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Gwenda Long interviewed by Rebecca Kendall for Radio Guernsey, 18/2/05, transcribed from CD by John David 25/11/05

[Gwenda Long had left Guernsey for Nursing training at Ascot in 1939, but left to join her parents who had been evacuated with her father’s school to Oldham]

I………. How did you go from being a nurse to being a radar operator?
I got very homesick, so I didn’t sign on, and my father was a schoolmaster at the Boys Intermediate, they were up in Oldham, my two brothers at Elizabeth College out in Buxton, my sisters joined the Land Army, and my very great friend, whose father was the headmaster of the intermediate, Freddie Fulford, she turned up in Oldham, she’d been working on a farm, she said ‘come on, we’ve got to do something now, lets join one of the services’. We couldn’t get into the Navy — Wrens were just beginning — so we applied for the WRAFs. We joined up together, which made it much easier, and we did six weeks in Harrogate.
I………. What was the basic training like?
The basic training was hilarious, it was in Harrogate, and we stayed at the Grand Hotel, very posh, but lots in a room, and the funniest thing was when we all caught some awful sort of flu, and we had to do a route march in gas masks, that was my most vivid memory, I was absolutely panicked, you know, and tears rolling down our faces.
But we, Nan and I, being such friends and knowing each other, we saw the funny side of everything, and at the end of it all, one girl, Catherine, who I still keep in touch with, she was hating every minute of it, she came from London, Blonde, dressed all in black, high-heeled shoes, and she was the last to get the uniform, and she was having to march, and she couldn’t do it.
My friend Nan’s mother was marvellous, because we had awful chests, and she came up to Harrogate with bottles and tonics, an awful journey to get there, and then we were introduced to what we would go on to, it was only basic training, lots of marching and things like that, which we thought, you know.
Then we were interviewed by an officer, and the radar wasn’t mentioned at all, and then she said ‘There’s something very new,’ — and she knew we’d come from Guernsey, obviously — and she said ‘This is very very new, and if you accept my idea, you will be stationed miles from anywhere, but you will be on the coast by the sea’. We said ‘Thank you, that’s it’. Coming from Guernsey, that was heaven, we hated towns. And we said ‘Right, we’ll do that’. We went to Yatesbury, the big RAF training area in Wiltshire, and she said ‘As you’ve come from Guernsey I’ll see that you go to the same first radar station. It was called Radiolocation, but that wasn’t even mentioned, and you couldn’t discuss it other than in an ops room, and you had to tell your family and friends that you were a wireless operator. So the first thing you had to do was learn Morse. Then Nan was posted to Sussex, and I was down in Cornwall, Drytrees, (now Goonhilly Down, Telstar, the lot). We were as far away as we could from each other. Lovely to be in on something very new at the beginning.
I………. When the officer first mentioned the word ‘Radar’ to you at the beginning, what did you think?
Well, she didn’t even mention ‘Radar’ it was a wireless thing, and it was called Radio-Location, we just had to, wherever we were, unless we were in an Ops room, we were wireless operators, and my family didn’t know what I was doing. I can’t remember how soon it was, I picked up a Mail or an Express or something, and the headline was ‘The new thing — Radio-Location’. How we were all desperately upset that everybody would know about it now.
I………. When you were interviewed by the officer, as you were about to come out of basic training and decide what to do, in those days, did the officers treat Women with respect? Did you get any hint of the male chauvinist society that was prevalent outside?
The only time I did was about two years later, I think, when I went down to Pembroke — I went to Cornwall first — and I had to take, I was just a Corporal, and I had to take a crew of girls to a station near Milford Haven, a very small Radar thing up on a cliff, with just men, there were just no radar operators. Then they needed men to go to the Far East, the Middle East, and so on, and they couldn’t sort of cope with women going abroad, obviously — no loos, hole in ground — so they were not welcoming, because they were not terribly young men, and they were at that time, about 1942, needing more men, and they didn’t like the fact that because we were doing it they were going abroad. So we didn’t get a very nice reception, they got used to us in the end, and in the end, apart from the actual mechanics, they accepted us, but it wasn’t easy at first.
I………. So did any romances go on?
Not many — some, but not many.
I did a mechanic’s course, a Radar operator-mechanic, so that we could help, so back I went to Yatesbury,
I………. Was that something that interested you?
Yes, I was interested in how everything worked, not that we were ever mechanics, we were — eventually the word Radar was used — we assisted the mechanics, in the jobs where you test condensers and things, I didn’t enjoy that, you had a long white thing, if you had to remove a valve you had to test it, and if it went Zzzzz, you know.
I had one very upsetting thing, down in Cornwall, which I loved, they had some young Canadian mechanics came, and there was one, he was really really dishy and nice and everybody liked him, and unfortunately he went into the mobile transmitter, and he didn’t use a condenser, and he shot through a heavy metal screen out of this, and was electrocuted, and that, I think, was my first impact of something ghastly happening.
They had a proper RAF funeral down in Cornwall, near the Lizard, and so we said we wanted to come to it. And of course the chap said ‘O, we can’t have women there, you’ll just let everybody down’. We said ‘No we won’t, we’re doing a mans job’ and we insisted, and I’ll never forget the RAF Regiment, when they fired their rifles — I could cry now — they fired the rifles, that was my first reality, I think, of what goes on.
I………. And of course a good deal more was going on, and you were helping to pass information from the people on the ground, as it were, back to HQ. What dangerous missions did you work on — its fifty years after the war, I presume you are able to talk about it now?
I think the thing I feel I did some good — the thing was you had to hit something metal, on say a plane, and gradually we got more clever, and we were picking up E-boats in the end, and down in Portland — and I was on the screen, like a television screen — there was a blip, and we were in touch, we were working with the Navy at Portland then, because we were picking up ships, and E-boats, and I reported this plot, which you did, and they all said no, we have nothing there at all, the Navy has nothing there at all. It wasn’t far away, and I stuck to my guns, and I ended up talking to some snooty admiral, and said ‘Look, there is something there, you say there is nothing there’, and my eyesight was very acute, and in the end they sent out a plane, and there was a flying fortress crew in a rubber dinghy, and they spotted them, and it was on the front page of the Sunday Express or something — I never kept it — You know, you get shafts of things. I loved the Isle of Man, and of course wherever I went I was near the sea, apart form courses, which was good.
I………. What was the worst part of the war for you?
The worst part was after I was married. I had known Gordon before, through the family, his father and my grandfather were business partners, and we caught up when I was in Sussex, where his parents were then living, and he had come through Dunkirk fine, and we met up in the beginning of 44 when I found myself near there, and my grandfather said ‘Nobody ever writes to Gordon, he is in West Africa’ so I said ‘I’ll write to him, I like writing letters’ so we got in touch, and he came back, and it was only about ten months, I worked it out. He wanted to go back to France, having come through Dunkirk, desperately, and he was in Patten’s Army down in Sussex, and I was down there, so we managed to get the odd twenty-four hours and so on, so we got married, and thought he would be in Patten’s Army and go back to France. So I applied too, but they wouldn’t have women being mobile, they couldn’t cope with us, and unfortunately he was sent off to the Far East, but only about ten months. And that was the worst thing, seeing him off when he was going off to Burma.
I………. But it had a happy ending in the end, and you had two lovely daughters out of the marriage,
Yes, and gorgeous great-grandchildren who are a real joy

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