Framed portrait photograph of Nanza Hughes. Overall size inc...

Hammer

£20

Framed portrait photograph of Nanza Hughes. Overall size including frame 76cm x 56cm. This is her story: "I was a wireless operator at Forest Moor Y station in North Yorkshire, listening in on the German stations and copying down their morse code messages. This all then went to Bletchley Park for decoding, although obviously we had no idea where they went at the time. We worked in pairs, what they called ‘double banked’ so that we would not miss anything. On 5th June I was on the night shift starting midnight until 7am. It was the shift that we all hated as nothing usually happened and I would normally spend my time writing letters home. Something peculiar happened around 3am, when army intelligence officers had arrived in our set room, which had never happened before. Just after 3am one of our out stations was calling up control, sending a message uncoded in plain German, which was unheard of. I realised something big was happening if the Germans were not even bothering to encrypt their own messages. As I was listening in to the message and copying it down, which was actually very difficult to do because it wasn’t coded, but in plain language and I was still trying to split them up into the usual group of five letters as we were taught to do, one of the intelligence officers tapped me on the shoulder and told me just to keep writing. After the message had finished and I had stopped writing, he tapped me on the shoulder again and said, ‘The invasion has started’."

More Information

Very good condition.