Pam Torrens
Wartime Wren who served in the elite group ‘Freddie’s Fairies’ eavesdropping on German E-boats
CHIEF WREN PAM TORRENS, who has died aged 97, was one of “Freddie’s Fairies”, an elite group of special duties Wrens who eavesdropped on German wartime communications.
Pamela Iris Watson was born on September 20 1924 in a prosperous suburb of Southampton and educated at the Girls’ Grammar School in the city; her father was Captain CH Watson, a Trinity House pilot.
Her first memory of the war was cowering in a cellar with her sister, Thelma, as the German Blitz destroyed the houses around her and rendered her family home uninhabitable. There was no question of her reaction: coming from a long line of fishermen and sailors, she volunteered for the Women’s Royal Naval Service.
Responding to an Admiralty appeal via the BBC for German-speakers, Pam Watson, chaperoned by her mother, attended a language test in London and was accepted as a Wren (Special Duties). There were only 400 or of these Wrens, who proudly called themselves “Freddie’s Fairies” after Lieutenant-commander L A “Freddie” Marshall, who recruited and trained them.
After two weeks’ initial training and eight days at a highly secret training establishment in Southmead, Wimbledon, Pam Watson found herself recruited into the naval Y-service at Abbots Cliff in Kent, listening to enemy E-boats which were using VHF for tactical communications.
She proved so adept – she could still remember the German phonetic code nearly 80 years later, for example, “SOPHIE TONI”, meaning “Stop engines!” – that in 1943 she was sent to the Y-station at Hemsby, Norfolk.
The station, staffed by a junior WRNS officer and 12 Wrens, all in their late teens and early twenties, listened for E-boats and gave warnings of attacks on East Coast convoys.
But there was “nothing but sand dunes and a nine-mile cycle ride to Great Yarmouth for a hop with a lot of rude soldiery”, so Pam Watson, who had learnt Morse in the Girl Guides, worked hard to improve her speeds so that she could progress to recording more strategic and operational wireless-telephony.
These were the raw intercepts on which Bletchley Park depended for its codebreaking. “Of course,” she recalled, “we only knew it as Station X, which sounded quite exciting to us teenagers.”
Promoted to Chief Wren in September 1943, she was sent to the naval Y-station on the Downs above Ventnor, where the base of the direction-finding tower is now a listed monument. There the Wrens kept the naval intelligence centre at Portsmouth informed of German naval movements, including, after the enemy’s daily wireless checks, its order of battle.
She was at Ventnor, but off watch, when she was woken by a friend calling her: “It’s today, it’s today, they’re going!” – and she rushed out of her quarters to see streams of landing craft headed for Normandy.
Afterwards she was sent to another large Y-station, at Abbotscliff in Kent, where the Wrens continued their important work under the flight path of flying bombs: occasionally the Wrens took cover under the benches where they were working, and Pam Watson was once woken when the exhaust flames of a buzz bomb filled her bedroom with fiery light and exploded on the hillside behind the station. Postwar, she translated captured German documents in offices in the basement of the Admiralty before joining the forces of occupation in Hamburg. Released at the end of 1946, she studied at Glasgow University and became a teacher.
The Wrens Y-service was quickly disestablished, and not one woman received any honour for the important services which they had provided during the War.
Pam Watson and the other Freddie’s Fairies were flabbergasted when the secrets of Bletchley Park began to leak out in the 1970s: for decades longer they kept the mystery of their wartime work and the contribution they had made, both to naval tactical operations and to the strategic successes of the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, and it is only in recent years that the last few survivors of this select group of women have spoken about their achievements.
She married, in 1975, Patrick Torrens, a wartime RAF pilot, and emigrated to Malta, where she taught French and business studies for many years before returning to Plymouth to continuing teaching.
She read, walked, played golf, and drove her own car until recently, and was an active member of the University of the Third Age – but her day did not start until she had completed the Daily Telegraph crossword.