The Woman Who Censored Churchill

by Ruth Ive

Overview

During the Second World War, the only way Winston Churchill and his American counterpart Franklin D. Roosevelt could communicate was via a top secret transatlantic telephone link. All other Atlantic telephone cables had been disconnected to prevent the Germans intercepting information. Ruth Ive, then a young stenographer working in the Ministry of Information, had the job of censoring the line, and she spent the rest of the war listening in to the conversations across the Atlantic, ready to cut the line if anything was said that might compromise security. Ruth was sworn to secrecy about her work, and at the end of the war all documentation proving the existence of the telephone line was destroyed. It was not until 1995, when Churchill's private files were finally declassified, that Ruth was able to research her story. Now, for the first time, one of the Second World War's key workers describes the details of her incredible story, and the private conversations of two of the war's most important players can be revealed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780752460949
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	12/26/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	168
File size:	6 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

RUTH IVE was censor for the transatlantic telephone link during the Second World War. After the war she worked as a journalist, married and had two sons. She lives in London.

Read an Excerpt

The Woman Who Censored Churchill

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By Ruth Ive

The History Press

Copyright © 2010 Ruth Ive
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-6094-9

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CHAPTER 1

LIFE IN 1938/9

My parents were dedicated theatre and opera lovers, thinking nothing of donning full evening dress to go by train via Fenchurch Street Station to the theatre and opera in London from Westcliff-on-Sea, where we lived till I was sixteen. They even allowed me to attend the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, though when it came to the crunch my father, in real Barrett of Wimpole style, told me in no uncertain way that no daughter of his was going on the stage.

I was furious at this decision. I had made no secret of this ambition; my parents had taken me to every suitable production at Southend Hippodrome since I was six and up to London for matinees for special occasions, not to mention regular Saturday afternoons spent in the cinema. I had wept buckets at Bitter Sweet with Peggy Wood in the lead; had been thrilled at Matheson Lang in a play called The Bungalow; and was taken to London to see the Diaghaliev ballets, so I was thoroughly immersed in stagecraft and music by the time I was sixteen.

At the Guildhall, I discovered I wasn't particularly interested in playing either heroines or insipid ingénue parts, but what really fascinated me were the comedy and character roles and particularly vocal techniques – inflations, pauses, timing, playing for laughs and tears and how the voice alone can be used as an instrument to stir the imagination.

In the 1930s we did not lack examples of this craft. Voices continually assailed our ears from the cinema newsreels and the wireless, from Hitler's rantings to the intimate storytelling of A.J. Alan. Our ears became our sixth sense, sensitive and attuned to nuances of tone.

I did enjoy my time there. It was a relief to leave my all-girl, very strict school and mix with girls and boys with similar tastes, similar ambitions, and quite a few had made considerable financial sacrifices to enjoy their musical and stage education. No grants then. I did my vocal exercises with enthusiasm, learning that the vocal chords had to be treated and cared for as a musical instrument, and I remember my teacher, Horace Sequira, shouting at me from the other end of the auditorium: 'Project! Project! I want to hear every syllable'. Sometimes, sitting at the National Theatre – now with earphones clamped to my head – I wish they could have heard Mr S. at full steam. The only blip came when I was reading a sonnet to my very elderly Shakespeare teacher when he dropped dead: a quite terrifying experience. Endless ribbing about my 'drop dead performance'.

I was in a couple of stage productions. One, a German play called Matchen in Uniform, was about lesbian love in a girls' school, playing the part of a schoolgirl infatuated with another. My parents were not impressed.

But my cultural tastes were not formed at the Guildhall; Colonel de Basil's Company of The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo were on a London visit and I think I saw every production from the gallery seat that I had queued for. Music from Stravinski, Ravel, Poulence, Debussy, backdrops by Derain and Bakst, and dancers such as Massine and Lifar; the entire genre I found stimulating – and still do. It seemed to me then that the 1930s were a turning point in the arts and everything was about to change, and in my own life too.

I was an only child of parents from a very close-knit but ever-quarrelling Jewish family and my father's conception of a dutiful daughter was not – as he put it – 'gallivanting around England ON HER OWN', but staying at home, helping my mother, getting a nice teaching job and marrying the right young Jewish man when the time came. My mother was far more sympathetic and understanding, remembering her own struggle to live an independent life before she was married. She was a born businesswoman and administrator and in her single days before the First World War, had opened and managed one of the first chains of exclusive off-the-peg dress shops for a Bond Street firm. Her sister was even more adventurous in her business life, doing a similar job but opening a chain of lingerie shops in America, so I did have two shoulders to cry on.

Obviously, I made a real drama out of the situation, sulking around the place for months till my father, tiring of this constant stage performance, told me I must go to commercial school to learn shorthand and typing so that 'I would have something at the back of me', and then he might reconsider the situation.

By this time, we had moved back to London and lived in a large rambling flat in Hampstead. Still muttering under my breath that I didn't want to be a shorthand typist, I was enrolled at the Gregg School of Commerce in Finchley Road for the new term starting in September 1938. However, in the August, a tragedy occurred that changed the course of my life.

In the '30s, my mother's cousin, Bernard Davidson, devoted a great deal of his time working at Bloomsbury House trying to help our German and Austrian brethren escape from Nazi tyranny, and as we had a couple of extra bedrooms, we gave hospitality to quite a few of these poor people for a short time before they moved on to more permanent homes. Among them was Erica Kaufmann, a girl my own age who arrived in England alone, leaving her widowed mother and younger sister behind in Aachen where they lived. Erica and I got on very well together, and she hoped her family would soon join her and together they would all go on to America. Then suddenly, without any apparent reason, Mrs Kaufmann's letters to her daughter stopped. Naturally enough, Erica was demented with worry. So my father and cousin Bernard devised a plan that they hoped would give Erica peace of mind and help her mother and sister leave Germany.

As it was August, it was arranged that I should go with my parents on holiday to a Belgian seaside resort – Knoccke, I think it was – where my father would put me on the Ostende train bound for Germany. Erica had returned there a few days earlier (her British visa was still valid), and she would meet me off the train. I was to try to persuade the whole family to leave Germany at the end of my visit, and my father hoped the sight of my British passport would influence the German Customs' officials to allow the Kaufmann family through to freedom.

Privately, I was amazed at my father agreeing to send me on such a journey when he was so insistent that I came home at 10.30pm, even if I just went to a local cinema with a friend – and never mind if the big picture hadn't ended; if a boyfriend was involved, then serious negotiations as to time, venues, etc. had to take place, and even if I was ten minutes late, trouble lay ahead. So, I jumped at this opportunity for adventure and freedom and it never crossed my mind that there were any risks attached – for, of course, I was carrying my British passport, my guarantee of safety.

The first part of the scheme went according to plan and Erica met me off the train at Aachen, looking far more cheerful than she did when we had parted in London. She immediately cleared up the mystery of why her mother had stopped writing to her; apparently she wanted to marry a man who was waiting for his divorce to come through and she didn't know how to break the news to her daughter. 'Was that all?' I said incredulously.

So with that out of the way, I phoned the news through to my parents who were by then back in London, my father telling me to stay in Aachen for a week to see for myself how things were and to try to persuade the Kaufmanns to leave Germany with me.

Perhaps because Aachen was a border town it seemed full of Storm Troopers, Wehrmacht, Hitler Youth, Black-and Brown-shirted troops marching around the place and I was disturbed by the feeling of menace just walking in the main street. The Kaufmanns hadn't dared go to the cinema for months, but they judged it would be safe enough if we went in the back seats of the circle and only spoke English to each other. They particularly wanted to see the film showing at the local cinema, a very long epic that I found extremely boring as I didn't understand German. The newsreel, however, was far from boring; it carried extracts from Hitler's latest speech being rapturously received by a huge audience and an item showing a local Jewish shop being smashed up. It was a relief to get out into the street and I felt that we were all too vulnerable to have gone there in the first place. I was finding my stay in Germany a far more disturbing experience than I had wished.

The telephone ringing at seven o' clock the next morning woke me and I had an overwhelming feeling, a presentiment, that all was not well at home. There comes experiences in life that are so crucial to one's future that they are etched deep into memory and even now I can relive every moment of that hot August day.

I heard whispering voices outside my bedroom door and then Mrs Kaufmann entered, telling me that my cousin, Edward Lobel, had rung from London asking me to take the first train home as my father had been taken seriously ill.

Within the next couple of hours, the Kaufmann family had to make momentous decisions. My father's wish for me to bring Erica, her sister Renata and their mother out of Germany was now obviously impractical. Their dilemma lay as to whether Erica should accompany me back to England but she finally decided her place was with her family, and to take a chance that their American visa (which Mrs Kaufmann's future husband had applied for) would come through before her valid British visa expired.

We said our tearful goodbyes at Aachen station. The platform was crowded with men in all sorts of uniforms and I was thankful to leave. I had seen enough of the Nazi regime and I found it menacing and frightening.

Some hours later, Edward met me at Victoria station and told me my father had died from a massive heart attack the previous evening. A few weeks later the Kaufmann family left Aachen for America.

I was utterly devastated by the entire experience. My father was a forceful personality, a big man with a big voice and sense of humour (and temper) to match, who completely dominated our household. He was at his happiest when listening to music and my earliest memory of him was when I was about two years old, sitting on his lap and shrieking with laughter at 'The Factotum's Song' from The Barber of Seville as it played on the gramophone. Our lives would seem dull and quiet without him.

The trip to Germany was a chilling one indeed and brought home with startling clarity the uncertainty and dread of tomorrow that had become part of the daily lives of our German brethren. Nobody could then envisage the appalling horrors of the Holocaust, but nobody could convince me after that visit that Hitler's aims were peaceful. There was an all-pervasive air of aggression and militancy around, which was quite alien to us in England, and I believed the ultimate aim of the Nazi regime was war.

Almost overnight I changed from a rather frivolous, self-centred teenager to a more sensible and realistic young woman. We were not well off now and I knew I would have to get a job, earn a living and make my own way in the world, so when term actually started in September 1938, my attitude had changed radically and I was eager to get started.

Back again then to full-time schooling with classes in bookkeeping, typing and shorthand. Bookkeeping remained a complete mystery to me then (as it does now); typing lessons were amusing, banging away on old Underwood machines to 'The Toreadors Song' played on an equally ancient wind-up gramophone, but shorthand I found quite fascinating. I must have had particularly enthusiastic teachers to get me fired up, for when I left school in July 1939 I had reached a verbatim speed of about 160 to 180 words per minute – the speed of spoken speech. I have since wondered why I found shorthand outlines easy to remember and easy to translate so rapidly onto paper. Again, I suppose it is this facility to react quickly to the spoken word. I was wondering how to put my one and only skill to some use other than a purely commercial one when war broke out in September.

Now I made strenuous efforts to find a job. I laid down terms of reference for my future career, which ideally would provide me with varied and interesting work, adventure, excitement, foreign travel, be socially rewarding and of course, be very well paid, but I soon found out that no prospective employer evinced any interest in me whatsoever until I mentioned my shorthand speeds. Then either the Civil Service Personnel Officer or the commercial company offered the usual routine jobs of shorthand typist/very junior secretary. So I decided to forget the shorthand and look for other ways of earning a living.

Until my ideal offer turned up, I took a temporary secretarial job with an accountant friend of the family, which confirmed my worst fears on the dullness of typing out columns of figures, and I spent the rest of my time helping at the Victoria station canteen – usually washing up – and job hunting. I had by now added another job specification to my list – it must further the war effort.

In the previous spring in 1939, my cousin Edward Lobel, a commercial linguist, had been recruited to join a small nucleus of staff making preliminary arrangements to resuscitate the Postal and Telegraph Censorship that had operated very successfully in the First World War and which had provided excellent Intelligence and information gained from the interception of telegraphic material and the reading of mail.

Edward told me the Censorship was now looking for 'well-educated staff' and thought (rather doubtfully) that I should apply, and brought me home a long application form to fill in. Very few of the questions on it actually seemed to apply to me: 'had I seen previous war service?' or 'in what other capacity had I served the Empire?' Obviously the Censorship was looking for a far older and more experienced type of personnel, but I did my best and sent my somewhat empty-looking form off and waited but – rather to my surprise – not for very long.

In about the spring of 1940, I was asked to attend an interview at the Censorship Headquarters, which was then housed in the Prudential Building in Holborn in the City of London. Three rather grand gentlemen awaited me: one was a very senior naval officer and I was suitably impressed and distinctly nervous. They asked me the usual routine questions about background, schooling and interests, then the naval gentleman looked at the 'special skills' section on the application form that I had left empty and said somewhat irritably: 'surely you can do something?' Well ... no. I was – and still am for that matter – a wretched linguist, so in desperation, I admitted to my shorthand speeds, now getting a bit rusty through lack of practice.

Unaccountably to me, my interviewers showed considerable interest and also in the fact that I wrote Gregg shorthand which is the system mostly used in America. One at a time they fired off a series of Trivial Pursuit-type questions as a general knowledge test and then sent me off to the waiting room while they deliberated. When recalled, my interviewers told me that I would be employed as an Examiner Grade II, and though I was not going to work as a shorthand typist, they suggested that while my application was being processed, I should keep my shorthand speed up by doing temporary secretarial work. I seem to remember that the personnel officer fixed me up with a secretarial job at a Board of Trade department in Furnival Street, opposite. It seemed to me that this was a very odd sort of job I was going to do but I found the three gentlemen far too awe-inspiring to dare ask any questions.

I spent some months at the Import Licensing Department doing undemanding work with pleasant people but I was very much aware that the Censorship was functioning and investigating my blameless past. Both referees given on my application form phoned my mother to say they had been visited and questioned by members of the Special Branch and wondered what on earth I was going to do. I had to admit that I had only got a job at the Censorship but as I had already signed – like every other person in the country – The Official Secrets Acts, I didn't go into details. Privately, I was equally mystified.

Looking back and with hindsight, I realised that I had been sent to a 'safe house' while my blameless past was investigated. I did very little work because my boss only came in about twice a week to check some licensing and rarely dictated a letter. I was grateful for inactivity because the drama of Dunkirk was unfolding hourly. I brought in a wireless to work so we could all keep abreast of the news. My then boyfriend (later my fiancé and eventually, six years later, my husband) was at an army training course in Folkestone and went missing. He reappeared three days later having been sent to the French beaches on the holding operation, returning in one piece though suffering from sea-sickness (he was a dreadful sailor). Thankfully however the Channel was like a mill pond and so the rescue of so many of our troops was a miracle. Winston Churchill, our recently-elected Prime Minister, stirred our emotions and resolve and turned around a stunned country into a united nation, and that is the way it stayed for the next six long years.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Woman Who Censored Churchill by Ruth Ive. Copyright © 2010 Ruth Ive. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Dedication,
Introduction,
Prologue,
1 Life in 1938/9,
2 The Postal Censorship,
3 Internal Censorship Units,
4 'The Radio Department': how it worked,
5 The British and the VIPs,
6 The Americans and Canadians,
7 The Russians,
8 The Germans,
9 A Security Catastrophe,
10 'Sigsaly',
11 A Visit to an RAF Airfield & Changes in Department Policy,
12 Calls to Remember,
13 End of an Era,
Lifestyle Notes,
Notes,
Acknowledgements & Source Material,
Appendix: Churchill Documents,
Copyright,
Plates,