
Gwen was recruited to this work thanks to her friendship with a senior army officer who knew she spoke fluent German. She was interviewed in what is now Eastbourne College. The school was briefly occupied by the RAF in 1940 but then became HMS Marlborough, a naval training school specialising in torpedo and underwater warfare. Her training complete, Gwen is sent to work up at Beachy Head.
Secrets in a London Attic
Imagine my delight when just a couple of weeks ago I discovered my imagination was closer to the truth than I realised. It turns out there was a secret intercept station up on Beachy Head, doing exactly what Gwen and the RAF were doing – listening in to German radio signals. The discovery was made when the wartime diary of an RAF technician was found in the false bottom of an old suitcase in a London attic - and no, I didn't make that up!. This man had always claimed to have worked at the chain home station but it turns out this was merely a front for a bigger top-secret operation.
WRNS operators had accidentally picked up some strange signals from occupied France which they passed to the RAF. To their surprise, RAF Intelligence discovered they were actually television signals. Like the BBC, French television transmissions had ceased at the outbreak of war, but unsuspected until then, the Germans had started transmitting again from the Eiffel Tower to provide news to hospitalised soldiers. Normally such signals would not extend more than about forty miles and hence too far to reach the English coast – or so the Germans believed. A massive aerial was set up at Beachy Head to receive the signals, operated by the RAF with German-speaking women, WAAFs, to transcribe all received messages ready to be sent on to Station X - Bletchley Park. And my hunch was right on another account as the WAAFs also listened out for conversations between Luftwaffe pilots and their controllers – just as Gwen did!
You can read more about the discovery here and in the recently published account of this secret station, written by local Eastbourne historian, Michael Ockenden, Wartime TV Pictures from Paris at Beachy Head. His other book, Canucks by the Sea was incredibly useful to me when I wrote The Chalky Sea, providing valuable details about the Canadian military presence in Eastbourne.

Here's an extract from The Chalky Sea, about Gwen's work up on Beachy Head:
The Chalky Sea is available in paperback, ebook and audio formats. Click here to find out more
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