Dan Snow's History Hit - WW2's Special Ops Sisters

Episode Date: November 10, 2020

Jean and Patricia Owtram were teenagers when the Second World War broke out. They both served in secret roles, one on the coast intercepting German naval signals, the other running intelligence agents from Cairo. Neither told the other what they had been up to until the 1970s! Now, in their late nineties they talked to me about their service and how they can still operate a Sten gun.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got a great podcast for you now. We've been hearing from veterans, veterans of the Second World War this November to mark Armistice Day, to mark Remembrance Day. We had the very brilliant 100-year-old Christian Lamb the other day. This time we've got two sisters. Sisters, Patricia and Jean Outram were teenagers when the Second World War broke out. They were both recruited to serve secret roles. One intercepted German naval signals, the other ran intelligence agents from Cairo. And neither of them told the other what they were up to until decades after the war. I'm very happy to say that I've got Patricia and Jean on this podcast now.

They are wonderful, wonderful people. I met up with them this summer. I did a socially distanced interview with them in their garden in Chiswick. You may hear the odd plane go overhead, but please do enjoy this podcast. All of our First and Second World War content is free this week on History Hit. No logins, no emails, no anything, credit card details, nothing. Just a click of a mouse or a finger on a device. You can go over there. You can watch all the wonderful programmes we've got, including the programme you might have heard on the podcast the other day in which we took John Watts to see his father's aircraft

in the RF Museum in Cosford. That's all there, free. Just go to historyhit.tv. I'm not even going to try and sell you anything. Check it out. In the meantime, everyone, enjoy this lovely podcast. everyone enjoy this lovely podcast. Patricia and Jean thank you very much for coming on the show. Thank you for coming to see us. So we think you might be the oldest set of sisters in Britain who are veterans of the Second World War is that correct? Could be. As far as we know yes I mean

we've never met any others. And do you think you have another personal record as well? Do you think you might be the oldest lady in West London who can still use a certain piece of machinery? Well, because when I was stationed in Aldova and there was a bit of a risk of a German commando raid on our random listening station, I did learn how to use a stun gun. And should, you know, the occasion ever arise,

whether I still remember after 70 years, I don't know, but I might. I think you might be the, yeah, there's not many people in the late 90s who can use stun guns, I think, in Chiswick. I'm not sure if they're still in use, actually. Now, tell me about your upbringing because you weren't expecting to go into service and fight for king and country were you? We were born to people who lived in a basic country in North Lancashire with farming going on around and we knew how to run a farm but we didn't know much else apart from ordinary lessons and things like that.

We went walking on our own with the dogs, and it was a peaceful, quiet life. What was expected of you? What did you think your future held? What we were quite sure our future held was that we would grow up, we'd do some short course in running a house or secretarial work. Then we'd marry somebody who our father hoped would have a bit of shooting and fishing and settle down as country mothers and wives. And that looked like our future.

And things didn't quite pan out like that, did they? It didn't come out like that, no. What did you end up doing during the Second World War? I was working as a secretary at the time. I think I'd just about left school. I think just towards the end. And I joined up thinking that I would probably do something rather simple and found that I was able to go overseas. I was in a ship sailing out to Africa by the end of 1944 and saw the war out in North Africa. So it was very different.

And what did you do? Well, I went to a boarding school, went to a secretarial college, and because on our mother's side, the family came from the Channel Islands, all the men always went into the Navy. So when the war started, my uncle and godfather, Uncle Charles, who was a destroyer captain, said, of course, the girls will go into the Rems.

So I didn't have second thoughts. I joined the Rems. And so did you tell each other what you did during the war? I can remember years after the war, I think in the 1970s, when books about Blescia came out and so on, I was saying, by the way, Jean, what were you doing in North Africa in the war? And she then told me.

And she said, what were you doing round the coast in England war? And she then told me. And she said, what were you doing around the coast in England? So then I told her. We were both very surprised. You were in the SOE? I was in Special Ops, yes. And you had to get parental permission to go overseas if you were under 21. And our father was a prisoner of war in the Far East. My mother wasn't at all short-ass. Her daughter was already working for something else in England, and she didn't know if the other daughter should not be kept in touch. And in the end, I think it was my grandfather who had been around the world when he was 18,

grandfather who had been around the world when he was 18, back in the 1800s. And he knew what it was like and he knew how it was feeling and he backed away. It sounds like a lovely childhood, but were you rather desperate to escape and have a bit of adventure? Yes. Yes, I think we both were because the war had started and my worry was that it would finish before we could actually play an active part in it. So I was very relieved in 1942 that I could join the Wrens and actually get involved. And why did you want to get involved? Was it a political thing? Were you against Hitler and fascism or was it just about personal adventure and getting out there and a bit of freedom? Well, I think the family had a lot of service people in it and we'd had to rush back from a Scottish holiday because our father was in the Territorial Army

and had to rejoin his regiment in 1939. So we always had the feeling that, you know, you must take part if there was a war going on and I was very glad to be 18 just the right age. And as women because traditionally it would have been mostly the men in your family I mean your grandpa who'd sailed around the world a teenager as women did this feel like a new time where you could finally get involved and do your bit? Yes it was because as you say, no women, I think, had ever been in the forces in the family.

Our mother had been a land girl in the First World War. You know, I was very excited about joining the Wrens, and because our grandfather had an Austrian refugee cook and housemaid, I had spent the time I was waiting to go into the forces doing a lot of chatting with the Austrians. With the consequence, I was fluent in German and put this on my own application. And they were actually looking for young women from safe families who knew German. From safe families? Well, because the work was going to be secret,

they had liked to know that you were the right sort of family. You mentioned your mother was a bit worried. I mean, what did she think? Did she think you'd go a bit wild? Well, I think she was a bit worried that everybody was going to be away. That would be in the forces. Her husband was already away. It was a prisoner of war in the Far East.

And I think she thought, well, it was my little brother who was only in his teens left, and she needed somebody else in the family. But I, meanwhile, of course, have been thinking, all these lucky people, they're getting into the forces and they're travelling and things are happening. I want to go. And so in the end, our grandfather, I think, who'd been around the world as a boy back in the 1800s, he knew what I was after. And I think he backed me. I've talked to many women in your position.

You said they met people from different backgrounds and there were challenges, but it was also great fun. Almost fun. We went out, first of all, in a convoy, and then through the Mediterranean and left the convoy behind and sailing through the Mediterranean at the age of 18. We'd never been out of Lancashire. And it was absolutely wonderful. And then I was in Cairo for three or four months, and then they wanted people over in Italy, and so we flew another aeroplane

never been in one of those and you know the whole thing was exciting and wonderful we weren't actually killing anybody or doing anything like that it was like glorious foreign travel. Jean I've heard that Cairo was rather wild during the war. Well I might say so but I don't know that I will. The official secret site doesn't cover the nightlife. Come on. I'm not so sure about that. But anyway, I think because I was young and villainous and I was just 18 and never travelled, everybody looked after me and made sure that I didn't have any problems, which was nice. So I could just enjoy it. And I did it. When we were in Cairo, we used to go for concerts and other

things off duty. But if you went to a nightclub, and if the king turned up, as soon as he came through the door, you left out through the kitchen, and they expected to see you come out that way and made way for it, because the king was not to be trusted with foreign girls in Cairo at the time. Anybody else, you were safe it because the king was not to be trusted with foreign girls in Cairo at the time. Anybody else who was safe? Not the king. Can I be sued for that? No, no, no, not at all. And what was your job in the SOE?

What was it in North Africa and Italy? Well, code and cipher work, obviously, was what it was. But we were doing the correspondence with our agents working behind the lines in Europe. So it was quite dangerous for them. And it was important you got it right and you worked at it. You found out what was going on and you heard about the dangers they were going through. It was quite a lot to take in for an 18-year-old.

Even though you were in an office behind the lines, you had a sense of the action of the war at the sharp end. Oh, very much. I mean, there were ones you'd known, you had a sense of the action of the war at the sharp end? Oh, very much. I mean, there were ones you'd known, you'd met when they came out and were back with the army again or something like that, who never came back again. You know, people disappeared and you knew that's it.

And, of course, we did know quite a lot about behaviour, action, what happened if you made mistakes in a foreign country in the middle of a war. So, yes, I woke up to what life was really about. Pat, you were in the UK. I was in Britain. And what were you doing? Well, because our grandfather had an Austrian cook and housemate, and they were refugees and didn't talk a lot of English when they came.

I became kind of an official interpreter by spending my evenings with them and talking mostly in German. So when I joined the Wrens, I put down that I knew German as one of my qualifications. And they had a secret training establishment in Wimbledon where they ran courses in intercepting and listening to German naval signals on radio. So I was trained as a radio interceptor,

and they had a string of 26 little listening stations down the east coast and the south coast where German-speaking Wrens were the staff, and we worked watches round the clock, four hours on, eight hours off, searching the German Navy's frequencies, writing down their messages, passing on operational ones to naval intelligence,

and the majority, which were in Enigma code, we sent straight to Bletchley Park by telegram, and all we knew was they decoded how they did it. We had no idea. I narrowly went to work at Bletchley Park at the beginning of the war And all we knew was they decoded how they did it. We had no idea. I nearly went to work at Bletchley Park at the beginning of the war because my godmother was married to somebody in the Foreign Office. And she wrote to my mother and said, a lot of the Foreign Office secretaries are going to work at a place in Buckinghamshire called Bletchley Park.

And it would be so nice if Pat went and joined them because she would be with a crowd of jolly girls. And I didn't want to be buried in Buckinghamshire for the war with a lot of foreign office secretaries because I thought of being somewhere near the sea with a lot of jolly sailors. And so I had to scotch this idea and I sent my mother a telegram to make sure,

which started, hate crowds, jolly girls. And the young man in the telegraph office said he rather hated crowds of jolly girls too. And that was the end of Aunt Ellie's good idea. Did you have as much fun on the coast of England as your sister did in Cairo, do you think? I think we did, really. We were sometimes rather isolated stations,

like the one on top of a cliff down over. But there were always army bases, or the Navy would sometimes last to go out in little boats with them. And we went to all the dances, the RAF and the army and people go and we gave our own parties so you know they were quite small stations with about 12 linguists and the social life was rather good. Did you both form great friendships it must have been so intense these teams you were working in? With the other girls, yes. I mean, I'm still in touch with one or two of the, as we were called, linguist friends. And I'm afraid we get fewer and fewer now that we're all in our 90s.

But yes, it was, you know, the sort of life that you could wish for anybody, 18 or 19. And what about you? It must have been very intense, that group out in Cairo in Italy. Yes, it was. It was a mixture. We had some South African women working with us who are volunteers and are not in uniform. And they seemed to be having a very good social life. And we could wear civilian clothes when we were out only working. We had to stay in uniform and so we also managed to have quite a good holiday feel about it.

But it wasn't really what we'd gone for so that although we were doing a lot of work with our agents mainly working behind the German lines in Europe. We didn't really want as much social life and when I was transferring to Italy I really felt I was getting into the war proper, leaving Cario behind which was really painful. The accounts of Italy, it was pretty grim. The local population were on the point of starvation, there were bombing raids, I mean it must have felt like you were really in a war zone. Well, we didn't see as much of that, of course, because we were in an army base and we were getting extremely good food and we had

opportunities probably to use vehicles and a lot to drive unofficially. And we used to go out when we were off duty and travel around and look at wonderful views and explore Italy and try and learn some Italian so I don't think we saw the worst side land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in rena. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories,

listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. So you went travelling around Italy? Yes, of course. Germans were in northern Italy and we were in the southern part. We couldn't travel all around Italy. But we did go when we were off duty as far as we could.

I liked going out and talking to Italians, learning enough Italian to be able to have a conversation. But also, Italy's a beautiful place and has a lot of beautiful things in it. So we were able, in our free time to get quite a good idea of what Italy was like. And did you hitch around or drive or how did you get round? Well, officially, of course, we weren't drivers. But unofficially, I learned to drive in Italy.

And so I always took over once we got out of sight of anybody else. It was a lovely experience, but we were aware that the cause of the experience was not lovely and I do remember we were coming back from somewhere I'd been with a friend and I saw something in the grass at the side of the road and I said hang on a minute I think that's a person. Sure enough it was somebody who was dead by the side of the road and we were aware that it wasn't all play. Like Pat, I'd done a certain amount of work with the foreign visitors we'd had at home and that sort of

thing. And I found that I could pick up a language fairly, not easily, but I could manage to talk Italian. So I took every opportunity I could find of talking to the local Italians who had been with the Germans. What was it like with them? What do you really feel about us being here? That sort of thing. And I found that was a great help. How did they test you and work out what you'd be good at? Well, I went to the training course in London when I joined the Fair Maids. And they said, well, activities and things like that,

and what was my spare time? I think it was, what did I do? And I said, I don't know, I do crossword puzzles and things like that. And they said, oh, well, in that case, let's talk about crossword puzzles, and what do you do, and how do you do them, and that kind of thing.

And after a little bit of discussion, they said, right, you can be a cipher officer because we have a lot of difficulties with ciphers that get wrongly transferred and that sort of thing. So I find this was a fascinating occupation. When I was asked to start doing crossword puzzles and try and sort them out, I was getting a bit cross about this, you know, I'm being played with. And then I discovered the importance of a broken message from somebody who was in danger and was desperately trying to get help under a foreign country somewhere. And nobody knew what was happening, where he was, what was going on. And that this was something you could sit up all night and do.

You must get this through before you leave this office. Pat, were all the messages that you received just encrypted and you were just handing them on to Bletchley? Or did you ever have a sense of what was going on? Were you ever getting an insight into what was going on in the German Navy? Well, a lot of them were in code. The plain language messages we received would be because ships were in action or they'd come over to lay mines on our convoy routes. They didn't code their messages then. They talked in open language and we would write this down, we'd pass this on to Naval Intelligence.

But the long coded messages in four-letter Enigma code, we really had no idea what the content was. You couldn't really, it was just groups of phonetic letters. But when you did understand the content, it must have been extraordinary listening to your enemy talking, chatting away. It did at one point strike me as rather odd. I never heard an English ship talking that I remember. I spent years listening to the German fleet talking, and in a way listening to the war from the German side of it. What did you gather? Did you feel they're the enemy, or did it make you almost rather sympathetic? Well, the e-boat crews became quite familiar in a way because they used to come across the North Sea and chat to each other and they would sometimes do messages like,

did you know so-and-so's crew are all going on leave next week? And the reply was, Sie machen alle Kinder was, you know, and that sort of thing. So you were very aware that you were listening to human signal. And the few messages that were open like that were quite interesting. But the vast majority in code, of course, we didn't know whether it was vital life and death or just a bit of routine instruction or something. But whatever it was, you had to be accurate.

And so you could hear the enemy's voices. Is that as close as they got? Were you ever on the end of any shelling or bombing or anything like that? Well, the station that was nearest to the French coast was Abbotscliff, between Dover and Folkestone. The Germans had long-range guns and they shelled over to bits, really, and also did some shelling and focused them. Luckily, they never had a go at our isolated,

rather conspicuous building on top of a cliff. There was always a bit of a risk of a German commando-type raid around there, so it was the only station where we had an armed guard of military police. And they were provided with stem guns. And we used to say to each other, it would be rather nice if there was a raid, if we could help to defend our station. And we asked if they would teach us how to practice with a stem gun.

And they did very obligingly. And we used to go and shoot at a little target in a field across the road. And I don't know now, but I might still be the oldest lady in Chiswick-Suttony who might remember how to use a stem gun in case of need. Well, you were the responsible one. You were the designated driver. Were you on nights out? I had passed the driving test, so I could drive the transport,

which meant I was the one who had to round everybody up and get them back from the RAF dances, the most unpopular job, and then tear through these darkened lanes with a blacked-out vehicle to get us back by whatever the time was, 11 o'clock or whatever. Very unpopular. And what about when you were driving back one night or something, you saw a rather famous person? Well, actually, I'd been on night watch and we

had a separate building from which you took direction-finding measurements. You could use the frequency of a German ship to establish the direction it was, and if another station also listened to the same signal, you would get a fixed point, and then we all knew where that ship was. I'd been doing this overnight, came out of the direction-finding hut, and there was a little group of people coming up the cliff. And to my astonishment, in the middle of this group, 8 o'clock in the morning, was obviously Winston Churchill, and I think General Montgomery, and certainly very senior officers. You were supposed to salute those people, but only when wearing a hat. And of course, you weren't wearing a hat on night duty. So I waved and said, hey, everybody, good morning.

They all waved back, good morning, and went up to the edge of the cliff and stood and looked across at Cap Grigny. And I was told later, Churchill was seen five times in the Dover area, and this was during Operation Fortitude, when we were convincing the Germans we were going to land at Calais, or now there, and it worked to some extent. And otherwise, I had no idea at that point what Winston Churchill was doing on Arkliff at eight in the morning on a spring morning. You're both presenting a very positive picture of your experiences, but you must have been very worried about your father was a prisoner of war.

Did you have friends that were wounded, killed, missing on the battlefields? Yes, it was. After all, I was only 13, I think, in the first year of boarding school, and he was a prisoner. And I do remember being very upset one night, and one of the nice older girls coming into my bedroom ward, and I was in tears, and taking me downstairs and giving me a cup of coffee and that sort of thing. They were very understanding, the girls at our boarding school. You'd think it'd be all the adults, but it wasn't. So there was quite a lot of support. I particularly remember one Christmas.

It was, I suppose, 1944. It was before the end of the war, anyway. And I was overseas in Italy. And we were expecting to have a nice party. And then one of our members had been over on the Yugoslav side and was flying back. Never turned up at the Christmas party. And it was quite difficult. You had to carry on.

You had to pretend that everything was normal. But we knew that he was not likely to come back again. So we were aware of the war, even when we were celebrating. So Pat, what about you? Was the reality of the war ever really brought home to you? I was in London or Buckinghamshire during the Blitzes, and... Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt

and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week You know, I can remember how loud the anti-aircraft guns were in the parks and, you know, the little crocuses growing around them in the spring and things, so that, you know, London was very different during the war.

But I never had anybody very close to me who was wounded or in great danger that I know of. Of course, before D-Day, a lot of the Wrens did have fiancées or husbands, prisoners of war or in the army that was going to land in Normandy. So it was a tremendously tense time for all my colleagues. Great relief when D-Day actually happened, because we were sitting looking across at occupied France and longing for the day when it was going to be free again. And we saw quite a lot of the free French. They had a centre in Folkestone. So we used to go there and join them singing French songs and reading French magazines, that kind of thing. Nice change from doing German. So we were very pleased for them when D-Day happened.

It sounds to me like the war, your war, was an experience you're grateful for. You're glad you went through that it was so much more interesting than what i'd expected my teenage years to be like and for a start obviously socially you were living in an adult world not in a children's world any longer you were with people who had real experiences and sometimes they were horrifying and they told you because they had to talk to somebody. And also you were working with older, more experienced people who were keeping an eye on things, making sure we weren't being pushed too far too fast at an age which I don't think would have happened socially in England. So it was a good time in my life. That's a very interesting point. You say people who've had terrible experiences would talk to you. Do you find the soldiers, people who've been in combat, would they unburden themselves to you? Sometimes. And I remember if you were on night duty,

I was doing code and cipher work with them all the time, with our agents working in Europe. And you would have people, if there was a gap, who suddenly wanted to talk about something which perhaps they'd never have talked to an 18 year old about, which had frightened them or hurt them in some way. You were dealing with adults as an adult when you were 18. Were you impressed by their bravery? What's your overriding memory of those agents? Yes, I thought it was heroic because if they were caught by the Germans, they didn't last long. And very often they wanted information from them, so they made sure they got it before they died.

So you knew there were pretty horrible things going on just a few miles away across the water in southern Europe. We were in Italy. Gene, what motivated these secret agents in your experience? Were they sort of patriotic? Were they in it for the money, the adventure? Or was it a whole range of things? I think it would be a whole range of things, but a lot of them, I think, had either lost family or friends or home,

and they wanted to get back, do something about it. And it obviously was a much more flexible way of winning the war by being over there disguised as a secret agent. You had to live a normal life, but at the same time you had to be sending information back which would mean death to some people, like the Germans. It was almost like a very good game we were playing. But it did mean that if you failed to encode or decode a message back in time, it could cost them their lives too. So we had a fairly strong connection with the people we were working with,

which we wouldn't have had in normal days. What about you? Are you glad you went through it? I think I was terribly lucky to happen to have German at a point when you could get a really interesting job. I never would have guessed I would be listening to the German fleet's messages as the first job I had, really. And, you know, you were well aware that what you were listening to was very important. What the content was when it was a coded message that went to Bletchley we never knew. So we only did know that absolute accuracy was vital. And listening to distorted or fading or not always very clear messages

requires considerable concentration. So we did get pretty good at that. One inspecting officer who came round our stations, she was a senior rent. We explained how difficult some of these messages were. She said, why don't you ask them to send them again? Showing a real grasp of what we were doing. Were you really bored when the war came to an end?

Not really, because our job came to an end? Not really, because our job came to an end before the war finished, when the German fleet capitulated, and we were sent up to Admiralty where they needed people to translate captured documents, and then to General Eisenhower's headquarters to go through official files looking for war criminals. So there were several things we could do, none of them as interesting as listening to actual live messages from ships. But, you know, we knew there were reasonably important jobs to be done. Is there a sense after the war that lots of the women were expected to return to their sort of older domestic roles,

and did lots of the women resent that? Well, it certainly happened because I know people who just went back to their domestic lives, their husbands were not interested in what they'd been doing in the war and probably the war was the most interesting bit of their lives, I should think. Not everybody because some people went to universities and things. I went to Norway because they reopened the embassies

in the rest of Europe and the occupied countries, and they needed staff in Oslo. And so I went straight out of the Rennes on a Friday to Oslo to start work on the Monday at the British Embassy. So it was very satisfactory. Jean, what about you? Did you miss it all when it was over? Oh, very much. We came home at the end of the war. Our father had been a prisoner of war in the Far East.

Our mother wanted us back. And so I couldn't look for another job until he came home. He did survive and did come home. And then I was desperate. what do I do now? Am I not going to stay at home for the rest of my life? And then I heard that just up the road from where we lived in Lancaster, there was somebody who was going out to Italy to cope with the refugees and people who were displaced and in camps and all that sort of thing.

So I picked up the phone and said, would you like a secretary or anything like that? And he said, can you do short-hand? Yes. Can you speak Italian? Yes, a bit. And so I write, he said, well, 10 o'clock on Monday, two days away at Lancaster station, and we're going out to Italy. And so I went out with him and worked in Italy with him on the refugees, displaced people, cases which really needed help, and stayed out in Europe for several years, I think, after changing jobs. So the war gave you both a real taste for adventure. Yes. Yes, I think it was a much more exciting time. I mean, there were very dark moments as well, but on the whole, one was very lucky as a late teenager

to have a job that you knew mattered so much. Would you have done anything different looking all these years back? Would you have made different decisions? I wouldn't have done. I think I would always have joined the Wrens. I didn't know when I volunteered what kind of job I would do, but I knew it would be probably by the sea and certainly for the Navy. So, no, I wouldn't have decided differently.

I think if I'd had the chance, looking back, I knew I wanted to travel, I knew I wanted to see where else there was in the world. I wanted to get away, do things independently. I think I had wonderful chance handed to me on a plate. What advice do you have for young people today that seek a life less ordinary like the ones you guys have had? Well, I'd say explore. Make sure you find out what is going on in the world beyond where you are present.

If there's something which interests you, make sure you go and find out. It may be a failure, it may not, but you will learn an awful lot by going to look. Don't sit at home. Yes, and I would say if you see there is something interesting, you think you could handle it, then always have a go because you won't get anywhere by not volunteering and you might find you enter something really interesting if you do. Just before I left Patricia and Jean, one of their friends or neighbours had brought over a piece of Second World War equipment, a listening device that they would have used,

that Patricia would have used in fact. And so this last bit of the podcast, I'd give you our conversation as we're both chatting while she showed me that after all these years, she's still got that magic touch. This is the kind of HRO that we spent our days and nights listening on. Of course, we had headphones. We knew the frequencies that the German fleet used, so we would only search that part of the wave band. And if we picked up a signal, we would then write it out exactly as we heard it on a naval message pad.

And that was the basis of the codes that Bletchley Park decoded. So what it contained, we didn't know, but we did know that that's what they did at Bletchley. And is it nice seeing it after all these years? It's almost homesick to see an HRO, I must say. Yeah. What a super thing to find. I'm not sure I can find the right frequencies, but...

I don't know if they're still chatting. Yeah. No, super. I wonder if it would work. I wonder if it could pick up a German ship. Hi, everyone. Thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms, but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour.

Head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars, and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference, for some reason, to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us, and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well. you