Serving with a sense of purpose
Colin Bradley reads one Wren's account of a wartime experience.
SPLENDIDLY over-endowed with a well established tophamper and rough bluff cheeks, the senior officer looked every inch like a ship's figurehead as she leaned forward from her desk and greeted Christian Lamb with the words: "How nice to have to welcome a breath of fresh air."
For the young volunteer, who had just set foot in the foc's'le of her first Wren establishment, the comment caught her by surprise. She wasn't sure whether the remark referred to her father's Admiral status - or her slightly rolling gait.
“I had been to a rather good lunch party and for a frozen moment I wondered if she was going to offer me a pink gin," recalls Christian, who had travelled from France on the last ferry across the Channel just as war was being declared in 1939. In this frame of mind, she had journeyed up to Scotland to stay at her grandmother's home near Fort William and study for the Latin exam necessary for entrance to Oxford.
But by the time she sat the exam it was obvious that going to University was not an option until the war was won. She felt she had to "do her bit" for the country and decided on the Women's Royal Naval Service, whose new director Vera Laughton Matthews had employed a top designer to create a uniform featuring a tricorn hat. “I had always been extremely hat-minded,” says Christian.
But her hopes of wearing one immediately were dashed – they were for officers only and she had to start at the bottom of the ladder. It was to be the first of many surprises, all of which she describes with a mixture of humour and sensitivity in this evocative tribute to Britain's wartime Wrens. With a foreword by Countess Mountbatten of Burma, who had a similar career in the WRNS, the book provides a fascinating glimpse at how women from all social backgrounds were suddenly plunged into a new life together and performed a wide variety of tasks, ranging from routine and mundane to highly responsible and dangerous.
But whether they worked at a desk, in a canteen. drove boats, cars and motorcycles, watched for mines from pill-boxes, maintained torpedoes and depth charges, plotted radar or decoded secret signals, all shared a single sense of purpose. Christian's own story takes her from London and the horrors of the Blitz to the Operation Room at Mount Wise, Plymouth, where she helped plot the desperate twists and turn, of the Battle of the Atlantic and also watched the unfolding of the famous 1942 St Nazaire raid, which began from Falmouth. "It was like living through a sensational action film, but it was real," she says of the daring attack on the French port.
To escape the stresses of war, there were parties in Plymouth - many in ships, but also in submarines where space was at a premium, though the tiny wardrooms were "very cosy". "Whenever possible on Saturday nights, we would be invited for drinks on board, before going on to Genonis - an Italian restaurant near Drake Circus, or to the Moorland Links Hotel out near Yelverton where we danced the night away," recalls the author, who lives near Par in Cornwall. And there were occasional courses laid on for Wrens. On one to Bath, she missed the train back to Plymouth. A Polish officer, with whom she had been at a party the night before, saved her. He offered to take her back in his "old crate" two-seater Miles Magister training plane. "The episode may sound quite ordinary now, but then it was quite the most daring adventure of my life," remembers Christian. "I had to sit on my parachute at the back and we set off in fine style looking out for, and probably overtaking, the train. My pilot tried to give me some good frights en route and make the trip extra thrilling by dive bombing cows or anything else that took his fancy. I had been hoping that he might loop the loop for an extra show-off but perhaps it was as well he didn't or I might have fallen out!"
Christian's experiences also included tracking her fiance's destroyer as he battled with the deadly German U-boat wolf packs. And later she worked on secret maps for the planned invasion of Europe while based at Whitehall's Richmond Terrace.
But her book is much more than just one Wren's part in the war, for her account is embellished with stories from fellow Wrens and naval officers. "It is perhaps not generally known that several hundred Wrens were killed due to enemy action during the war," writes Christian. Wren Freda Bonner was nearly one of these casualties and she tells of a dramatic incident in March 1943 when she was sailing from Durban, South Africa, in the Empress of Canada, a liner turned trooper, which had 1,800 troops, including 400 Italian PoWs, on board. Twice torpedoed by the Italian submarine Leonardo da Vinci, it sank south of Las Palmas, with the loss of 392 lives-Freda was one of six Wrens to survive after spending four days adrift in a lifeboa.