大象传媒

About two weeks before the war started the GPO Engineering deparment was combed to release staff for an undisclosed mission. At the time I was working at the GPO Research Station, Dollis Hill, in northwest London. As I was in the process of being transferred to another laboratory I was in limbo so I was a natural choice. I was not consulted in the matter, just sent. I found that I was to man a radio listening station as MI5 feared that the fiendish Hun would set up radio beacons all over the country to guide his bombers and defeat the blackout.

With the advantage of hindsight this seems a pretty ill founded fear. Surely someone in Intelligence knew that the Luftwaffe had no bombers capable of reaching Britain from Germany. The Luftwaffe was a tactical airforce to be deployed on the field of battle to support the ground forces. Also it had a system of navigation which needed no help from spies, as the bombing of Coventry testifies, when our counter measures failed.

The result was that I spent the next four months in Hendon telephone exchange with a range of useless radio receivers listening for What? I never heard anything more suspicious than the electical interference produced by the generator charging the batteries of the exchange.

I and one other unlucky wight shared this duty seven days a week, turn and turn about. I know now that we should have objected but in our simple minds the war overrode our employment rights, but an 84 hour week was unreasonable war or no war.

At the end of this period I enlisted and so escaped. The station was then closed. Thus ended my inadvertent career as a secret agent.

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