War games, teddies and tai chi
Avid knitter, history writer, Tai Chi student, and Wellington Free Ambulance supporter Audrey Harper lived in the UK in the 1940s, and was one of small group of women in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (the Wrens) brought in to design war game exercises for the Navy’s servicemen.
‘‘We were never exactly told that our work was a new concept in teaching naval strategy using scenarios and exercise. In a way we were guinea pigs,’’ the longtime Upper Hutt local said.
Harper’s job was to work on a Perspex screen, plotting the presence of make-believe enemy ships, torpedo and bomb attacks, submarines and surface craft, all overlaid with fake weather conditions and time of day.
‘‘Like a soap opera, events in an exercise came close upon each other to maintain interest and learning,’’ Harper explains.
Technical information was passed over telephones (there were no computers back then) to the men on the course: ranges and bearings, visual sightings, reports from look-outs on the bridge or elsewhere.
Harper and the team provided the information for trainees to absorb and calculate and ultimately find a way out.
When women in England during WWII turned 19 years old they either volunteered or were called up for war work.
Harper knows exactly how long she was a Wren - Two years, eight months, and 18 days.
‘‘I know that because I used it to help make up the compulsory three years of service I needed to become a grade-three teacher in New Zealand.’’
She also remembers her 21st birthday.
‘‘It was the best 21st I could have had. My birthday is August 13, and the war was declared over on August 15.’’
Once discharged nearly a year later Audrey studied at Bristol University, England.
Every year on her birthday, Harper gives Wellington Free Ambulance a dollar for each year of her life and asks her friends to make donations rather than buy presents.
She is also the woman behind the costumed paramedic teddies which are auctioned at fundraisers.