John Stott’s Right Hand - J. E. M. Cameron

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Shortly after leaving school, unexpected tragedy would bring an end to her Beara days, and to this special bond.

      10. Pamela Hurle: Malvern Girls’ College: A Centenary History (Phillimore and Co Ltd, 1993) p65.

      11. A term used in the UK to refer to some of the oldest-established schools offering an elite education.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      Massive changes: 1943–47

      Frances left Malvern Girls’ College aged 18, in the summer of 1943, and immediately joined the war effort. Her first job was in Malvern Link, in the government’s Radar Research and Development Establishment (RRDE). Here she was one of a team of thirty men and women.

      Part of their work was to investigate what lay behind ‘anomalous propagation’, that is, the way searchlights perform differently according to weather conditions and pressure in the atmosphere. This information, gained through simulators, provided a ‘reasonable expectation’ on how effective searchlights would be in differing weather patterns.

      The data collected would be used in deciding how and when the allies should send out their aircraft. Surprise was obviously a critical element in air raids. This data from simulated sources gave the RAF the best guess on the extent to which cloud cover would hide aircrafts; further, it showed how far distant their own craft needed to remain to fly undetected by enemy radar.

      Frances, who excelled in maths, was designated to the team’s Mathematics Department, acting essentially as a human computer. She would be given equations with different variables, and, with the help of a slide-rule, plot points on a graph.

      Frances’s father wrote weekly, responding to news he received from Frances, updating her on local happenings, and often mentioning what he had been reading. His letter of 21 January 1944 opened with his usual fond greeting, ‘My Darling old girl’. Claude Whitehead was the local Commander of Special Constables, and halfway through the letter, he explained how he had been called out three days earlier at about 8 p.m., to investigate a reported light in Bovey which was infringing the blackout regulations. He wrote:

      I thought I had just enough petrol to get me into Bovey and back. I found no light, and coming back my car stopped at the bottom of Atway and I found I had run out of petrol!! I knew one of my special patrols was coming along, so I just waited for them, and with the help of another man we pushed the car up the hill into the lane and left it there for the night. What a game! It took some pushing up the hill.

      Then he closed with news of high winds. While the incident was relayed in a ‘by the way’ fashion, Claude must have been in significant discomfort as the strenuous effort in pushing the car uphill had caused his heart to move two and a half inches. A few weeks later, as he was still unwell, Frances sought compassionate leave, and special permission to travel, which was granted. Her father was delighted at the prospect of seeing her, but there is still no trace in his letter of the seriousness of his situation.

      ‘Darling old girl’ he wrote on 16 March, ‘How delightful to think of seeing you on Saturday, but am afraid you are getting a wangler!’ He told her that a car had been arranged to meet her at Newton Abbott station on the mainline, and she would need to look out for the driver.

      How’s Daddy?

      ‘How’s Daddy?’ asked Frances as soon as they were both in the car. She could barely take in her aunt’s words. Her beloved father, suffering from a coronary thrombosis, had died earlier that afternoon. Having no indication from his letters of his condition being serious, let alone terminal, this news came as a profound and terrible shock. Frances arrived in Beara to find her father laid out, surrounded by candles, in the room in which she had received her first lessons from a governess. She felt totally desolate.

      Her mother, by then engaged in war work and living in Leamington Spa, arrived the following day, and the funeral took place in Bovey Tracey Parish Church. Claude was buried alongside Pamela in the local cemetery. In the numbness of the days following, Frances found it hard to grasp that Beara would have to be sold. This proved another painful loss.

      It was decided that Frances and her Aunt Dolly would both live at Welstor Farm, in one of its houses. Frances would use this as a base for holidays, while continuing in her job in Malvern. The farm had been a second home for years, enjoyed with her father, but now her double bereavement of losing him and also losing Beara brought deep pangs of sorrow. While Frances had several cousins in the Whitley family, they were much older than she. Their kinship nonetheless brought some comfort.

      Everything in Frances’s life had changed, just a few days before her nineteenth birthday. Her father’s death and the new somewhat makeshift arrangements in Welstor gave a deep sense of rootlessness. While Frances returned to Welstor as her new base for several years, it was all so different from the security she had known up to then, with Claude Whitehead acting as father and mother, a rock in her young life.

      Colleagues at the RRDE, sensing something of her devastation in losing her father, showed kindness. As a way of giving her a break, she was sent to Cambridge for two weeks, to work at the Cavendish Laboratory, then under the direction of the Nobel laureate, Sir Lawrence Bragg. Wartime Cambridge, which escaped bombing, remained much as it had been before the war, affording few concessions to the nation’s new realities, at least on a superficial level, beyond the appointing by each college of its Air Raid Precaution (ARP) volunteers. Frances stayed in the Garden House Hotel, situated within easy reach of the Cavendish Laboratory, where she was set to work entering data into its huge computer. The hotel offered a welcome change for a fortnight from her not-very-comfortable digs in Malvern, which she shared with a fellow Malvernian also working at the RRDE. Here the young women had only a small baby Belling on which to cook, and mice could be seen running up the curtains.

      A move to Lambeth

      As the war finished, Frances’s role at the RRDE came to an end. While wondering what lay ahead, she accompanied her mother on a short holiday in the New Forest. Here she went out riding every day. During the week, she found herself riding in the company of Oliver Gibbs-Smith, who served as both vicar of St John’s Wood and the Archdeacon of London. As they talked, Frances spoke of her desire for a change, perhaps a move to London. The Archdeacon put her in touch with an architect friend in the Ministry of Works, Colonel Tweddell, whom he knew was looking for a secretary.

      Frances had received some secretarial training in her final year at school, and she was offered a job in the Ministry of Works, based in Lambeth on the south bank of the Thames. The Ministry had been formed in 1943 originally to handle property requisitioned for use in the war; then in the post-war years it carried responsibility for government building projects. The construction of thousands of new homes, to replace those which had been bombed, was a pressing need, nowhere more so than in London, where the housing stock was seriously depleted. In 1945 a new surge of building began. In the UK over 150,000 prefabricated homes – flats, terraces, semi-detached houses – were constructed, mostly in London. They could be erected in comparatively few man-hours without dependence on bricks, and proved a popular temporary solution to housing needs. The first block of flats in London, functional and pleasantly designed, was opened by the Minister of Works in February 1946. While prefabs were intended as a stop-gap solution for families, some were to remain for decades, and a few into the new century.

      From this point onwards, Frances returned less frequently to Devon. She found a bedsit near Earls Court in West London. Frances’s mother and Sylvia Dunsford were by now living in Ardingly, a picturesque village thirty miles south of London, in West Sussex. Frances would go and stay with them and their Alsatian dog, Carlo, at weekends. In due course, further change would come, in a direction Frances could not have anticipated.

      12.

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