Some of the latest 'Our secret war' oral history interviews have been with women who, after joining the ATS or WAAF, were recruited into Y Service [wireless interception]. Following special Morse code training they were based at secret listening stations around the UK to monitor German radio transmissions which had been encoded using Enigma machines. Once intercepted the enemy's military messages, still in code, were sent to Bletchley Park - also known as Station X -  to be decrypted by its talented, ingenious and, in many cases, eccentric code-breakers.

The secret military intelligence gathered in this way was code-named 'Ultra' and Winston Churchill called those involved his "geese that laid the golden eggs but never cackled" - in fact it's reported that in the early days of the war it was a FANY who was entrusted to personally deliver the decoded messages to him.

It was imperative that the Germans never realised the Allies had broken Enigma, and so very few people outside Bletchley Park knew that it was in fact the Government Code & Cypher School [GC&CS]. Everything was on a 'need to know' basis and the people stationed there knew little if anything at all of the other secret departments working right alongside them, let alone about those at the Y Service listening stations. They in turn had no idea of the significance of the messages they monitored nor where they were being sent, and everything connected with Enigma and Ultra remained a complete secret until long after the war when certain official records were eventually de-classified in the 1970s.

The work at Bletchley Park was later depicted dramatically in the Robert Harris novel 'Enigma' and its film adaption, but by comparison very little is known even now by the general public about the women and men of Y Service even though without them the BP decoders would have had nothing to work on.

The vigilance of the many hundreds of Y Service women and men at the listening stations around Britain and overseas ensured that it was possible to intercept the enemy's coded messages for decoding at Bletchley Park. In short, without the Y Service Bletchley would not have had the coded Enigma messages to decipher, and the work of these combined teams of many thousands of secret and silent heroes is now widely acknowledged as having shortened WW2 by at least two years.

Wide-eyed.tv’s recent oral history recording sessions with Y Service and Bletchley Park veterans have not only proved highly enlightening but also became something of an “ULTRA-reunited” ....

Although they didn't know each other at the time Jean Cleminson and Doreen Page [below] were both at Bletchley Park during WW2. Purely by coincidence they're now firm friends, yet only realised the wartime BP connection when they first met a few years ago! Jean [on right and in centre portrait below] was a WAAF living at 'the Park', but as a Y Service interceptor she worked at a nearby listening station in Dunstable. Doreen was a civilian, and as a fluent German speaker was recruited from university to work in Bletchley's 'Hut 8' handling enemy naval communications.

Wide-eyed.tv has also been talking to the BP decoders. At the start of WW2 Mavis Lever was a German linguist and Keith Batey a Cambridge mathematician. These talents led them to being separately recruited for top secret MI6 work at Bletchley where they met and married while working together as two of its code-breakers.

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Following in his father's footsteps, Geoffrey Pidgeon was recruited at only 17 into the communications section of the Secret Intelligence Service [aka MI6] to help develop and construct special wireless sets for covert intelligence work.

Geoffrey [seen here with cameraman Alan Benns] has recently researched 'the bigger picture' in great detail and his recently published book The Secret Wireless War about MI6's wartime communications also describes the crucial linkage between Y Service, Bletchley Park, and the Secret Intelligence Service.

Geoffrey’s interview also provided a fascinating insight into how the Ultra intelligence gleaned from Bletchley's decoding of Y Service intercepts was disseminated by SIS to such great effect while remaining secret from Britain's enemies until long after WW2 was over.

Pamela Elliott and Marjorie Lilley joined Y Service from the ATS, and at Bletchley Park's 2007 reunion these former 'secret listeners' needed little persuasion to pose in front of wartime wireless receivers in the BP museum!

[Mrs Elliott is on the right and also in the B&W portrait below]

Mavis Batey gave one of the most fascinating and compelling oral history interviews of this entire project - no wonder that she was a consultant for the feature film Enigma, and gave her personal memories and insights to its stars Kate Winslet and Dougray Scott. [The latter is shown with Mavis in the photo on the right above, taken at the film’s premier.]

Joan Nicholls [left] was recruited into the Y Service via the ATS and worked at its secret listening station at Beaumanor [right] which was depicted in the Enigma film. In fact she’s the author of "England Needs You: The Story of Beaumanor Y Station in World War 2". Her  interview provided a very informative account of how she and thousands more wireless interceptors served at home and abroad as the first and crucial link in the intelligence gathering chain known as ‘Ultra’ - quite simply a case of no Y Service, NO Ultra!