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At the outbreak of the Second World War on September 3, 1939, Marion Thomas was in her mid-20s and living quietly with her parents at Maes-y-Deri, 9, New Road, Ammanford in Carmarthenshire.

Marion was the second of the four daughters of Thomas Morgan and Blodwin Thomas.

She was the shy one of the family, unassuming and reserved, content to live at home and work for her father at his accountancy firm, T M Thomas & Co in offices above Peglers the grocers in Quay Street, Ammanford.

When Marion had finished her education at the Amman Valley Grammar School she had opted to join the family firm as a trainee rather than venture into the wider world as two of her sisters had done.

World War Two changes her life

Her older sister Iris had trained as a nurse at the Swansea Hospital and was, by this time, a health visitor in Leek in Staffordshire whereas Eileen was training to be a comptometrist at Swansea, working on electro-mechanical key-driven calculators. Her youngest sister, Vera, was still at school.

The outbreak of war however changed everything.

Although Marion enjoyed her life in Ammanford and despite her father arguing that she was quite indispensable to the running of his firm, by early 1940 she was becoming increasingly determined to play her own part in the war effort.

Conscription for women would not happen until December 1941 but nevertheless, and long before this time, girls were already travelling by bus each day from Ammanford, as well as from all over South Wales, to work in the huge ordnance factory at Bridgend which employed thousands of women to make munitions for the troops.

The wages to be earned at Bridgend were very good indeed and considerably more than Marion earned with her father but she believed that her contribution to the war effort lay in volunteering for the forces and in particular the ATS. This was the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s section of the army.

Time to join up

Then much to Marion’s surprise her younger sister, Eileen, offered to join up with her – provided that they joined the RAF because, she said, the blue of the Air Force uniform would be far more flattering to their complexions than the khaki of the ATS.

Although both girls duly applied to join the women’s branch of the Air Force, for some unknown reason only Marion was selected as a WAAF, a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Eileen would have to remain at home playing her part in the war effort as a fire-watcher.

Although Marion’s parents were concerned for her safety they supported her decision to join the WAAF.

Then, just before she left home, Marion received a letter from her elderly grandfather saying how taken aback he had been to learn that a grand-daughter of his had decided to enlist, put on a uniform and fight for King and country – although he did add that he was proud of her.

On Thursday, August 15, 1940, as the Battle of Britain raged over the south coast of England, Marion stood on the train station at Neath on her way to the WAAF depot at West Drayton near Uxbridge on the outskirts of London.

By her own admission, as the train pulled in to the station, and she kissed goodbye to her mother, the tears flowed and the enormity of what she was doing finally struck home.

In fact she sobbed all the way from Neath to Cardiff before giving herself a brisk talking-to, drying her eyes and repairing her make-up so that when she arrived at the depot the other recruits wouldn’t realise that she had been crying.

A life in code begins

At West Drayton the civilian Marion was transformed into Aircraftwoman Thomas 2nd class. She was kitted out in her uniform and given her own mug and “irons”, the knife, fork and spoon that she would be expected to use until the end of the war and then hand back.

Like all recruits she underwent medicals, dental checks, was lectured endlessly on subjects from first aid to fire-fighting as well as taught the art of drilling – marching up and down parade grounds.

Then, after undergoing extensive tests to determine which “trade” she would be best suited to, Marion was told that her part in the war effort would be as a teleprinter operator, responsible for the sending and receiving of coded messages.

Within weeks Marion was transferred to Cranwell Signal School to receive her intensive training in Morse Code and taught how to interpret coded messages at great speed.

By the time Marion left Cranwell for her first posting at 81 Signal Wing Worcester in October 1940 little could she have imagined where she was headed or the significance of the work that she would ultimately carry out, for signals would play a vital role in the war effort focusing as it did on communications and on intelligence gathering.

In 1941 Marion was posted to RAF Innsworth at Gloucester. Her time there was a happy one, she loved the work and lived in comfortable lodgings with the Walker family and their small daughter, Paulette. She was near enough to travel home to her family in Ammanford when she had leave and to cap it all had been promoted to Aircraftwoman 1st class.

Recruited to the top secret 'Y' Service

However, it was now that Marion’s war-time career in the forces took an unexpected turn. She recalled that, with no prior warning of what to expect, she was ordered to attend an interview with some senior officers where she was questioned at length about her background, her family and friends.

Shortly afterwards, in October 1942, Marion was posted to Chicksands Priory near the village of Shefford in Bedfordshire.

Chicksands Priory was home to the “Y” Service, a top-secret, intelligence-gathering, listening establishment responsible for intercepting enemy radio traffic.

Because of the highly secret work that they did there, Marion, like all of those working in the “Y” Service, had to sign the Official Secrets Act and agree to be bound by it, even after the war ended.

The young people chosen to work in the “Y” service had been handpicked for their high IQs, their capacity to work under pressure and for their exceptional skills with Morse Code and particularly their ability to simultaneously translate coded letters into the alphabet.

Marion and her colleagues worked long hours at the very forefront of information gathering and were often the first to learn news of the progress of the war although they were never able to tell their friends or families what they did, or what they had learned.

She knew how to identify enemy coded messages on wirelesses as well as how to get the wirelesses to work efficiently – she was even drilled on the impact that the atmosphere had on radio waves.

She remained at Chicksands until the end of the war, part of the select group of young people who, by day and by night, headphones over their ears, scanned the airwaves for enemy frequencies.

A life with 'the girls' in Hut 121

They logged every coded message and then, at great speed, accurately transcribed the Morse Code signals before passing the messages on, often by dispatch riders, to the code-breakers at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park (known at the time as “Station X”).

Life for Marion at Chicksands was radically different from Gloucester. She no longer lived in comfortable “digs” with a family, her address now was Hut 121 shared with a couple of dozen other young women and where privacy was virtually non-existent but where life-long friendships were made – indeed until Marion’s death at the age of 94 she continued to correspond regularly with “the girls” as well as meeting them at reunions.

Food was eaten in the Cook House, and although it was, on the whole, of a better quality than that available to civilians, she left the WAAF with an overwhelming dislike of curry (used to “hide” meat that was “off”) and potatoes (“always slimy”).

Marion thrived at Chicksands and over her time there was promoted first to Leading Aircraftwoman, then to Corporal and finally to Acting Sergeant.

When the war came to an end and Marion returned home to work for her father she did not breathe a word of the “Y” service or her part in it.

'I wish I could have told Mother the war had ended'

She spoke instead of the excitement of dancing at the Bedford Corn Exchange to the music of Glenn Miller, the famous American band leader, as well as of the American boyfriend who had wanted her to marry him and to move to live in the United States as a GI bride.

She talked of the friendships she had made as well as of trips to the cinema and war-time shows, of exploring the countryside on her bicycle and of the trials and tribulations of sharing a hut with a couple of dozen young women and then, when she was promoted, the responsibilities of “being in charge” of the hut.

When in the 1980s the newspapers started to reveal the secrets of Bletchley Park and the Enigma code-breaking machine Marion was very disappointed that someone had decided to break the promise that they had all made, saying “a solemn oath is a solemn oath” and would say no more.

As the history of Bletchley Park and the development of the Enigma machine became increasingly well-known over the years that followed, even written about in books, she continued to refuse to discuss the actual nature of work she had done at Chicksands other than to say it was “top secret”.

A year or two before Marion died in 2007, across the nation a series of events had been staged to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of the war.

As she watched one of these events on the television Marion suddenly said that, when at Chicksands, she had received notification that the war was over, well before it was formally announced and that she had so wished she could have told her mother there was nothing more to worry about – that apart, Marion took the secrets of her time with the “Y” Service with her to the grave.

WHO IS DINAH EVANS?

Dr Dinah Evans is a research associate at the School of History, Welsh History and Archaeology at Bangor University.

Her work focuses on the impact of war on society during the 20th century.

Marion was Dinah’s aunt and a woman she greatly admired for, although quiet and unassuming, in many ways Marion broke the mould of what could have been expected of a young woman of her time.

In addition she was a woman of great discretion for, having given an oath not to divulge her wartime activities, the truth of her wartime service only came to light after her death when Dinah set about researching her service record.

Dinah’s mother’s family were originally from Swansea and the town and the destruction of its centre during the Second World War played a large part in the family narrative. Dinah is at present preparing for publication a work on the physical impact of the bombing on Swansea’s shopping centre and the political dynamic that lay behind its reconstruction.

She can be contacted at dinah.evans@bangor.ac.uk

Further reading:

J. Gardiner, Wartime Britain 1939-1945 (London, 2004).

S. McKay, The Secret Listeners (London, 2012).

L.Verrill-Rhys & D. Beddoe, Parachutes and Petticoats (Dinas Powis, 2003).

* This article was first published during the Western Mail's Welsh History Month 2017.