Fanny Hugill recalls her extraordinary life serving in the Women’s Royal Navy Service (also known as Wrens), reaching the rank of Third Officer and serving during WW2. She decided to join the Wrens after visiting a recruiting officer during her lunch break at work. After joining, she was sent to the Wren headquarters in London to serve as a short-end typist. It was boring work and Fanny tried to transfer out, but she wasn’t allowed. Luckily for Fanny, her father, a war veteran, bumped into Admiral Ramsay, an important military figure during WWI and WWII, on a train, explained the situation and the Admiral said he’d move Fanny over to Dover. Her job there was as a plotter, marking on charts everything that moved in the English channel, from slow moving convoys to minesweeping ships, Fanny remembers it as very complicated work. She was housed in Dover college and she worked in the operations room in the tunnels under Dover castle. She loved her time there and remembers it as some of the happiest months of her life. Dover was a hub of activity and on occasion, very important figures would come and visit the operations room. She remembers Sir Winston Churchill visited several times, and on one occasion remembers seeing him looking over across the sea to France, it is something she never forgot. Eleanor Roosevelt also visited, she was very popular amongst the Wrens. Fanny fondly remembers her time at Dover, but, after 21 months, she was promoted and moved on. She carried out her officer training course at the start of 1944, describing it as three of the hardest weeks in her life. After completing her officer training, she was assigned to be a personal assistant to Admiral Tennent, the renowned "Dunkirk Joe", who played a pivotal role in the evacuation of over 300,000 Allied soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk. However, Fanny much preferred working as a watchkeeper, so asked the Admiral to transfer her, which he happily did. Fanny took part in planning D-Day with Admiral Ramsay and his team. Fanny was on shift when the day came. She gives us a first hand recount of the operations room during such a tense time. Following the D-Day landings, she was sent to Normandy, September 6th 1944. She recalls the devastating sight as she travelled through Normandy to Granville. Fanny talks about the impact on morale that the death of Admiral Ramsay had on her and the rest of the team. Ramsay's replacement was Sir Harold Burrough whom she describes as a "big, teddy bear of man." Fortunately he stayed with them through to Germany. Fanny reflects on her war. She missed out on a place at Oxford but says, "I have been so thankful for the experience, people I met, people I worked with, people I worked for and the friends I made. And I think it made one feel, you can do things if you want to. It's up to you. Get on and do it. And that stood me in a very good stead."

Having joined the Navy first as an engineer, then as a Seaman Officer, Malcolm had reached the position of Lieutenant Commander Staff Officer and was incredibly busy on the HMS Antrim taking part in Exercise Spring Train by Gibraltar when they starting to hear rumblings about what was happening in the South Atlantic. It then came as no surprise when they were mobilised to head south. Malcolm recalls that there was initially a degree of making things up as they went along as they didn’t know what to expect and nobody, except one Royal Marines Officer, had ever been to the Falklands. One of Malcolm’s jobs was to work on deception tactics such as laying chaff around this ships to appear a larger flotilla and charting a course which looked like they might actually be heading for Argentina. At Ascension, Malcolm transfers to HMS Hermes where he recalls a frenzied race for better sleeping conditions when the Admiral said the officers could share his cabin which included the luxury of a double bed and shower. During this time, Malcolm had two main responsibilities. When on watch he was the Anti-Submarine Warfare Screen Coordinator and when not on watch he managed communications, including highly classified messages. He vividly recalls hearing the tragedy of the Sheffield directly through his headphones but that they only had a brief time to reflect before pushing on with their jobs. Malcolm describes some of their biggest challenges being rudimentary communication, lack of advance warning about airborne attacks and confusion which could arise from the three services not really having collaborated since WWII. He also remembers the tragedies of helicopter crashes and a Harrier exploding, he thinks it was often luck that meant things weren’t worse. Malcolm says it was difficult readjusting to life at home and is grateful to the public who offered members of the task group free holidays. It was a week in Wales with his family, away from home and work, that finally helped him decompress. He reflects that the Falklands will probably have been the last time the Royal Navy will fight a fleet action in that way.

When Joe Pitcher was called up into the Royal Navy in 1941, his military career began at HMS Glendower, a training facility preparing sailors for service on defensively equipped merchant ships (DEMS). Throughout his ensuing service, Joe sailed on the coastal, Atlantic, Mediterranean and Pacific convoys. He shares his memories of how it felt each time he changed ship and had to get used to working with a completely new crew, and adapting to the ship’s life and rules. He also remembers with wry humour a number of near misses along the way, including a scramble to find an ammunition locker stopcock, dodging a bullet from a round accidentally fired off by a young sailor in the mess, and surviving two separate torpedo hits on the same ship. Joe’s service ended in Singapore where the true horrors of war were brought into sharp focus when the hospital ship he was on took aboard countless near-to-death POWs. With great modesty, Joe says he was glad to have been able to do his bit, and shares with deep emotion his gratitude for surviving the war when so many others weren’t so lucky.