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Telegraph
08-05-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Veteran code-breaker ‘haunted by lives lost' through her work
A veteran code-breaker has told how she is still 'haunted by the lives lost' because of her work. Dorothy Walsh, 98, spent the year before VE Day monitoring the Bombe machines used to decipher German Enigma-coded secret messages at Stanmore, an outstation of Bletchley Park. She described work on Enigma as a 'constant pressure', and upon the German surrender on May 8 1945, she celebrated in front of Buckingham Palace and did the conga with American soldiers. Her cousin later messaged her from Germany to say that her joyful antics had been published in a newspaper – but she has never found out which one. 'I was having a great time,' she said. 'I had never seen anything like it. I was standing in front of the Queen Victoria statue when the Royal family came out onto the balcony.' Mrs Walsh said that as an 18-year-old during the war she would have happily fired on the enemy and even parachuted into France. But as the decades passed, she eventually became haunted by her wartime work. She said: 'You feel these things emotionally when you're much older. 'I often think about the German lives that were lost because of us. I couldn't go to Germany.' 'Noisy, hot and intense' During the war, Mrs Walsh worked with the Women's Royal Naval Service, undergoing eight-hour shifts in silence to break the Enigma codes before they changed every 24 hours. She said: 'It was noisy, hot, and intense – no windows. You wouldn't be allowed to work in those conditions today. The Bombes worked 24 hours a day and never stopped. I spent my 18th birthday working there.' Mrs Walsh, who lives in Waterlooville, Hampshire, said Alan Turing would occasionally visit to check that the machines were functioning properly. 'I just knew him as a nice, quiet person with a slight speech impediment – I think his brain was quicker than his speech. He made us giggle. We knew that he was responsible for the Bombe.' Mrs Walsh signed the Official Secrets Act and was not allowed to talk to her colleagues about what they did outside the building. She added: 'We thought we would never be able to speak about it. If people asked what I was doing, I'd say I was a confidential writer.' Mrs Walsh was frequently reminded of how vital their input was and sometimes informed of the breakthroughs which occurred as a result. Her team had been previously told that they had been pivotal in sinking the prized Nazi battleship Bismarck three years before. She said: 'No one knew how the Bismarck had been sunk, but we knew it was because of our work, the intelligence that meant they knew where to find her.' Glitches with the Bombes were fixed by RAF technicians, who naturally weren't allowed to know what the machines they were mending were used for. Mrs Walsh kept her classified war work a secret from her family until they were watching a television programme about Bletchley Park together, and only recently told her story to the Royal Navy and Royal Marines Charity. She recalled knowing the end of the war was imminent because the Enigma messages requiring decoding had dried up, but being unable to tell her childhood friend, Ronald Walsh, when they met up a week before VE Day. When it was later declared she helped to demolish the machines. Mrs Walsh and Ronald eventually married, moved to Portsmouth and raised sons, Morris and Colin, while she worked as a pharmaceutical dispenser for two doctors. On Thursday, Mrs Walsh visited shore establishment HMS Collingwood, in Fareham, to mark the VE Day anniversary with the Royal Navy.
The Guardian
08-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
The witnesses: second world war survivors from across Europe share their stories
E ighty years ago today, on 8 May 1945, the second world war in Europe came to an end with the unconditional surrender of Germany's armed forces. The number of people who remember the war – and how it finished – decreases every year, even as European security feels ever more precarious. Here, seven people, aged between 85 and 100, from Estonia, Poland, Britain, Germany and Romania, talk to the Guardian about their memories. Dorothea Barron waves as she sits in a Spitfire at Biggin Hill airport in Kent. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP Dorothea Barron, 100, joined the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS) aged 18 in 1943. The retired art teacher, a great-grandmother, still teaches yoga and lives in Hertfordshire in the UK. 'I grew up in Hampton right on the Thames. And, of course, the Thames was like a beacon day and night. You can't disguise the glint of moonlight or any light on water. So we were being bombed. 'At night, we'd all pile down into the shelter which we had helped to dig out in our garden, and then cover over with corrugated iron. The earth you had dug out you piled on top to disguise it so it didn't glint in the moonlight. 'I joined the WRNS when I was 18. I was a visual signaller, which meant that I had to go out in all weathers to signal to ships coming into harbour. They also flew flags at the mast to say 'we need water' or 'we have a casualty on board' – things like that. 'We also took part in training the boat crews who took the troops off the big liners and transported them to the waters off Normandy for the D-day landings. 'When Germany surrendered, I was based in the Isle of Wight. There was just sheer delight. We all went completely mad. We were broadcasting over loud hailers to all the ships. We were talking to each other in morse code and semaphore. 'I was in a signal tower somewhere. Out on the streets there was cheering and singing and dancing and everything. The ships dressed in celebration. It was wonderful. It was such a relief. Relief that we'd got rid of nazism. 'I don't think [people] can conceive at all about the relief. At last you could turn a light on and not have to pull the curtains. Yes, the freedom, the idea of freedom again. 'But there was also the remembrances, the friends who you'd lost, kids you'd grown up with who had been shot down, out of the sky or on the land. 'Nobody wins a war. Nobody. Everybody loses. And as soon as people begin to realise this, perhaps women's common sense will prevail. The women have to pick up the pieces after a war, have to reconstruct families and homes.' 'We've not lived so dangerously since then as we do now' Irmgard Müller. Photograph: Steffen Roth Irmgard Müller, 96, from Northeim in Lower Saxony , Germany, was working as an administrator for the local mayor in May 1945. 'Northeim was a Nazi stronghold so was heavily defended. We got through the war quite well, until the last days when our railway station was bombed, our sugar factory destroyed, several houses were reduced to smithereens and 37 people died. In the evenings the British air force dropped their remaining bombs on us when they were returning from Berlin. They were so low-flying, I swear I could see into the faces of the pilots. 'One of those to die was my school friend who I'd enjoyed playing with in the grounds of the sugar factory. She, her four siblings and her parents were killed. 'All in all, though, we were quite lucky. When Kassel was bombed, which is 60km away, we could see the inferno in Northeim. Then came the final days and we knew the Russians were coming from the east and were just 20km away from us, and the Americans were coming from the west. And we were terribly afraid that the Russians would get there first. A picture of Irmgard Müller in her youth. Photograph: Steffen Roth 'Half of the population of Northeim escaped into the woods in fear. My mother and I took a handcart, in which we had put my grandmother because she couldn't walk, and slept there for three nights along with another four families we knew. And we waited, asking: 'Will it be the Russians or the Americans?' 'After three days I made my way to the town hall where I worked to see what was going on. But the mayor, who was a Nazi bigwig, and all the other Nazis, had fled. 'The Americans arrived first, then the British. Bartering for food began as the ration supplies were insufficient. Money had no value, but items like carpets or perfume were exchanged for, say, five potatoes. I had been very attached to a doll – it connected me to my childhood, which had been cut short by the war – and was upset when we had to exchange it for food. All the wooden fences were destroyed for firewood. 'My father had fallen in Russia in '44. I also lost an uncle in the war. I never got to see one of my grandmothers, because during the 12 years of Nazi dictatorship we weren't allowed to take the train to Breslau [now Wrocław in Poland] where she lived, and she died during the war. 'Nowadays I'm an avid consumer of news. And I don't understand it when I see how much war there is going on now. War is the worst thing there is. It feels like we've not lived so dangerously since then as we do now. Even the cold war wasn't a patch on what's happening now, whether in Ukraine or the Middle East. It's like we didn't learn anything.' 'I remember the rationing – lots of porridge, with black syrup, and pilchards' Nick Treadwell. Photograph: Fabian Weiss/The Guardian Nick Treadwell, 87, an art gallerist in Vienna, lived in Hove during the war, alongside his mother, sister and aunt. 'During the war I was surrounded by women. My aunt Kate came to live with me, my mother and sister. She'd pay me and my sister a ha'penny a toe to scrape her nail vanish off, which we loved. There was a great sense of entertainment and nice togetherness. 'During the air raids I remember my mother and I used to get into the cupboard under the stairs in our basement flat in Cromwell Road in Hove. My father had made the clever decision when war came to move us out of the city so we'd be safer. We'd take candles with us and play I Spy With My Little Eye, or sometimes sing Ten Green Bottles. My mum was very good at making the best out of difficult circumstances. 'I remember the sound of the buzz bombs, which rarely dropped in the Hove and Brighton area, unless it was a mistake, and I remember the rationing – lots of porridge, with black syrup, and pilchards; the barbed wire on the beach, which stopped us going there, and the American and Canadian soldiers who my mother and her sister used to entertain. They'd come and see us and bring me Hershey bars, and say to my mother: 'Has the kid been good today, Eileen?' I still remember the taste. 'We kids would hang around where they were staying, and ask them: 'Have you got any gum, chum?' A picture of Nick Treadwell and his sister in the 1940s. Photograph: Fabian Weiss/The Guardian 'I was seven years old when my soldier father, who had been the commander of a tank landing craft taking people over to the D-day landings, came home. He was horrified when I told him I wanted to make dresses like my mother, and a few days after my eighth birthday, he sent me to boarding school in Bristol, to learn to box, play rugby and to 'be a man', to learn to take a few knocks. So the end of the war for me was rather an abrupt end to the lovely life I'd known. After that, between '45 and '54, I only really saw my parents once a year. 'All I'd known was the war. That was more or less my entire life until then. When it ended that's when my new life began, away from the warmth of my home. At least I learnt to box well, and still do so to this day.' 'I lit a candle and cried like a river' Józef Kwiatkowski. Photograph: The Private Archive of Józef Kwiatkowski 2Lt Józef Kwiatkowski, 98, born in Łuck in Volhynia , then part of Poland, now in Ukraine, was part of the First Polish Army , 180,000 of whose members, many former underground fighters, fought alongside the Red Army and allied forces in April and May 1945 to liberate Poland from fascism . 'I remember the stench of death, the destruction, the dirt, the lice, the ulcers, the hate and the mistrust of those days. War is a terrible thing. 'On 3 March 1945, I was walking with my comrade Tadeusz 'Tadek' Sokół and we were tasked with fixing telephone cables. When we reached the spot where a cable had been damaged, a German soldier pounced out. Another was hiding behind a tree, but I couldn't shoot at him because he was behind Tadek. Then, the first German more or less cut Tadek in half with the burst of fire from his rifle, whereupon I killed him, and took the other prisoner. 'For decades, I'd wanted to find Tadek's grave, but was never able to locate it. I had never forgotten this jolly chap from Lvov [now Lviv in Ukraine], who had made us laugh with his Yiddish songs and hadn't had the chance to live a full life like I have. I named my own son after him. Józef Kwiatkowski (left) with two of his comrades during the war. Photograph: The Private Archive of Józef Kwiatkowski 'Then, just before the pandemic, all the Polish war graves information was digitalised. My carer, Łukasz, found in eight minutes what I'd spent 80 years searching for. We went to visit his grave on the 80th anniversary in Drawsko, north-western Poland. I lit a candle and cried like a river. I wouldn't say I quite feel closure though. I still ask myself: might I have managed to save him? 'When the war ended, I was in the town of Sandau on the River Elbe, where we met American forces and celebrated together. I remember the shock of the profound silence – no explosions, no whistling bullets, no noise, just quiet. 'The current war in Ukraine fills me with anxiety. It's a failure of humanity that we have not managed to stop the Russian aggressor and says to me that we learned few lessons from the second world war.' 'Shrapnel from the grenades was flying over our hedge' Aasa Sarnik. Photograph: Hendrik Osula/The Guardian Aasa Sarnik, 85, from the Estonian village of Pihlaspea , was five in 1945. Soviet troops had invaded the Baltic countries – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – in 1940, but were pushed out by the Nazis a year later. The Red Army retook the countries in 1944 and occupied them until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. 'In September 1944, we had packed all our things, ready to flee to Sweden [as the Soviet army was coming]. But at the last moment, my parents decided that we would stay. 'I remember the big battles that took place here on the sea. There were German ships everywhere and the Russian aeroplanes flew over our house and started shooting at them. My father called me to come out and see how a Russian aeroplane, which had been hit by ammunition from a ship, was falling into the sea. Shrapnel from the grenades was flying over our hedge. When the next plane started its descent, we all ran into the cellar. 'While others in Europe might have been celebrating, May 1945 here was a time of fear, which I remember well. No one was cheering. We were just scared. 'Soon after their arrival, the Russian army started to control the seashore near our house – the sand on the beach was flattened every night so that they could detect any footprints. Sometimes they would even come to the houses at night to check and measure our footprints. 'All the boats were confiscated and access to the sea was barred. Even children's rubber dinghies were forbidden. 'I remember how in 1945 German PoWs were held captive by the Red Army in our village, behind a thick barbed wire fence. My mum sewed me an apron and baked some bread. I went to bring some bread to them, even though I was quite scared, but I made it back safely. 'I'm afraid, of course, nowadays, especially because I'm constantly following these world events. The sense of foreboding similar to what we felt back then is here again. 'Of course, the big plus nowadays … is that we're a part of Nato together with Finland and Sweden. But I tell you I simply don't want to experience another war. One is enough, thank you very much.' 'Around a third of my 31 classmates were killed' Hans Müncheberg. Photograph: Gordon Welters Hans Müncheberg, 95, an author and TV scriptwriter, was sent to a militarised boarding school in Potsdam aged 10 . At 15, he was conscripted into the Waffen-SS, tasked with helping to defend it during the Battle of Berlin in 1945. 'In April 1945 our school was destroyed during the bombing of Potsdam, and I and my classmates were told to put on our uniforms, take our weapons and ride our bikes from Potsdam to Spandau, where there was another military school. Instead of being taken from there to safety in Schleswig-Holstein, where the British were heading, we were put under the command of the Waffen-SS and headed right into the fray believing wholeheartedly that we were making a really important contribution to the fight to defend the honour of Hitler and Nazi Germany. The motto of the school had been: 'Praise be, what makes us strong.' We understood our purpose. 'We headed towards the centre of Berlin, constantly dodging bullets, grenades and tanks. On 2 May, I was caught up in street fighting in Staaken, a suburb of Spandau, and was fired on by a Soviet T-34 tank and left unconscious, before being saved by two women who found the bandages which were incorporated into the buttons of the SS-uniform, and were able to stop the flow of blood and save my life. I was briefly captured by the Red Army, until a woman pointed out to them I was just a 'ditya' [child] and they released me. Hans Müncheberg's military identity card. Photograph: Gordon Welters 'Around a third of my 31 classmates were killed in the battle … I think I'm now the only survivor. One of my friends, Bertram Freitag, had his face shot off, right next to me. I remember shouting: 'He should not have been killed!' I still have a leather pouch stained with my own blood when I got wounded, and my so-called Wehrpass [military identity card], which reminds me how my childhood abruptly ended at the age of 10 when I was taught how to use a Karabiner 98K rifle at school. 'When I got home to Templin [a town around 30 miles north-east of Berlin] after the unconditional surrender of Berlin, our family home had been destroyed. I found my mother at my grandmother's house. At first she didn't recognise me, then she greeted me with amazement. They made me rest for a long time, I was a nervous wreck. I basked in the stillness.' 'There were no celebrations on the streets of Bucharest' Victor Pitigoi. Photograph: Ioana Moldovan/The Guardian Victor Pitigoi was 18 and studying to be a mechanical engineer in Bucharest when the second world war ended . His family had been forced to leave their home in Chișinău , Moldova, when war broke out. Aged 98, he still works as a journalist, filing regular columns on Romanian politics. 'The war didn't affect us much until 1944, when Anglo-US bombers started attacking Romania. We evacuated Bucharest on 4 April 1944, ahead of a huge bombing raid the following day. 'My family took refuge in the mountain valley resort of Vălenii de Munte in southern Romania. School was stopped but life was OK, as we had access to a big orchard and the people who had taken us in were kind. 'The Soviet Union took over Romania in August '44 … I have never been so miserable as I was during this period between 1944 and 1948, 1946 being the most sinister time of all due to famine. They behaved savagely, firstly taking our food, and helped by Romanian communists who wanted to be in the first row when the time came. Old photos of Victor Pitigoi's parents, Elisabeta and Gheorghe. Photograph: Ioana Moldovan/the Guardian 'Refugees who were starving arrived in the capital in droves, and I remember on my way to school crossing the marketplace at Gara de Nord railway station and seeing the bodies. Every morning people from the morgue would send vans and kick the bodies. If they moved they were alive, if not they were carted away. 'People were sick of the war, revolted, angry because of the agreement Stalin made with Churchill, which gave the Soviet Union huge influence in Romania and paved the way for decades of dictatorship, of homegrown Romanian communism under Ceaușescu, when we lived in a constant state of fear. 'There were no celebrations on the streets of Bucharest when the war was over. There was nothing really to celebrate. The fact that Hitler had killed himself was a sidebar. We had to deal with the presence of the Soviets. I took comfort, and still do, in the fact that our 23-year-old king, Michael, had stood up to the Germans and led an insurrection against them, while all the other leaders ran away. He was someone we could be proud of. We hoped he'd do the same to the Russians, but it didn't happen.'
Yahoo
03-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Former Wren, 99, remembers VE Day celebrations 80 years on
A great-grandmother who served as a Wren during the Second World War has described how celebrations for VE Day were happy occasions but limited by ongoing rations. Mabel Kidney, from Portsmouth, Hampshire, was only 13 when the war started, and after she joined the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS) at the age of 17, she was based at HMS Daedalus in nearby Lee-on-the-Solent. The 99-year-old said: 'I joined the Wrens to see the world and I ended up over there.' Ms Kidney, who lives at the Admiral Jellicoe House care home run by The Royal Naval Benevolent Trust (RNBT), described how she was in the barracks when the end of the war was announced but she said there were no major celebrations because they were still in a military environment. She said: 'I'm sure I was on duty on the day, I was in the barracks but it was quiet because there was nobody about much and it was just an ordinary day to me. 'There were hooters going off and stuff but you were in a military area so you weren't able to have a knees-up. We weren't expecting it really but it was good news.' She added: 'I was only with a couple of people on duty, we said it was good news and you could hear noises and that in the distance but there wasn't a lot when I was in the barracks, I think the civilians had a better time really.' Ms Kidney said that at around the time of the end of the war, she went on compassionate leave to look after her elderly mother while her father was away at sea. She said that her family managed to celebrate when they were back together. She said: 'We did have a little one in the road because I was home then, looking after Mum. 'It wasn't a party, you had that later on because there was no food, we had it with what we had but it wasn't 'party party', I don't know where I was when all that was happening.' Ms Kidney said that her mother had spoken of her relief when the war was declared over. She said: 'She used to say 'I never thought I would live through another one' because my mum was old and when the war started I remember Mr Chamberlain saying we are now at war with Germany, I can remember my mum, she went over to her neighbour and they both cried together and I said 'They're making a fuss', we thought it was a bit of excitement, really.' She said that her mother said at the end of the war: 'I thought I'd never see another one and I never thought I'd live to see my family through it.' She added: 'Everybody was very kind and friendly, helped each other all we could with everything. We still had rations for three years after the war, it was a long time, we hardly had anything. 'We only had the local boiled sweet manufacturer, as for fruit, you never got any, you couldn't get a banana, the only way you got a banana was if you were pregnant for nutrition value.' Looking into the future as the world marks the 80th anniversary of VE Day, Ms Kidney said that she was unsure that all the lessons from the war had been learnt. She said: 'It's no good saying it won't come again because all the things are different nowadays, but I still don't think we get it.' Debbie Dollner, RNBT chief executive, said: 'The sacrifice Second World War veterans made to help secure the freedom we enjoy today is almost unimaginable. 'We're incredibly privileged to have Mabel as our resident and are in awe of the stories she shares. 'Although they and others who experienced it will never forget the tragedies and devastation of war, we hope that by holding our garden party, we're helping to recognise and celebrate the vital contribution they made.'
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
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 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
VE Day is ‘last big chance to thank Second World War heroes'
Amongst the polite mingling, finger sandwiches and Union flag-themed slices of cake was the serious feeling that this would be one of the last gatherings of Second World War veterans to ever take place. Six decorated attendees, aged 96 to 100 years old, convened at London's glamorous Ritz hotel on Friday, marking almost 80 years since the famous VE Day outing of Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret in the same hotel. The tea party, organised by the Royal British Legion (RBL), was the official launch of the charity's commemorations to mark the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day. It brought together Bletchley Park Enigma machine operator Ruth Bourne, 98, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) transmitter hut attendant Joyce Wilding, 100, Private Joe Mines, 100, codebreaker Bernard Morgan, 100, RAF soldier Gilbert Clarke, 99, and former child evacuee Doreen Mills, 96. The high tea was billed as 'one of the last opportunities to come together and say thank you' to those who served the country from 1939 to 1945, ahead of the RBL's formal VE Day celebrations on May 8. 'This is one of the last major opportunities for the whole nation to pay tribute, to say thank you, to those that served, and to pay tribute to their courage and fortitude,' Mark Atkinson, director general of the RBL, told The Telegraph ahead of the poignant anniversary. 'There's not so many of us that are with it [any more] in a way,' Ms Wilding, who enlisted as a FANY aged 18 in Surrey, said over bites of The Ritz's Victoria sponge cake. The centenarian, whose role as a transmitter hut attendant involved tuning powerful radios to receive messages from agents in occupied Europe, added that they formed a 'wonderful camaraderie' at the time. 'I must say it was a wonderful time of my life, [even] with all the tragedies and the terrible things that went on, but VE Day was just joyous, it was unbelievable,' she said. 'We danced the hokey cokey all the way down Piccadilly and ended up in front of the Palace.' Ms Wilding was one of two veterans at the high tea event – and among an estimated 100,000 people in 1945 – who decided to celebrate the historic moment outside Buckingham Palace. 'There was an electric feeling going through the crowd,' said Ms Bourne, who was a Bombe machine operator and checker at Bletchley Park during the war. She was awarded the Legion d'honneur in recognition of her service in 2018. Ms Bourne, who was only 17 when she joined the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS) in 1944, added: 'In the end, we all broke out. We started shouting: 'We want the King, we want the King!' 'And believe it or not, they came out, the King and the Queen, Princess Elizabeth in her khaki uniform and Princess Margaret. Of course, we went wild. 'People were climbing up lamp posts, there wasn't an empty lamp post to be seen. We had a scarf, hat, whatever we had, we waved. I think that was the most exciting moment of my WRNS career, seeing the Royal family.' Similarly to Ms Wilding, she spent the evening dancing down Piccadilly Circus, while a few miles down the road the two princesses were famously given permission by their father, King George VI, to go incognito among the revellers and to celebrate at the Ritz. 'The story is they did a dance through the Ritz Hotel,' Ms Wilding said of the now infamous tale, which has been immortalised in the 2015 film A Royal Night Out and in Netflix's popular dramatised series about the Royal family, The Crown. Ms Bourne said 'no one knew it at the time,' and that the crowds outside the Palace were too busy 'doing the conga'. She said: 'That's the old fashioned dance we were doing, complete strangers, holding on to one another. It was like we were all one great big family.' As part of their national programme of celebrations to mark VE Day, the RBL is launching a range of downloadable resources available to all schools across the UK to help teachers plan related activities in classrooms. At Friday's tea, three schoolchildren were invited to meet the veterans to ask them about their experience of the war and were able to observe Mr Morgan's original telex, which he received two days before VE Day to tell him the Germans are surrendering, and which he has since refused to give to any museums. Mr Atkinson explained: 'You want to make sure that children are learning and talking about the Second World War… it's very important. 'It was great to have children here today to meet directly with people who were there 80 years ago, to hear their stories. That's a core part of what the legion has a responsibility for, it's making sure that the service and sacrifice is never forgotten.' After speaking with the children, Ms Wilding remarked: 'I think it's lovely to know that they know about it, because so often I find that the younger ones are not really very knowledgeable, because they've never lived through an air raid or anything like it.' 'One didn't realise how near, you know, with Hitler, we were,' she added. 'We could have been in trouble really.'
