The FANY in Peace War by Hugh Popham

Author:Hugh Popham [Popham, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, World War II
ISBN: 9780850529340
Google: YdWkAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2002-01-22T02:57:38+00:00

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‘The decrypts [were] sent down to Broadway from Bletchley by the car of a resolute lady in the FANYs, Mrs Barclay.’

Ronald Lewin, Ultra Goes to War

Churchill called the people at Station X at Bletchley who decoded German signal traffic ‘the geese who laid the golden eggs but never cackled’. Although it does not seem that any FANYs were actually involved in that extraordinary academy, with its staff of international chess champions and poets, mathematicians and classical scholars, there is nothing odd about the fact that it was a FANY who, in the early days of the war, delivered the ‘golden eggs’ direct to the Prime Minister. For the Corps, having no general or particular brief, but having within its ranks many women of high calibre, acted as a kind of reserve of talent when there was work of special delicacy or high responsibility to be done. Thus they tended to turn up in high places: as drivers to very senior officers, or in a variety of posts in the War Cabinet, the Foreign Office, the War Office, and General Headquarters. In the hierarchies of war many FANYs occupied the rather exclusive, confidential position of the personal assistants and private secretaries of the hierarchies of peace: women with a unique insight into the web of power, and on whom their masters placed a total reliance. The FANYs involved in this type of work formed a separate HQ Attachments Unit.

The recruitment of these (and indeed all new members of the Corps) fell, with a thousand other tasks, to the small, overworked, and largely unpaid staff at Headquarters. In October 1940 they had moved house once again, this time to 31A Wilton Place, which was the Vicarage for St Paul’s Church next door, and which the Vicar lent the Corps rent-free for the duration of the war. This was a gift from the gods, for 10 Lower Grosvenor Place was a strain not only on the Corps’ precarious finances, but also on the staff’s legs and tempers: being three floors up, they had to go trotting down to the basement every time there was an air raid.

With Mary Baxter Ellis totally involved with the Motor Companies and FANY–ATS problems, the Gamwell sisters (once referred to by a visiting soldier as ‘the thin one and the thick one’) took over the running of the Corps. Hope went north to command the Polish Units while Marian remained in London with an Adjutant (Elizabeth Hunt), an HQ Sergeant (Winifred Mason) and three clerks. In dear old William Guff’s place of Honorary Treasurer, they had J. A. Thomson, Managing Director of Brown’s Brothers, and a director of Lucas. He not only succeeded in raising funds for the Corps among his friends in the motor trade, but, through Lucas, presented them with a very splendid mobile canteen for welfare work in the Far East.

The sheer amount of work that this tiny Headquarters team had to shoulder was quite daunting. Apart from recruiting, one of HQ’s major labours –

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