The BBC remembers the volunteer radio tinkerers who helped win the intelligence war in Europe:
One day, towards the start of World War II, a captain wearing the Royal Signals uniform knocked on a British teenager’s door.
The 16-year-old was called Bob King. When he went to greet the visitor, he had no idea that soon he would become one of Britain’s so-called “voluntary interceptors” — some 1,500 radio amateurs recruited to intercept secret codes broadcast by the Nazis and their allies during the war.
“The captain asked me if I would be willing to help out with some secret work for the government,” remembers Mr King, now 89. “He wouldn’t tell me any more than that.
“He knew that I could read Morse code – that was the essential thing.”
[. . .]
By mid-1941, the new base, Arkley View, was receiving about 10,000 message sheets a day from its recruits.
“I worked for five years scrutinising the logs that came in from the other amateurs — thousands of log sheets with the signals which we knew were wanted, and you could only know it from experience,” remembers Mr King.
“We knew it wasn’t Allied army air force, we knew it was German or Italian — various things gave that away, but it was disguised in such a form that it looked a bit like a radio amateur transmission.
“We knew it was highly important, everything was marked ‘top secret,’ but only many years later we discovered that it was German secret service we were listening to.
“Of course you didn’t ask questions in those days, otherwise you’d be in real trouble.”
Encoded messages were transmitted to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, the UK’s former top-secret code-cracking centre.
Once decoded, the data was sent to the Allied Commanders and the UK Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.
