My great-grandfather should have been a very lucky man. Born in late 1898, he managed to just catch the tail end of the First World War. He was still in training with the RAF (at the time called the Royal Flying Corps) when the war ended. By the time the Second World War started he was 41, married and working in a reserved occupation, so he was unlikely to be conscripted... except he was in the RAF reserves, so he was called up anyway.
After WWI he had stayed with the RAF for a few years and trained as an engineer. He then left, got a civilian job and started a family. In the depression of the 1930s jobs were scarce and he found himself unemployed. The only work he could find was a paper round for the local newsagent, a job normally done by children, and he joined the RAF reserves to top up this meagre income. Once he was in full time work again, he decided to keep both the newspaper delivery job and the RAF reserve income to top up his salary and allow the family to take a summer holiday each year.
This decision backfired on him when war broke out in 1939. I'm not sure exactly when he was called up, but in 1941 he found himself in Liverpool boarding the SS Britannia, headed for India. It's believed he was going to teach recruits how to fix aeroplanes and it's likely that, had he reached his destination, he would have been quite safe. It wasn't meant to be, as the SS Britannia came under attack.
The ship left Liverpool as part of a convoy of ships travelling through the dangerous European waters, but by the time she reached Africa she was on her own. By 25 March 1941 she was 600 miles off the coast of Sierra Leone and spirits were high as they approached the equator. A ship was sighted nearby but it was flying a Japanese flag and wasn't seen as a threat because Japan had not yet entered the war. Suddenly, the ship was rocked by gunfire. The Japanese flag had disappeared and a German flag raised. They had been ambushed.
The German ship, Thor, had attacked their front and rear guns, killing and injuring a number of men. The Britannia tried to fire back and to outrun the Thor, but it was apparent this was not possible. The captain made the announcement to abandon ship and those on board began to lower the lifeboats. Some of the life boats had been damaged in the initial attack, so there were not enough spaces for everyone onboard. They did their best. One account describes 47 men in a 25 man lifeboat. Those that were in the water clung to pieces of debris or made rafts. Some expected to be taken prisoner by the German ship and they threw their identification into the sea, but the rescue and imprisonment didn't happen. Whilst still on board a distress message had been sent out by the Britannia to Sierra Leone. The Germans intercepted a message back that said a navy warship was on its way at speed. Because of this, they left the scene and expected the survivors to be picked up by the navy warship. Unfortunately, it never came.
Of the 492 people on board, 243 of them survived, but my great-grandfather was not one of them. Having read the harrowing reports of the survivors, I hope he died quickly at the beginning of the attack. Most of the survivors were picked up by a ship called Cabo de Hornos after five days and were taken to Tenerife. Shockingly, one of the lifeboats was at sea for 26 days and travelled all the way to Brazil. Two seamen on board realised that although Sierra Leone was much closer, the winds and tides meant that their chances of reaching Brazil were much higher. They put the survivors onboard on strict rations of one cracker spread with condensed milk per day. 38 of them survived the journey.
In my naivety, when I originally heard about the sinking, I assumed my relative had gone down with the ship or drowned quickly because he didn't reach a lifeboat. Having read the accounts I realise that many of those who died were actually in the lifeboats or on rafts, and their deaths were not pleasant. Some were already injured and died of their wounds. Some drank sea water. For others the cause of death was sharks, loss of hope or madness.
Nearly all the survivors describe the waters as shark-infested. I imagine they were drawn by the bodies from the initial attack, but they then found a steady source of food. Some men were dragged from the rafts after they dangled their legs in the water, but mostly the men jumped to their deaths. After several days of little food or water, exposed to the elements with their skin blistering from the sun and with nothing to see except the empty ocean, many men began to lose hope. Some of them went quietly to their deaths. One survivor describes a man getting to his feet, putting his coat on and calmly stepping off the side of the boat. Some said goodbye to their fellow travellers and explained that they had had enough. Others ranted and raved, frothed at the mouth, became wild and aggressive, but all seem to have ended the same way - by jumping into the sea. Even those that survived describe hallucinations and feelings of despair.
All of this makes for distressing reading, but I'm grateful to the survivors who had the courage to bear witness and record their stories. There is an excellent website called www.ssbritannia.org which has links to survivors' stories as well as news articles and information about the ship.
Saturday 25 October 2014
Sunday 19 October 2014
The WOYGians of Beaumanor
I'm currently reading The Secret Listeners by Sinclair McKay, which is about the operations of War Office Y Group (known as WOYG) during the 2nd World War. The department were wireless interceptors who listened in on German (and other enemy) radio transmissions and took down coded messages for deciphering. Mostly these transmissions were sent to Bletchley Park. The story of the code breakers at Bletchley Park and their cracking of the Enigma machine codes is now very well known, but the wireless interceptors are still mostly unknown. If you don't know about Bletchley Park you can read about it here.
The wireless interceptors had the less glamorous job of working long shifts writing down morse code messages. The messages would be difficult to hear over crackly transmissions and would be seemingly random batches of letters. Despite this, accuracy was extremely important if the codes were to be broken. Other times the interceptor would be sat listening to static for hours on end waiting for transmissions.
There were a number of more psychological difficulties with the job as well. Due to the top secret nature of the work, mostly the interceptors didn't know whether the information they were passing on was of any use. Was it being deciphered? Did it say anything helpful? The monotony of the work without obvious results would have been hard. Also, for the young men who were serving as civilians at WOYG, they also had the societal pressure of the secrecy. They couldn't tell anyone what they were doing (even their families) and the sight of healthy young men out of uniform was generally met with disapproval. In actual fact, the members of WOYG were specifically selected for the service based on certain skills they had such as knowing morse code or being an amateur radio enthusiast. Even after the war had ended they couldn't talk about what they had done. It now seems to be generally accepted by historians that the code breakers shortened the war by approximately two years, but many of the staff will have received little or no recognition of this during their lifetimes.
My grandfather was one of these interceptors and was based at the largest of the sites in Beaumanor, a country house in Leicestershire. It seems he was actually quite lucky. In McKay's book he describes Beaumanor as having lots of gossip about romances, but that it was very rare any of these relationships lasted and ended in marriage. My grandfather was an exception. My grandma worked as a runner at Beaumanor, taking messages from the huts in the grounds up to the main site to be sent to Bletchley Park. They were married in 1945 and this must have made things much easier for my grandfather as he continued working for the department after the war as well. Whilst he wouldn't have been able to tell my grandma exactly what he was doing, she would at least have understood why and had a general idea of the importance of it - something that many of the interceptors' spouses would not have had.
Beaumanor seems to have been one of the happier sites with a wealth of activities and clubs and a sense of belonging amongst the staff, who referred to themselves as WOYGians. I know that after the war, when my grandfather was posted to Famagusta in Cyprus, my dad remembers there being a lot of parties and socialising - especially fancy dress parties, which my grandfather excelled at, coming up with spectacularly creative costumes.
There is another book which is specifically about Beaumanor (the McKay book covers bases all over the world) which I would really like to read but it's out of print and I can't find a copy of it under £100! Hopefully I will stumble across a cheaper copy somewhere. It's called England Needs You by Joan Nicholls.
Another great source of information is the Garats Hay website which has information about the Y Services including photographs and histories.
The wireless interceptors had the less glamorous job of working long shifts writing down morse code messages. The messages would be difficult to hear over crackly transmissions and would be seemingly random batches of letters. Despite this, accuracy was extremely important if the codes were to be broken. Other times the interceptor would be sat listening to static for hours on end waiting for transmissions.
There were a number of more psychological difficulties with the job as well. Due to the top secret nature of the work, mostly the interceptors didn't know whether the information they were passing on was of any use. Was it being deciphered? Did it say anything helpful? The monotony of the work without obvious results would have been hard. Also, for the young men who were serving as civilians at WOYG, they also had the societal pressure of the secrecy. They couldn't tell anyone what they were doing (even their families) and the sight of healthy young men out of uniform was generally met with disapproval. In actual fact, the members of WOYG were specifically selected for the service based on certain skills they had such as knowing morse code or being an amateur radio enthusiast. Even after the war had ended they couldn't talk about what they had done. It now seems to be generally accepted by historians that the code breakers shortened the war by approximately two years, but many of the staff will have received little or no recognition of this during their lifetimes.
My grandfather was one of these interceptors and was based at the largest of the sites in Beaumanor, a country house in Leicestershire. It seems he was actually quite lucky. In McKay's book he describes Beaumanor as having lots of gossip about romances, but that it was very rare any of these relationships lasted and ended in marriage. My grandfather was an exception. My grandma worked as a runner at Beaumanor, taking messages from the huts in the grounds up to the main site to be sent to Bletchley Park. They were married in 1945 and this must have made things much easier for my grandfather as he continued working for the department after the war as well. Whilst he wouldn't have been able to tell my grandma exactly what he was doing, she would at least have understood why and had a general idea of the importance of it - something that many of the interceptors' spouses would not have had.
Beaumanor seems to have been one of the happier sites with a wealth of activities and clubs and a sense of belonging amongst the staff, who referred to themselves as WOYGians. I know that after the war, when my grandfather was posted to Famagusta in Cyprus, my dad remembers there being a lot of parties and socialising - especially fancy dress parties, which my grandfather excelled at, coming up with spectacularly creative costumes.
There is another book which is specifically about Beaumanor (the McKay book covers bases all over the world) which I would really like to read but it's out of print and I can't find a copy of it under £100! Hopefully I will stumble across a cheaper copy somewhere. It's called England Needs You by Joan Nicholls.
Another great source of information is the Garats Hay website which has information about the Y Services including photographs and histories.
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