Share your stories

I went to Beaumanor on a lovely summer's day in August 1962 aged 19. The station was disguised as a farm, with the main set room a greenhouse complete with a glass roof. This meant you froze in winter and roasted in summer. The high-speed Morse section (called L Hut) intercepted international civil communications using AR88's and the Marconi UG6G paper and two-pen undulators. A thin paper roll about the width of your finger was drawn through two small wheels as two inked pens drew the Morse out with the mark at the top and the space at the bottom. This at about 80wpm. The tape fell on the floor and was a fire hazard. You had to be quick reading the tape, for you had a large book about the size of a telephone directory full of wanted addresses/people/groups. To ensure you didn't get bored and fall asleep, you had a similar setup on your right. Messages of interest were torn out and rolled up for the traffic handlers. J hut was devoted to recording scrambled printer transmissions between Russian nuclear rocket bases and Moscow. They used double frequency shift transmissions with the printer in one arm and Morse in the other. They also churned out miles of undulator tape - another fire hazard for pipe smokers. Several times, blokes had to stamp on burning undulator tape. Now and then, you had to scoop up the undulator tape and pile it into large burn bags as the paper tape was just a back-up for the Morse arm. The burn bags were collected by the cleaners and burnt - hence the name.

The signals were run through a TFS3 bridge to drive the printers and undulators, so the noise was terrible.

L and J huts were a couple of hundred yards from M hut the main set room. This ensured you got soaked on a bad day/night.

M hut was disguised as a greenhouse and had minimal comforts. There was a large battered cupboard which looked as if it had seen duty with Lady Smith at the siege of Mafeking. It was subdivided into 8 x 10 slots where you could leave your sandwiches so the mice could have first whack. The first time I saw the main set room I was puzzled by the fact that it was done in a depressing diarrhoea brown. A few years later, when they washed it for the first time since the builders had moved out pre-war, I saw the original colour had been a cheery bright yellow. It showed what a couple of decades of cigarette smoke could do. The other part of the building was devoted to Morse search. You searched up and down the band you were allocated, logging every Morse transmission you happened on. Between the two set rooms was a long narrow room called the 'concentrators cabin'. This was connected to Cheltenham via a scrambled phone. The sort you see on old movies, which has a bright green handset on a black base that has three buttons. It also had a temperature-controlled frequency meter which, before the Racal 17, measured the frequency and steered the DF stations onto the target transmission. We covered the Russian army main lines, the political directorate watching to see they didn't do naughty things, paratroops, air defense, spy transmissions, and police. Even now, some 60 odd years later, I still remember the callsign of the Russian police control station.

I think I can say that I am the only man who got a scrambled phone call from a major intelligence agency to tell him he was a father. Knowing our tiny flat had no phone, my dad (who was at Gilnahirk) used the scrambled phone so no one would query a domestic call.

I did almost 5 years at Beaumanor before going to Treasure Island, as Cyprus was called.