LIFE AS A RADAR GIRL
“Work hard, play hard” seems to have been the mantra for many of the personnel at Bawdsey during the war, with many radar operators initiating bonds of friendship that lasted a lifetime.
“They were undertaking very tedious, detailed, intense and important work for eight hours at a time, and it must have been very tough,” says Bee Springwood, recalling her mother’s time at the radar station. “But a group of them really clicked, and they kept each other going.”
For Bee’s mother, Peggy Butler, there were regular reunions, letters and cards to keep in touch with the other men and women who worked at Bawdsey, and Peggy also kept a journal during her war years and had this published to distribute to friends and family.
“It starts from when she signs up in 1942,” says Bee’s sister, Erica Read. “It documents her whole journey through various postings to her specialist training in radar.
“She talks about places she stayed, the long train journeys, the food, the wonderful billet in the tower at Bawdsey, and the extraordinary social life that they all built around the stations when they weren’t on duty.
“It’s full of photographs and images of her copperplate handwriting, as well as the text. There are fragments from theatre programmes, newspaper cuttings and postcards from the different places where she went on leave.”
Peggy Butler volunteered for the WAAF in May 1942 after having worked in advertising for a year. She continued in the Force for the next four years, stationed throughout England and Scotland, and it was here that she met her husband and father to Erica and Bee. “Bawdsey was such an important place to my mother,” says Erica. “It was a lifelong education, really, in all that she learned technically, the friendships she made – and her love of East Anglia stemmed from that time, too. She always thought that she would come to live there, though she never did.”
After the war, Peggy lived in Chichester, West Sussex, where she was an active member of local theatre groups – an interest which was fuelled during her time at Bawdsey. While there she had helped found the entertainments committee at the station, which proved very popular.
The journal doesn’t detail any of the technical or operational aspects of her work in radar, says Erica, because they weren’t allowed to reveal this sort of information, but there are some hints of what she did.
“There is the sense of life and death, in what she has written, but you also have all the typical concerns of young people. When you see how they signed their names for each other, and silly little verses – these are things we might have done when we changed classes at school. But boy, did they rise to the challenge.
They had to learn such a lot, and even to mend the equipment if it went wrong.”
Peggy called the book of her journal Searching in the Dark ,and it has recently been passed to Bawdsey Radar Trust with hopes for re-issue in order to reach a wider readership.