During the Second World War Jane Eldridge was a Cypher Officer, travelling with Winston Churchill to Canada.
I couldn’t think why I was doing all this. Nobody knew anything about it. And when I got into the first coach – meaning you’re the lower class – there were several others and none of us knew what we were doing.
On board with Churchill
We were given sleepers and when we woke up in the morning we were in the Firth of Clyde. There was the Queen Mary, out in the mouth of the firth, so we went out into a little hull somewhere in the water line and then, when we got on board, there were notices in Dutch all along the corridors, which we thought were extraordinary.
I went straight on watch, and I was as sick as a dog, but that didn’t make any difference – you went on watch and you were given a ship’s biscuit, which was like a dog’s biscuit. By the time you’d chewed this and tried to do your work, you had forgotten you were sick in the first place.
It turned out that we were on board with Prime Minister Churchill and his Chief of Staff going over to a conference in Quebec.
Adventure in Canada
Freedom when we were off duty was the ballroom, which had been completely stripped of absolutely everything. We all sat on the floor – there was no furniture.
We finally got off at Halifax and there was a train waiting for us, where we had the most wonderful dinner because they weren’t suffering from rationing. We went on a sleeper train to Quebec, to Le Château Frontenac, an enormous Canadian hotel that is very beautiful on the St Lawrence river. And then President Roosevelt arrived and they had the Chief of Staff conference, for which we ciphered up all the messages going out and deciphered all the messages coming in between Chiefs of Staff and the rest of the world.
We had a wonderful time, because when we were off duty we were expected to be social, and so we were. Another girl and I were given the most beautiful bedroom in a turret, and we lay in bed and a butler came in every morning with a trolley bearing halves of grapefruit with a cherry in the middle – that was the height of luxury at that time.
Egypt and Malta
A few months later I had another signal saying this time I had to report to Paddington station – no request for tropical kit, but a very small suitcase. I reported to the station and the same girls were there again, so we wondered what was going to happen this time.
Going down from Paddington in those days, there were no names on stations anywhere – it was all blotted out, so we didn’t really know where we were going, but we ended up in Plymouth in the middle of the night. Because of the blackout we had to find our way with tiny little torches to the launch, which took us out to the battle cruiser HMS Renown.
Once again, it was the Chiefs of Staff and Churchill on board, and we set off for the Egyptian port of Alexandria, stopping off in Malta en route, where there was an announcement that the Captain was having a bathing party at 1500 hours, launch would leave at 1430 and everybody off duty was expected to attend.
Of course we didn’t have bathing costumes, as we didn’t know anything about it, so we borrowed midshipmen’s swimming trunks and used jumpers for our top halves. The water was absolutely gorgeous, but once you came out of the water the jumpers were skin tight – and this was before it was fashionable to do that.
After Malta our route took us all along North Africa, where all of us women had to stay down below deck because if anybody had sighted a woman on a battleship, they would have thought it unusual and guessed that something was going on.
Once we arrived in Alexandria, we went by train to Cairo and worked as cyphers in the Middle East headquarters for the duration of the conference there.
