My mother, Muriel Manning, who has died aged 100, was a wireless operator during the second world war at the Chicksands RAF base in Bedfordshire. There she listened in to morse code messages from Germany’s Enigma machines that were then sent to code breakers at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.
She joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) – where, as a Welsh woman, she was inevitably nicknamed “Taff” – in early 1944 at the age of 19. She took to the work like a duck to water, and was soon able to transcribe morse code at 90 letters per minute as a member of the top-secret Y Service at Chicksands.
Her scribbled intercepts were rushed by military dispatch rider to the Bletchley code breakers, providing valuable information about the enemy’s operations and plans. Off duty, Muriel would lie in her bunk, eardrums ringing painfully from the incessant morse code.
She kept her war secret until the 1990s, when she finally confessed to her children that she had not after all worked as a WAAF dinner lady. That bombshell resulted in the eventual publication of a children’s book about her war service, Taff in the WAAF (2013), written by me and illustrated by Brita Granström.
Muriel was born in Colwyn Bay, north Wales, to Georgina (nee Thompson) a housemaid, and her husband, Jack Jones, a chauffeur. With her sisters, Audrey and Dilys, she enjoyed an idyllic seaside childhood.
She left Colwyn Bay Central school in 1941, first working in a grocer’s shop, where she dealt with ration queue chaos, and then as a clerk for the Ministry of Food, which had relocated to Colwyn Bay after the blitz in London, before signing up with the WAAF. After leaving the armed forces in 1946 she married a Yorkshireman, Charles Manning, a teacher, and settled down to raise their four children, moving around Britain as he worked his way up to become a headteacher.
After Charles died aged 51 following a heart attack, Muriel remained in the family home in Haworth, West Yorkshire, to look after her youngest son, Mark, who was only 12 at the time. After a while they moved to Catton, Northumberland, to be nearer other members of the family.
Once Mark had left home, Muriel relocated to Alston, Cumbria, where she became a member of the local fell walking group until she was 86, tended her garden, read books and did crosswords. She went into a care home in Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland, at the age of 93 when the stone steps of her cottage became too steep for her, but was still able to enjoy seaside walks.
Muriel is survived by her children, Peter, Susan, Mark and me, 11 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
