`Y` Station Cheadle
Shortly before the outbreak of the war the Government moved its Code and Cypher School to Bletchley Park, a large country estate near to Milton Keynes. The wartime activities at Bletchley Park have been described as `Britain`s Best Kept Secret`. At the peak of activity several thousand people were engaged in the crucial task of breaking the codes and reading the messages sent by the enemy. Bletchley Park, known as Station `X`, was the hub for the de-coding of Enigma radio signals which were sent there from Air Ministry Monitoring Stations around the country. One of these was located at Woodhead Hall near to the town of Cheadle. It was designated as as a `Y` station because the primary role was the monitoring of enemy air force signals. The staff at Cheadle were very much a part of Britain`s best kept secret. Mary Alcock (nee Perks) was one of the Radio Operators who worked at Cheadle in 1944/5 and her recollections provide a fascinating insight to a part of what Winston Churchill described as his `ultra secret`
Mary was born in Wolverhampton and at the outbreak of the war she was working in the accounts office at the Boulton and Paul Aircraft Factory in the town. On her 18th birthday she paid a visit to the Recruiting Office to see what was available. She could have stayed at Boulton and Paul but Mary wanted to do something different. "I didn`t tell my parents that I was going because they would have tried to stop me. My mother had lost her three brothers in the First World War and I knew that the loss of most of her family was never far from her mind"
"When I got to the Recruiting Office I didn`t really have a clear idea of what I wanted to do. I did fancy being a teleprinter operator and I asked about the Naval Service. I was told that they were not recruiting for the W.R.N.S. at the moment but that there was an urgent need for women who wanted to join the Air Force. So that was it, I filled in a form and signed up to serve my King and Country. I had no idea what sort of work I would be doing or where I would be sent to. Looking back I think that was one of the many things that were very different in those days, people tended to do what they were asked without asking too many questions."
"As I made my way home I was more worried about what my parents were going to say about me about joining up than about anything that might happen to me once I had left home. In the event they were fairly calm about it but under the surface I knew they were more than a bit worried. Like so many others I had never been away from home on my own before. The adventure started on the 1st of February 1944 when I reported for basic training at Wilmslow. The train was delayed and our party arrived late for lunch. Not to worry though, they had kept it warm for us. My first experience of RAF food and one that I would not forget in a hurry! In fact it was not until several years after the war that I could face eating parsnips again."
"In the following days we were issued with our uniforms and started to learn the RAF way of doing things or should I say the RAF way of doing everything. On one day towards the end of the basic training we were taken into large room which contained a number of tables and chairs. On each of the tables was a set of headphones. We were told to put the headphones on, listen carefully to the sounds and to make a note on a piece of paper each time that we heard a different sound. It turned out that we were listening to morse code. For most of us this was our first experience of the strange high pitched dits and dah`s. I must have done fairly well because at the end of the test I was told that I had been selected to become a Radio Operator."
For the next stage in her training Mary was sent to Blackpool. "We were billeted at various locations in the town. My billet was a boarding house in Pallatine Road and the landlady was very nice. We were all a bit homesick but there were some compensations. It was exciting to be in Blackpool. This was the first time that many of of us, including myself, had actually seen the sea. I learned to dance at the Tower Ballroom and there were organ concerts performed by Reginald Dixon."
"We marched to and from the various training sessions, some of them were held in the Winter Gardens. We were taught to send and receive morse code and how to recognise the various parts of a radio set. There was an almost constant reminder of the need for secrecy. We were told never to discuss what we did with anyone else. As a cover story we were told to say that we were doing meteorological work if anyone asked." The final phase of Mary`s training was carried out at R.A.F. Calne in Wiltshire. "We developed our proficiency in morse code and our technical knowledge of radio sets. We learned how to identify common faults and to replace some of the parts in the set. Finally after taking a test to prove that I could send and receive morse code signals at a speed of 25 words a minute I was sent to the Air Ministry Station at Cheadle".
"The station at Cheadle was based at a country house called Woodhead Hall. Our living accommodation was at the W.A.A.F. camp which was located off Donkey Lane near to the town. The station operated 24 hours per day and seven days per week. There were three constantly rotating shifts or watches, I was assigned to `B` Watch
"The first shift ran from 8am to 4pm, the second from 4pm to midnight and the third from midnight until 8am. I was engaged on `Search` this was the constant monitoring of certain radio frequencies listening for morse code signals. Woodhead Hall was quite large and we worked in one of the rooms on the ground floor."
"The room was set out with tables in rows. There were spaces for two radio operators at the tables and each operator had their own radio set. We had a schedule of work to follow. We scanned each frequency band carefully from beginning to end. If we heard morse signals we stopped the scan and transcribed the message onto slips of paper. When the message had finished we pressed a button which switched on a light at the front of the table. This alerted the Duty Sergeant who then came and collected the slip of paper. When we had reached the end of the frequency band we changed the coils inside the radio set and started to scan the next frequency band."
"The process was repeated until the end of the shift when the next operator took over and carried on where Mary had left off. We knew that we were monitoring signals from occupied Europe and also from Spain and Portugal. The signals consisted of what looked like groups of random letters. It could have been a shipping list or a shopping list for all we knew. The message slips were taken to another part of the building and that was the last that we saw of them."
Although here were a large number of people working at Woodhead Hall no one really talked about what they did. "Everything was `hush-hush` and it was not the done thing to ask too many questions. Two examples of the way things were spring to mind. We knew that here was another group of radio operators who worked at another site near to the village of Dilhorne but we did not know what they were doing. Secondly whilst we were kept busy monitoring radio signals other radio operators at Woodhead Hall were engaged on jamming or disrupting enemy transmissions but as we were not working on that task we were not given any information about it. There was an unwritten rule that everyone just got on with their own job." Mary is pictured standing with her friend and fellow radio operator Kath Phillips on the left.
"An R.A.F lorry was the main transport between the W.A.A.F. camp and Woodhead Hall but as it was only a short walk across the fields most of us preferred to walk even when it was dark. However our short cuts across the fields were stopped after a refugee was murdered nearby. Her body was discovered lying in one of the fields and the murderer was never caught. When we were off-duty we looked forward to visiting the Osborne Cinema in Cheadle. There were also a number of Public Houses but in those days girls would not even consider walking into a Pub on their own. The thing we looked forward to most were the dances which were held at the Guildhall in Cheadle. It was at one of these dances where Mary met her future husband. Local bands like the `New Melody Band were very popular and there were also visits by the R.A.F. Dance Orchestra `The Skyriders`.
"I remember that there was an increase in the amount of enemy radio traffic in early June 1944 but at first we had no idea that this was due to the Allied Landings in Normandy. After the war had ended I was posted to the station at Chicksands Priory and then near to the City of Celle in Germany. There were precious few luxuries in wartime Britain but the local people in Celle had almost nothing at all. Some of us would smuggle out things like bread and soap powder to help them. On one occasion a german girl came up to us to barter a soft toy in exchange for a packet of 20 cigarettes. Located nearby was the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp which had been commanded by the notorious Josef Kramer. This was the camp where Anne Frank died in April 1945, only a few weeks before the camp was liberated by the British Army.
"A question that was often asked was, if the local people knew about the terrible atrocities at the camp then why did they do nothing to stop it ? I remember one local man telling us that they knew that something terrible was taking place at the camp but everyone was afraid of the ruthless nazi troops, anyone who complained or protested knew that their own family would simply be taken away and never seen again."
"I remained at Celle until it was my turn to be demobbed back in England. I left the service in June 1947 and returned to work at Boulton and Paul in Wolverhampton."
"As everyone now knows it was not until many years after the war had ended that the true story of Bletchley Park and the station at Cheadle was revealed. I was surprised to discover that we had in fact been receiving and copying the Enigma signals of the German Luftwaffe. I think that all of the staff at the various monitoring stations must be proud to know that they played such a vital role in the conflict."
If you would like to know more about Station X and the Enigma Code Bletchley Park has a web site.
The end of the war did not end of the involvement of Woodhead Hall in radio
communications. It was purchased by the Air Ministry in 1937 to create a radio station for
`metrological purposes` and remained in Government ownership until only a few years ago.
Acknowledgements : Information and photographs with the kind permission of Mrs Mary Alcock.