Petty Officer Pat Owtram
Just after she turned 18, Pat joined the WRNS (Women’s Royal Naval Service) in the ‘Special Duties Linguist’ branch. She joined Y Service, consisting of 400 German speaking Wrens. As a Petty Officer, she was based at listening stations along the coast and Pat and her fellow Wrens would "search the part of the radio dial where we might pick up one of the German Navy ships, write down exactly what we heard and report it to Naval Intelligence”.
Sometimes, they intercepted "four and five letter groups of jumbled letters: Enigma code", which were then sent to Bletchley Park for decoding.
A Family of Service
The secrecy of their work was paramount and extended to her family, who "knew I was in the radio business, but they would have assumed it was our ship's radio, not the enemy ship's."
Pat's sister, Jean, also served in a secretive role as Code & Cipher Officer in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), first in London, and then in Cairo and Italy to support allied agents and aid Partisan efforts against the occupying German forces.
Their father, Colonel Cary Owtram OBE, served with the 137th Field Artillery Regiment and was taken prisoner at the fall of Singapore in 1942. He endured harsh conditions as a prisoner of war in the Chungkai camp along the River Kwai in Thailand for two years. The family faced a long period of uncertainty, with letters initially being returned with the stamp: ‘missing’.
Conditions in the camp were hellish and men were forced to work on the Burma-Siam Railway. Colonel Owtram was made British Camp Commandant. In charge of 8,000 men, he proceeded to lift morale by organising concerts and church services and establishing essential infrastructure, including a hospital. Critically, he also implemented a clandestine news network powered by a concealed wireless. He kept a secret diary which was concealed in a grave.
When VJ Day finally came, Pat's diary entry read, ‘VJ Day, repeat of VE Day, had a successful Wrennery party. We went out to see the sights and dancing in Piccadilly’.
For Pat and her family, "it was splendid to get to Victory in Europe Day. But of course, what we really wanted was the day of victory in the Far East... So when VJ Day came, that was the really biggest day for our family".
Pat’s father returned home (with his retrieved diary) and she went on to have a successful career in journalism and television production, creating the long-running quiz series ‘Ask the Family’. In her late 90s and along with her sister, they wrote a memoir following the publication of their father’s diary.
Hope
"My hope for the future is that we have peace for the indefinite future. In some ways some things were rather well run during the war when there were no extra supplies or anything available. We learnt quite a lot from the situation at the time."
