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.
