Themes

World War Two Wren Elizabeth Cook nee McVey explains the work she was doing at HMS St Angelo and what type of signals they were getting.

After – your talking about after one became a code – well, your job would be to put something into plain language. Again, it wouldn’t be highly classified ones, but it would be – there was a tremendous amount of signals coming to and from Malta then about ships’ movements and also about ships’ repair work, so you were very busy. Again, they would have to be classified in order of importance. You were coder and decoder, yes, and you sat there with all these numbers, and sometimes in the middle of the night struggling to get the key of the code, which I don’t think had changed much since Nelson’s time. But I think just finding out just how it operated, if they had to be scrambled at the last minute because the Germans had intercepted them – but it was very interesting, very tiring and (Interviewer: A lot of mental work?) Hmm a lot of mental work.

Return to article