I lost a friend.. it just made me more determined
Daphne attridge, 98 ATS searchlight teleplotter
Daphne signed up for the 65th Searchlight Regiment Royal Artillery.
“I joined up at 18 because I lived in a village in Norfolk, and I wanted to get out,” says Daphne, who now lives in Chelmsford, Essex.
“I wanted to go at 17 and a half, but mother wouldn’t let me, so I went at 18.”
After three weeks of training in Northampton, Daphne was selected to go to the teleplotter station with the Royal Artillery as a teleprinter operator for the 21st Army Group.
“I did a course in Melton Mowbray before I was posted to Essex Regiment, and I stayed right until D-Day,” she recalls. “I ended up at Hull where we had lots of terrible raids, but I loved the job. It was wonderful seeing the searchlights as they went up to engage the enemy.”
Daphne lost her school friend on a gun site six
VITAL JOB ATS operator guides a searchlight
months after she joined up. “I remember Dorothy lying there with just the smallest scar on her forehead where the shrapnel had entered,” she recalls. “It didn’t put me off service, it made me more determined.”
And while Daphne had been engaged before joining the service, she did not marry until she was in her 30s.
“I had been engaged to a man in the air force at 17 and a half,” she says. “We thought we were more mature in those days. But I didn’t marry him. I met my husband Sidney Thomas through the job I later had with the GPO in Ipswich where I worked in the telegraph office. “I met him in Chelmsford, and made my home here. I finished working at 64 and carried on with voluntary work until I was 95.”
SERVICE Daphne