We served in silence
Two female veterans tell of how they played vital roles on D-Day — and why they never talked about it
For the thousands of people involved in the months of planning for D-Day, secrecy was imperative. Pat Owtram and Christian Lamb were both 18 when they signed the Official Secrets Act upon joining the Women’s Royal Naval Service – the Wrens. Each felt it their duty to be silent about their work not only throughout wartime but for decades afterwards, never speaking of their experiences, even to their closest loved ones.
Early in 1944, Lamb, having previously worked as a plotting officer in Plymouth and Belfast, was assigned to Combined Operations Headquarters in Whitehall, working in a windowless basement office inside Winston Churchill’s secret war rooms.
“My role was to correlate mapped information to create a visual record of the skyline at points along the Normandy beaches, so that the soldiers landing on D-Day could identify where they were,” says Lamb, who’s now 103. “It was very exciting and I was sworn to secrecy. Many staff in the same building were making other preparations, but we never revealed our work to one another. It was ingrained in us not to talk about it, even after the war.”
I didn't tell my husband John until 50 years later
When she began her role, Lamb was newly married to Lieutenant Commander John Lamb, captain of the destroyer HMS Oribi. But even he didn’t know about the nature of her work: “I didn’t tell John until about 50 years later.”
Meanwhile, Owtram served as a Special Duties Y Service Linguist Interceptor, eavesdropping on German naval radio transmissions at coastal listening stations around England. The vital information was passed either to the Admiralty in London or Bletchley Park, the centre of Allied code-breaking during the war.
On a spring day in 1944 she unwittingly witnessed part of Operation Fortitude, the vast military deception to mislead German High Command into thinking an Allied invasion was planned at Calais, rather than 200 miles south-west in Normandy.
“In the run-up to D-Day I was stationed at Abbots Cliff House listening station, just outside Folkestone, where the front windows looked straight across the Channel to Calais,” recalls Owtram, who will be 101 in June. “It was getting very lively in the Channel, with a lot of Allied convoys going west under the Kent cliffs, like nothing we’d ever seen before.
“Early one sunny morning I had come off night watch and was sitting outside reading my book when a whole bunch of staff officers came up the path. As they walked within 15 feet of me, I recognised Churchill and Monty. They were unmistakeable. There was a rule that Wrens were not to salute unless we were wearing our hats, but I didn’t have mine with me. So I called, ‘Good morning, everybody!’ They all replied cheerfully including Churchill, who waved.
“He and Monty made great play of going to the top of the cliff and staring out intently at Calais for some time. I thought it rather odd.
Of course they wanted to be seen so that word of their visit should reach the Germans. But I told no one for years, because we had been warned there was no release from the Official Secrets Act. If we breached it, the possible penalties included death. My goodness, we took it seriously.”
Owtram’s service with the Wrens was shaped by her formative years. She grew up in Newland Hall, a Lancashire country house belonging to “Grandboffin” – her father’s father, a mill owner. Her childhood was one of nannies, tennis parties and ponies, all against a backdrop of the Depression, the abdication of Edward VIII and the rise of Adolf Hitler.
“In 1938, Grandboffin took in two Austrian Jewish refugees, Edie Krochmalnik and Lilly Getzl, to be cook and housemaid,” says Owtram. “I would talk with them in the maids’ sitting room, learning to speak German fluently. That facility meant the Wrens were very keen to have me.”
After the war, Owtram’s family expected her to find a husband. But the Wrens had given her a taste of independence, and she would be in her 40s before she married BBC radio news producer Ray Davies.
In the interim she used her ex-service grant to fund degrees at St Andrews, Oxford and Harvard universities. After becoming a reporter for the Daily Mail in Manchester, she moved into television. She worked on Florizel (later Coronation) Street, produced University Challenge, devised Ask the Family and produced Patrick Moore’s coverage of the Moon landings for The Sky at Night, including a subsequent promotional tour of the UK by Neil Armstrong.
“When Armstrong came to Manchester, no accommodation had been arranged for him,” says Owtram, “so I mentioned that my family would love to have him. He stayed for a couple of nights, and my younger sister Jean saw him play snooker with my father.”
My friend burst into my room saying, 'It's started! It's started!
Jean, who died last year aged 97, was herself a cipher officer with the Special Operations Executive in Italy during the war. Yet the sisters’ duty to secrecy meant that it wasn’t until the mid-70s that they revealed their wartime roles to one another, and it was only in 2020 that they wrote a book about it all, Codebreaking Sisters: Our Secret War.
Owtram recalls the morning of 6 June 1944 with pride. “My friend burst into my room saying: ‘It’s started! It’s started!’I feel so proud to have been involved in D-Day. It’s a piece of history I wouldn’t have wanted to miss.”
Christian Lamb left the Wrens soon after D-Day, giving birth to her daughter Felicity that October. She became an expert in botanic gardening, writing two books on the subject – but she was 100 years old before she published an autobiography, Beyond the Sea: a Wren at War, about her service.
“I will always remember hearing on the Home Service that D-Day was under way,” she says. “I was thrilled to know we had managed to carry out the plans envisaged by so many brilliant brains. A lot of people now know nothing of D-Day, or think that the war isn’t anything to do with them. But everyone should know how important it was. We must always remember D-Day.”
