Lady Sheila Trevaskis
Auxiliary Units wireless operator BORN OCTOBER 25, 1920 – DIED DECEMBER 15, 2019, AGED 99
AS one of the Second World War’s Auxiliary Units members, Sheila Trevaskis was part of a secret defence trained to be part of the frontline resistance of a Nazi invasion of Britain.
Recruited over a Harrods high tea, she was selected as a wireless operator who would relay coded messages to Churchill’s HQ in the event of an attack.
Ironically, the only time she was witness to a real assault was seven years after the war when she survived a grenade attack.
It happened as she was waving off her husband Kennedy Trevaskis as he boarded a plane from Yemen to London and they both survived.
She was born Sheila Harrington in Griffithstown, Pontypool, South Wales. Her father Frank was a GP who served as a medical officer in the Indian Army.
Upon leaving school, she began her secretarial work at the BBC before joining the Auxiliary Territorial Army, the women’s branch, in December 1942.
It was at Harrods where she was interviewed by the then Archbishop of Canterbury’s niece, Beatrice Temple, and accepted for her post with the Special Duties Branch.
She was trained to work in a dugout environment near to Alnwick, Northumberland.
Her job was to receive messages from ground agents that she would then relay up the chain to the communications HQ at Coleshill House.
She met her husband during the war and they wed soon afterwards, going on to have three children.
Two of them, Jeremy and Jennifer, were born in remote Eritrea. The couple separated in 1976 although never divorced.
She is survived by her daughter and two sons.