16-04-2025
Pam Harding, Y-Service Wren who transcribed German Morse and voice messages for Bletchley
Third Officer 'Pam' Harding, who has died the day after her 103rd birthday, was one of 'Freddie's Fairies', an elite group of Wrens who listened to German wireless messages and fed Bletchley Park with transcripts of German voice and Morse messages.
She was born Peggy Alexander Mackan on April 2 1922 in Bristol, where her father was a solicitor. Educated at Clifton High School before reading German and French at Bristol University, her parents thought that joining the WRNS was a waste of her education, but in January 1943 she had persuaded them otherwise and spent three weeks learning to march at the WRNS's new entry establishment at Mill Hill in London, before being sent to skivvy in naval quarters at Southend-on-Sea.
Next, she was sent to the secret Royal Navy Training Establishment at Southmead, a rambling Victorian house in Wimbledon where she met Freddie Marshall and was inducted into the Y-Service, the code name for a chain of wireless intercept ('WI' or 'Y') stations that operated worldwide. The naval Y-Service was almost entirely staffed by an elite group of some 400 Wrens who proudly identified as 'Freddie's Fairies'.
At Southmead she learnt to intercept and transcribe German tactical voice communications on VHF radio. Promoted to Petty Officer Wren, her first posting was to Withernsea on the Yorkshire coast, where a handful of Wrens and one charge hand, a Mr Mason, were based at St Leonard's (now Captain Williams), a seafront pub commandeered during the War. They slept on the first floor and kept their watches from a tiny attic room overlooking the North Sea.
Often, they heard German shore stations exchanging messages in three-letter 'Q-codes', which the Wrens worked out for themselves, and at the end of each watch everything they had heard was sent by teleprinter to Station X. Her initials in the logs, 'PAM', gave her a new nickname which stuck for the rest of her life. She never learnt where Station X was, and would never have asked: only years later did she discover that it was the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park.
In her spare time she learnt Morse from Mr Mason and then returned to Southmead to qualify as a Chief Wren (Special Duties), able to receive Morse at 25 words per minute. 'The hardest work I've ever done,' she recalled; not even in old age did she forget her skills.
She was next sent to Abbot's Cliff on the Kent coast, the largest naval Y-station in Britain. At night the Wrens took turns in a direction-finding tower remote from the main house, when the only communication with the outside world was by telephone.
Pam's job was to take bearings of any transmissions and to report these back. The women were trained to use Sten guns, but they did not carry arms on their lonely vigils. Sometimes, if another Y-station had bearings, a telephone dialogue would be followed by the sound of gunfire at sea.
For recreation she climbed down the cliffs to swim, though she dreaded the appearance of a convoy, as this would usually be followed by German shelling from long-range guns and sometimes 'overs' would fall on the beach. At other times she saw doodlebugs flying overhead towards London and once saw one shot down by an RAF fighter.
On D-Day 1944 the watch room at Abbot's Cliff filled with senior naval officers and she remembered looking across the Channel towards the Continent, where her fiancé, Geoffrey Harding, was a prisoner of war, having been captured in North Africa with the Kent Yeomanry. 'We are coming to get you,' she thought – though she had to wait until May 1945.
A few days later she saw what looked like gigantic, upside-down billiards tables being towed along the coast and later learned that these were mulberries, the components of artificial harbours which were placed on the Normandy coast.
When Abbot's Cliff closed, she was offered an appointment to the Far East or an immediate commission as a cipher officer, but she preferred to be promoted in her specialisation and was sent to work for US intelligence in Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) based at Bushy Park, next to Hampton Court.
There she helped to draw up lists of places that the Allies did not want bombed as they might be useful postwar, and she moved with SHAEF to Versailles, and then to Frankfurt am Main in the American sector of Germany, where she translated captured documents. She became a Third Officer WRNS in July 1945 when she was lent as an interpreter to the British military government in Hanover.
She was demobbed in September 1946 and married Geoffrey Harding, a chartered accountant, in December that year. They settled in Bristol, but Pam did not find regular work: 'I had fluent German and French and Morse and I could work a radio set, but there wasn't much demand for that in Bristol.'
Like many in her generation Pam Harding was silent for many years about her wartime occupation. She was scandalised when the secrets of Bletchley Park were made known in the 1970s, and it was not until the 1990s that she and other Freddie's Fairies began to meet at reunions.
Later in life she became a member of Blind Veterans UK and settled in Torquay, a few hundred yards from the wartime naval Y-station at the summit of Hyde Road overlooking Torbay.
Pam Harding is survived by a daughter.
'Pam' Harding, born April 2 1922, died April 3 2025
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