THE WAR-ROOM TYPIST

Joy Hunter, 93 Shorthand typist in the joint planning secretariat at Churchill’s War Rooms

IN JANUARY 1944 a pink form arrived inviting me for an interview at the War Cabinet. I was 18 and had no experience of London, having grown up in the Midlands. After school my parents had sent me on a six-month course at Mrs Hoster’s prestigious secretarial college, but that had been evacuated from the capital to Lincolnshire. By the time I moved to London, five months before Dday, there were no lights illuminating the city at night; even the street names had been taken down to confuse enemy spies. I didn’t know how to navigate the Underground, so I took buses, and stayed in a Church Army hostel overlooking Paddington.

At first I worked upstairs in the War Cabinet as part of a huge typing pool, but after a few days some of us were chosen to go downstairs. None of us knew why; in wartime nobody tells you anything. Downstairs I saw two Marine officers in full dress and I thought, what on earth is this? We’d been selected to join the joint planning secretariat – the underground nerve centre from where the prime minister, Winston Churchill, and his inner circle gave directions.

We saw him a lot. He always wore a boiler suit he designed himself and, unlike some of the senior officers, he always spoke to you when you met him in a corridor. It must have been horrendous for him. I cannot imagine how he got through it.

There were about 10 of us and a supervisor working in the room, and reports came in from all over the world, detailing bombings and casualty numbers, which we typed up on Imperial typewriters. The air was awful – terribly stuffy, with a dreadful musty smell. On D-day, we typed the battle orders. I didn’t know where they came from but immediately knew they were very important. When Operation Overlord actually happened it was like the cork coming out of the bottle because the tension had been so great. But then, of course, the stress started. We were getting reports of various battles along the beaches that hadn’t worked and about the drownings. My 19-year-old brotherin-law was a junior naval officer in charge of one of the landing crafts. It contained 900 men, all with heavy uniforms, rations, rifles and extra munitions. He watched many of them drown before they ever reached the shore. He only spoke about it once. He felt responsible and I think he remembered that for the rest of his life.

We were made to sign the Official Secrets Act so for many years I didn’t speak about anything I had witnessed. The minute I shut the door and left the building after the war, I never thought about anything either. I suppose when everything is top-secret you just shut your mind.

‘Churchill wore a boiler suit he designed himself and would always speak to you when you met him in a corridor’

Life after the war Left the War Cabinet: 1946 / Lives in: Guildford / Family: married in 1949, four children, eight grandchildren, 10 great-grandchildren / Career: secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury and teacher

Left Joy Hunter pictured at the War Rooms, with her scrapbook of the time, in 2016. Above During the war. She was chosen for the joint planning secretariat in early 1944