My mother-in-law, Helen Werner, who has died aged 92, used her fluency in German to listen in to torpedo boats, submarines and aircraft at East Anglian Y-stations during the second world war. Her transcripts were sent to the code breakers of Bletchley Park. She continued to work for what she called “the office” until 1954.
Born in Birkenhead, Liverpool, where her father, Alexander Davidson, was a senior chemist with Lever brothers, Helen and her family spent five years in Germany. She remembered life as a child in Berlin quite fondly but in the mid-1930s, as the Nazi party grew more powerful, it became increasingly difficult to remain, as many thought that they were Jewish because of their surname, despite it being of Scottish origin.
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