories

I was at school and only just 17 when I joined up under age by forging my father’s signature. I went in 1940. I went to join the Wrens at Cardiff and they were taking batches every 6 months and I would not wait, I crossed the road over to the army where you were meant to be 17 and a quarter which I told them I was.

I had the interviews and then went home to wait for the documents to come in and then go for a medical, which I passed A1 and then waited 3 weeks and then went back to Cardiff to enlist properly. I had not told my parents. I waited for the call-up papers which came some time later. I joined as a despatch rider. They took us up to Strapfepher in Scotland and there they found out my true age and that I was too young to be trained as a despatch rider. By then my father found out what I had done and he wrote to the Colonel and that I was underage when I joined and that I had joined without his permission and asked for me to be posted back to Cardiff, as near to home as possible.

I was taken to the Royal Corps of Signals camp in Penlyan on the outskirts of Cardiff (where I met my husband). They were just bringing up the GOR (Gunner’s Ordnance Room) and we heard they wanted six girls to go to learn RADAR at St Mellyn’s. They set up a kind of hut in the middle of a farmer’s cabbage field and I had to wind my own signals onto a screen. I had to learn map references which was how I gave information on aircraft, we had to do 60 references a minute.

In our camp we took in information for the gun sights and airforce. Then it started to really grow and they made a place in the base with better facilities to receive information and pass it on.

In between times we picked cabbages or potatoes for the farmer at a 1/- an hour, so it was more or less 24 hours work.

RADAR really started to get going. I was billeted in houses outside the camp and four of my friends were killed at night when a bomb fell on the house. I was off duty that night but had been in Cardiff and was coming home when the raid started. It was dreadful we had no transport back to camp and incendiary bombs were falling all round us where we were walking. They were bombing the ports. When we got back to Cardiff we could see the flames and knew it was our billet.

After that night they decided to take us out of the private billets and into the camp. After that RADAR really started to move fast and they built a new GOR room with all modern appliances. We had huge tables all with maps on them and we knew all the map references. We could even identify enemy aircraft from friendly. I personally could find 60 map references in a minute, the officers had bets on it. The officers were on a table on a dais and they could see us working on the table and all the planes coming in and out. From there they could judge how many enemy aircraft were going down and the same with our aircraft. Over the next two years it improved, they had huge glass screens which the officers sat behind and we had to write everything on those screens backwards so they could read it. We fed the gunsights, the RAF and navy with information so they knew when enemy planes were coming over, we supplied information to the whole country. The RAF and the navy had there own ways of obtaining this information but they were not so quick as us.

I was there for nearly four years until I was de-mobbed.

Our billets in the farmer’s cabbage patch were tents with straw palliases or ‘biscuits’ as we called them. When it rained I woke up floating and it rained frequently in Wales. There were only six of us there and we lived in mud, particularly in the winter. There were no comforts at all. We could make a cup of tea on a small stove and that is all.

I met my husband in the army, he was in the Royal Corps of Signals and laid the cables in the Sahara Desert. He took me back after the war to see where he’d laid them. We married in 1944. The church was fall of ATS and army and we could not have a proper reception, everyone brought in some butter or sugar for the meal and all the men ended up in the British Legion after the wedding. We had not invited so many, they just turned up and all the neighbours rallied round to provide something to eat. My brother was a Beven boy and was made to go down the mines even though he was only 17 and he died on St. David’s Day 1944. The wedding had been all planned and so we waited until April and married in grey and black, a grey coat and a little black hat and black shoes.

Doris Daniel of Aberdare Valley

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