Foreign Office War Work

Some weekends we spent in Bletchley Park which we weren’t allowed to mention. I don’t know why we were there. We did the same work as we did in London. Nobody knew any German. I don’t think anybody had anything other than school German. Early morning tea which I never liked. There was a Professor Stirk. He & Dr Reichenbach had a row over some grammatical point, I do remember that. It struck me as rather odd, that he, merely a teacher, was grammatically trying to teach a journalist how to write an article. It seemed to me quite… [Laughing]

My friend lived with a landlady. One of her grandsons mentioned the government was trying to recruit German-speaking people for war work. I was in the stencil department. We did stencils of German war communiqués. Based in Ingersoll House. They called it PID, political intelligence. They were editing a paper for the German prisoners of war, in German, to convert them to democracy. First called Lagerpost & later called Wochenpost. I could also contribute my own ideas. Like a puzzle corner.