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JOY WELCH
WOMEN’S ROYAL NAVAL SERVICE

Joy was born in Galgate, near Lancaster and had one brother. Her Father was a solicitor and Chairman of Lancashire Education Committee. She was taught at home, then went to boarding school at St. Albans, which was evacuated during the war, half to a former holiday home on Anglesey and half elsewhere, until a larger premises was found in Shropshire.

I volunteered and remember a chaotic medical in Liverpool when I was unprepared for being given a pan and told to ‘spend a penny’. I also have a vivid recollection that day of seeing a red telephone box completed ‘concertina-ed’ when a lump of concrete had fallen on it. My six weeks ‘square bashing’ was done at Tulliechewan Castle, near Loch Lomond (which was later pulled down as the tax was so high). I still have the navy overcoat, made by a Jewish tailor in London; the navy pullover now with numerous holes and also my brown attaché case. In addition to our uniforms we sometimes wore bellbottoms and a teeshirt. If you ate ice cream you had to have your jacket off and sleeves rolled up.

I wanted to be a radio mechanic so went to New College, Finchley Road, but didn’t qualify ~ perhaps because I was with a lot of medical students who had more knowledge of physics. When the Doodlebug raids came we went to the Theological Library at the college for safety! When the explosion came after the silence, we knew the bomb was down so we were safe. We would travel by bus to Chelsea Polytechnic for the course and would see what damage had been done during the night.

From here I joined P5 at Eastcote, west of London, an offshoot of Bletchley Park famous for breaking the German codes. There were four ‘watches’ of approx. 46 people ~ one on leave and the other three working on a rota basis. The job was to operate machines, called ‘bombes’ which found the settings of the rotors on the German Enigma machines and this involved the use of tweezers. If a code was broken we stripped the machine and started again.

We worked and lived in single-storey pre-fabricated buildings with flat roofs. The work bays (named after countries) contained up to 12 ‘bombes’ and were dark, airless, noisy and smelt of oil. The officers had small cabins and the rest lived in large cabins. They were divided into dormitories with half-height walls, double bunks, a chest of drawers and hanging spaces for uniforms. I remember ‘slimy’ glasses in the canteen and I never want to see a baked bean again ~ as they catered ‘all around the clock’ beans were often served.

When we had time off we would go into London by tube and because of being underground it was a long time before I ‘got my bearings’ in the city. We would go to one of the Lyons Tea Houses as they were cheap or there were various places open in London for the forces. We would also go to the local cinema and saw Bing Crosby, infinitum. I did a lot of walking and remember doing so one Christmas Day and feeling very alone. We also visited people with TB at Mount Vernon. There were no dances or concerts locally, because of the proximity to London. If I had leave I went home and can remember the WRVS serving tea in jam jars on Preston Station platform.

On VE Day we all joined hands and did the conga through the site. After, I retrained to be a meteorologist at Leigh-on-Solent. When in the control tower the detail for plotting on maps came in by teleprinter. If you were on ‘nights’ you would often have a nap and be woken when the paper in the machine became jammed. You had to take the temperature, the wind speed and direction, and the height of the cloud using a search light. In the daytime you had to send up a balloon and your ‘hands were full’ as you needed a stop watch and a theodolite whilst writing the information down.

At this time I was flown by Tiger Moth from an airfield near Warrington, to Padstow, in Cornwall, where I stayed in the St. Merrion Hotel and worked on St. Merrion Airport. I went to Constantine Bay where Churchill and Guerring had stayed at The Tregloss Hotel. I actually knew of a shop in Cornwall that would exchange pyjama coupons for ‘civvy’ clothes. Padstow was beautiful and I hitch-hiked all around. The surf was phosphorescent and I remember swimming nude with a group one evening at Harlin Bay and local fishermen coming down and we all joined hands and drifted until we found where we had left our clothes. A visit to the pub meant going through fields and hedge and we had to shove geese off the airfield when the Admiral was coming. A replica Japanese village had been built in a bay to practise bombing. On one occasion the Prince of Siam, who was one of our pilots, came in and asked for the Met. Office and I directed him into the ladies toilet by mistake. I was de-mobbed at the Admiralty.

Since then Joy went to university, then worked for the Federation of British Industry doing information work. She then transferred to doing voluntary social work at a school in the East End of London. When she retired she came to live in Teesdale, near her family.

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