August 28, 2009

By Emma Alberici in London for AM

British pensioner Myra Collyer

AM | abc.net.au/am (28 Aug 2009) – An exhibition celebrating the work that went on in Winston Churchill’s wartime bunker has opened in Whitehall in London.

Seventy years ago this week, the famous war rooms became operational. It was the week before Germany invaded Poland. Britain was yet to declare war.
The typists, secretaries and telephonists in Churchill’s underground bunker were among the forgotten heroes of World War II.

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Women like Myra Collyer helped to plan every step of the war against Nazi Germany.

“It was 75 pence a week wages, I remember that, and we couldn’t do much on that,” she said.

“I don’t know, we got two pounds 10 shillings,” said another former secretary.

“Oh I didn’t, how did you get that?” said Ms Collyer laughing.

Joy Hunter was part of the secretarial pool.

“A group of us were taken down and brought down here with the onset of D-Day to do the more intricate planning,” she said.

“We typed [the instructions]. We knew the date of D-Day, we knew the movements of troops in England. We knew exactly which ports they were going to go from and how they were going to go.

“We had reports every single day where the bombs had fallen in the whole country. So we were very much in the heart of it.”

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