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A WAAFs wartime memories Part Two — Air Ministry, onto the Cabinet Office and Special Duties. One of the accompanying WAAFs to Yalta Conference.

Part two of an oral history interview with Mrs. Noreen Jackson conducted by Jenny Ford on behalf of Bedford Museum

“Then I got posted to Skegness and came back to the Air Ministry. When I got the Air Ministry, I found it was big, well my husband helped me get back there I think. You found you were in a huge office, perhaps 10 girls or 15 girls all typing like this. I got married in August 1942 and I came back to the Air Ministry and I was on the Code and Cypher doing it on the machines and there were a lot of us there because the signals all came in from all different departments. Then we just typed and de-cyphered them or cyphered them and passed them on.

Then they wanted somebody to work in the ‘Cabinet Office’ on ‘Special Duties’ I didn’t realise why I had been picked. It was called the ‘Cabinet Offices’ and ‘Special Duties’ you see, well they wanted Code and Cypher Officers for that and we had about eight of them there. Suddenly I was told I was going to another job and so I went up to another Office. It was the Ministry of Defence but it was the Cabinet Offices and that was stationed very much where the Museum is now under Downing Street, that’s part of the Ministry of Defence but it was the Cabinet Offices and that was a very interesting job. There were about three of us on at a time I think and we did shifts again, sometimes only two of us on, we did round the clock. But all the stuff that came in came from the Chiefs of Staff and the Prime Minister’s Office it was very high powered stuff. That used to come in, we didn’t have to type it so much, we had to decide who should get this literature we are getting, obviously there was a script, we had to decide who should have it. So that was very interesting indeed. We did a certain amount of typing but I wasn’t a typist there It was all common sense and asking people and making sure that your files were right. Making sure that General Ismay or General Jacob or General Hollis got the stuff he should get and the other people. The Prime Minister often used to send work up to us. And how you had to prioritise it, which was priority, so all the stuff came through to us in ordinary, plain English, it had all been de-cyphered downstairs. So we passed it through from there down to the girls to type after we had decided where it should go to and then they would circulate it. Yes, we would then say where we wanted it to go to and then it was up them to despatch it. But I mean that was a wonderful job, it was very interesting. You worked around the clock it was a very busy time.

I was working in the Cabinet Offices and Churchill was Head of us, he was the Prime Minister and General Ismay was the Chief of Staff. We were in offices on the floors where General Ismay was, General Hollis, General Jacob, where all the Generals were and the Colonels and people like that. Churchill, he wasn’t with us, he was further away, he was down stairs in his bunker. But I mean we used to see him at night sometimes, he’d be walking along the corridors and things like that. But I mean we knew what was going on and we knew when he was there because the work used to appear about three in the morning it always came late. So if we were on duty sometimes if we weren’t busy you could perhaps sleep for a couple of hours. But if he was around, if he was basically there, I mean if the work was being piled up it came first thing in the morning you see because obviously his staff, his secretaries and people would have taken all the work. And then it was priorities, either ‘immediate’, ‘emergency’ or ‘for his eyes only’, this sort of thing, it was all categorised. Oh, yes, we saw him around but really I was working for Chiefs of Staff which was Cabinet Offices, Ministry of Defence which was part of Churchill’s enclave. I didn’t ever go down to the map room, to his offices or anything like that. He didn’t have Service people working for him there he had civilians. I knew some of them actually. He had men there but I don’t think he had many girls in uniform down there I think it was mostly civilians
It was 1942, we were being bombed a lot, not flying bombs then but I lived in Chelsea at that time and fair enough my husband was in the Directorate of Operational Requirements which was in the Air Ministry and you were very busy and you were very young. At the same time you worked in the day and played at night. Or worked at night and slept the next day, you see you worked around the clock, you got used to it. There wasn’t much bombing in that part of London then, I mean there was bombing. If I tell you that we dined out in all the best restaurants nearly every night you wouldn’t believe me but it was true. You see you used to come out of there, you would hear the air raid warning go and you’d come out of somewhere in Piccadilly or Mayfair and you’d run down the street, you’d hear the guns go and you’d go to an archway, you really just lived with it. You just got used to it, you just ran, you couldn’t always get down in a tube. I have slept down in a tube on many occasions. But at the same time in those days you were all young and if you were off duty you wanted to go to the theatre, the theatres were going, and if there was an air raid of course you had the warning you had to get out. But if you were having dinner at a restaurant and the air raid went, you stayed you see and I mean you had to get home after it. But there was a limit on the food as you know but on the other hand if you, an awful thing to say, but if you had the money there was an awful lot of food that you could buy that wasn’t rationed, a tremendous amount.”

I stayed there until 1946 actually when I came out. During that time, we had the chance to go, when Churchill went to Toronto or Casablanca or somewhere like that, we took it in turns to go. It was a question of who wanted to go. I had the chance to go to Canada but I didn’t want to buy a fur coat, I may sound quite mad, so one of my friends went. We were all there and then when he did these Conferences the WREN Officers and the WAAF Officers had to go and do the same sort of work wherever they were. So in 1945 it came up that they wanted someone to go to Russia, it was my turn, so I went on the Yalta Conference, which was fantastic. We were given money to buy clothes and I remember I went to Harrods, I remember I bought woolly vests and jumpers and things like that at Harrods, because we were quite near there obviously. We flew from Northolt. I couldn’t tell my husband where I was going, you just didn’t talk in those days, and he didn’t know where I was going he just knew I was off somewhere, I said, ‘I shan’t be back for a week.’ He didn’t ask any questions, I said, ‘I’m going away.’ I think we flew from Northolt in an old York aircraft which is a think like a Lancaster, a civilian version of a Lancaster and we flew in that to Malta. I can’t tell you who was in that aircraft or anything but there was a flirty old lot of men I can tell you, some of the Wing Commanders and Air Commodores did not behave like gentlemen!

There were a few of us. I think there were most probably - yes some WRENS came on the Yalta Conference. We flew to Malta and in Malta we did the same sort of job as we had been doing in London. We went to Malta and we worked the same sort of situation as we did in England except it was lovely and warm and it was like a weeks holiday. We were there for a week at the Officer’s Club and the social life meant an awful lot to we girls you know. The social life was there. We were there as a member of the Officer’s Club and Malta was very interesting in those days because it was free and easy at the same we were all in uniform the whole time. So we had a week there working. We were put up in place called the Savoy Hotel but you don’t want to compare that with London. We worked very hard and we had a week there and then we had to fly onto Russia. We all got in the aircraft - we’d had a party the night before to celebrate the fact that we were going and the identification signals - we were flying to a placed called Simferopol or something I think, south of Stalingrad. And we all flew in the aircraft and we had self heating soup in those days. We had this quite long flight into Russia, right over from Malta, right across as you can imagine I know the identification signals when we came in. I used to sail a lot and if you sail you can either take it or you can’t, but I get sick, and I felt so sick. We landed at Simferopol where the Russians looked at us as though we had come from space. It is just a place, nowhere near it all, it just landed and the Russians were all around us looking at us. We all got out of the aircraft and we were all sent in cars. We got in the car and we had a four hour journey and we went somewhere were we had some Russian tea and that was my first experience of seeing Russian loos. There are no plugs in them, no plugs in the basins or anything like that there. Then we went down from there to Sebastopol but we were just on the edge of Yalta. The SS Franconia was there, that was brought for us to live on which is a P & O ship. That had come with people like Lord Allenbrooke and Ismay and people like that, they’d all come on the boat I think because it came especially and I think Churchill must have come on it. He may have flown to Malta and then got on the boat, I’m not quite sure, he may quite well have done that. I don’t think he was with us in Malta but I have an idea I think that is what happened. They all went on by boat and we flew in you see.

We were all accommodated on the SS Franconia, that was the Head Quarters. In 1945 when we had been on rations for four years, it was just like a first class hotel so I mean we had breakfasts, there were waiters everywhere. Meals, you had a choice of everything, it was nice, it was lovely. The boat was all lit there was no blackout on there, it was quite a place to be. We worked in tiny cabins I remember and we were busy but not as busy as all that. There were the WREN Officers there and all the Generals and people there, you had all the Chiefs of Staff there, all the names I mentioned and you had Air Marshal Tedder, everybody who was anybody was there, Admiral Cunningham, they lived on board. We had films at night. You’d see Churchill around the place, you know you kept out of the way but you saw him the whole time. I mean it was hard work but at the same time we had times off duty and I’ll never forget going on the roads to Sebastopol, that’s were we where, how many miles Sebastopol is to Yalta I’m not quite sure, that’s where the SS Franconia was based. We used to go out in the evening. I’ll never forget going to a Russian Concert were their voices were absolutely fantastic. They used to come and look at us and say, ‘Why isn’t the Second Front open?’ Well this was January you see, ‘Why isn’t it open, why isn’t it open?’ and you all had to say nothing because it hadn’t been decided when they were going to open it then at the same time they were at us the whole time for it. We saw terrible prisoners, they were either Rumanian or Hungarian, Eastern Europeans being shuffled along. As pictures you see them on the road and dead rats and dead wolves and things on the road and we felt sorry for these men, they were all being marched along where to I don’t know, Prisoners of War, what happened to them I don’t know. The harbour at Sebastopol, the harbour there was full of dead Germans because that’s was where they were pushed into the sea by the Russians, we didn’t know they were there but we were told that they were.

As far as we were concerned we worked hard, we did what we had to do on the ship, it was all very important and there was a lot of pressure but it wasn’t over the top because they had Conferences the whole time. I think we were there about a week and we were entertained by the Russians, went to some of the Palaces, we went there and had lots of caviar and things like that and we did what all the young people did, always escorted. But I’ll never forget walking around by the Russian harbour and these sailors all pointing at us and saying, the people that could speak English, ‘What about the Second Front?’ the whole time and we were very obviously British dressed in our uniform. So that was quite a thing. The only thing that I did bring back, I got a Russian badge off a sailor’s cap which I managed to get, which I’ve still got.

Then the time came for us to go back. I think we were there for about a week and it wasn’t cold, I didn’t need my woolly vest or anything, it was the Crimea and Yalta was very nice. You can’t believe what it was like seeing that food. I mean four course dinners and breakfasts I mean there was no war on as far as we were concerned, we just ate well and lots of romances, endless romances going on. We came back on the SS Franconia which was fantastic. We came through the Bosporus, we went from Russia into Turkey and I’ll never forget the boat was going at a fair pelt and we were told it had to stop. We wondered why we were stopping, well Churchill had decided that he didn’t want to go on the boat he wanted to fly home. So having been on the boat with all his entourage, he suddenly decided he’d had enough of that and he wanted to fly. They had to stop this liner and get him off which was quite a thing, it juddered and everything else, so he went off and flew back to UK. We went on to Malta and we flew back from Malta. I’ll never forget when they came into the harbour they hit the harbour wall, it’s something you remember isn’t it? The boat hit the harbour wall. Then we flew back from there to England. I think I was away about a fortnight but of course my husband didn’t know anything about it at all. That was exciting!”

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