Moyra Campbell, Wren in the top-secret Y-Service who later worked for Moët et Chandon – obituary
Moyra Campbell, who has died aged 99, was one of the last Wrens of the highly secret Y-Service who in the Second World War listened to German VHF voice messages in the North Sea and fed coded HF transmissions to Bletchley Park.
Born on July 14 1924, she was the daughter of Lord Stratheden, and as a child she lived at Hartrigge House, near Jedburgh. She and her two sisters enjoyed a happy Borders childhood revolving around ponies and pets. Like many girls of her class, “Moy”, as she was known, never went to school, but her mother believed strongly in educating girls, and taught by a governess, Moyra became fluent in French and German.
She was 15 when the war broke out in 1939. The Admiralty advertised on the BBC that it needed German speakers, and as soon as she was old enough she volunteered for the Women’s Royal Naval Service.
Selected for training at the innocuous-sounding Royal Naval Training Establishment at Southmead House, 22 Park Road, Wimbledon, discreetly hidden behind a wall of mature trees in extensive grounds which included a sunken Italian garden, she learned Morse and enemy wireless procedures before being sent to a listening station on the East Coast.
Each station was staffed by a junior officer of the WRNS and some 20 female ratings who maintained a 24-hour listening service over the North Sea for German U-boats making the passage round Britain, or for E-boats preparing to attack vital East Coast convoys.
When they intercepted VHF in “voice” – plain spoken language or simple code which the girls soon cracked without reference to others – the Wrens passed warnings on to local naval operational centres at Hull and Harwich. When they heard enemy high frequency signals in Morse they were transcribed and sent by teleprinter for deciphering at Bletchley Park, along with the bearings of transmissions.
Moyra Campbell served at Withernsea, where the Captain William public house on the promenade had been requisitioned, and at Beeston Hill, Sheringham. There, she made a lifelong friend of the widowed Dorothea Klatzow, née Fuhrmann, one of only two known foreign-born Wrens to have joined the Y-Service. Moyra Campbell readily admitted that her Czech friend (who later became famous as the illustrator Dorrit Dekk) was far better at picking up German “voice” than she was.
At the end of the war she was deployed to a secret SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) headquarters based on the top floor of Peter Robinson’s department store at Oxford Circus where, for a few months until she was demobilised, she translated captured German documents known as “pinches”.
There were no more than 400 Wrens in the Y-Service; they regarded themselves as an elite and rarely spoke about their wartime work even after the more general secrets of Bletchley Park became known in the late 1970s.
Postwar, Moyra Campbell felt too old to prepare for university, and had begun working for the English Speaking Union in Edinburgh, helping to find housing for those newly arrived in the city, when she received a telegram from a friend in France, Laurien Jones, daughter of the playwright Edith Bagnold, saying “Would you like my job?” After some hesitation, Moyra said yes.
The job involved working for Count Robert-Jean de Vogüé, war hero and director of Moët et Chandon champagne, as chatelaine of Château de Saran, near Épernay. She helped to entertain a stream of guests, when after working all day, she would stay up late talking: not a problem for Moyra Campbell who never went to bed until well after midnight.
The success of Saran was largely due to her, and under her stewardship it became famous for its gastronomic delights. Her jeunes filles, who grew the magnificent flowers at Saran, still remember her with affection.
Moyra Campbell always returned to the Borders for the hunting season, and after 13 years at Saran she settled permanently near Jedburgh. There she became a well-known figure in the local community, involved with charities such as Scotland’s Garden Scheme or Riding for the Disabled, and was a woman farmer when farming was a man’s world. A regular at the Jedburgh festival and Kelso show, she rode with the Jed Forest Hunt, followed hounds well into her nineties (latterly in a car), and gave memorable Christmas parties.
Independent-minded and full of common sense, she just got on with the things that needed to be done. She lived a full life on her own terms, and never married.
Moyra Campbell, born July 14 1924, died June 18 2024