Codebreaking is an art, too - Ken Gibbs

Preface: Before reading the article, it should be pointed out that what follows is based on quite a lot of guesswork because when we tried to get accurate information, the subject – my Aunt Diana – courteously changed the subject. I have been in contact with her son – one of my first cousins – and he is unable to fill in many of the gaps, as will become apparent. And if this hasn’t put you off, read on:

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My maternal (Nelson) grandparents seemed to live a gypsy life given that their son was born in Shanghai (China), their eldest daughter was born in Perth (Australia), and the next two girls were born in Modder B (a gold mine on the South African Witwatersrand). As to whether this inclined them to become good painting water-colourists; or a busking musician; or seamstresses or tapestry/needlepoint of a high standard or a mix of all these, I know not. The fact is - they were talented.

THE NELSON TALENT POOL

DIANA ON HER ELDER SISTER’S BACK, CIRCA 1918

When it came to the youngest girl, Diana, sometimes known as Kate, while she was excellent with needle and thread and with tapestry/needlepoint, she had the right physique to become a house-model at quite a young age for a fashion house in London (Ben Windsmoor), because she was both good looking and outgoing. My only memories of her was that she was always immaculately turned out and always the life and soul of the party. Naturally, she was soon married but in a liaison which was unlikely to last. She divorced and was soon swept off her feet by a British diplomat in the late 1930s.

Then came the Second World War.

Just before war broke out, her new husband Geoffrey was posted with her to the British Embassy in Buenos Aries (Argentina, at that time allies of the British), which lies at the mouth of the River Plate. This was where the German Pocket Battleship, the Graf Spee sought refuge by entering Montevideo (Uruguay, neutral) on the opposite bank of the estuary for emergency repairs following an intense sea battle in September, 1939. Details are available on Wikipedia under the Graf Spee and Battle of the River Plate.

While her husband was neither Minister nor Ambassador in Buenos Aries, because he was a fluent German speaker, there was a belief that he had met with Captain Hans Langsdorff shortly before the Captain and a skeleton crew scuttled the Graf Spee. Captain Langsdorff returned to Montevideo after the scuttling and shot himself three days later, presumably to avoid the ignobility of losing the cream of the German navy which would almost certainly have earned him a death sentence had he made it back to Germany. Considerate of him to save his masters back in Germany, the cost to get him back to face the Fuhrer’s fury, one might think.

While all this was going on, Diana was heavily pregnant and my cousin was born shortly afterwards, in 1940, in Buenos Aries.

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After Buenos Aries, Uncle Geoffrey and Aunt Diana were posted to China and operated out of the British Embassy in Nanjing which was then capital of the Chinese Republic. Uncle Geoffrey was listed in the diplomatic lists as Counsellor, which probably means Deputy Chief of Mission, from 1943 to 1945.

During the Second Sino-Japanese War ‘The Nanjing Massacre’ took place at the end of 1937. Conservative estimates are that the Japanese killed up to 200,000 Chinese civilians in Nanjing at that time. Pearl Harbour was attacked on 7th December, 1941.

Putting these various dates and events together probably means that Geoffrey and Diana were having to operate in an intensely fraught environment, and it thus should come as no surprise that they were ‘active’ against the Japanese in trying to eaves-drop on Japanese radio communications.

Diana had had no formal training in the dark arts of espionage, nor was she a mathematician, as far as we know. Yet her son – my cousin – spoke of being with his mother in a room in the Embassy where the walls were covered with numbers from the radio communications, which she would study – sometimes for days – to identify specific patterns which would tell the Japanese speakers where to start their code breaking. My cousin was too young to have understood what patterns she was trying to identify so we are left wondering if Diana had had a Bletchley Park type training.

Whatever the case, her ability to identify those patterns was as much an art as if she had been wielding a paint brush, or writing family letters, or singing songs.

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Imagine, if you will, sitting between Japan and Burma (which was then occupied by Japan – remember the Burma Railway ?), it cannot have been reassuring. The only way to return to an area controlled by the allies was straight over Burma to India, and if Diana had needed specialist medical treatment, India would have been where she would have gone.

Curiously, despite considerable research, we could not find any photographs of Diana as an adult. Was this a conscious decision to avoid having any photo record ? Again, nobody seems able to enlighten us. I had even thought to try the archives of the Ben Windsmoor Fashion House for photos of Diana on the catwalk, but it is in administration and there are no staff to contact.

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Moving on many years to 2014 when I had occasion to contact my cousin with a query about the latter part of the Second World War. This was because when I had known my Aunt Diana in South Africa in the late 1950s, my memory of her at that time was of a fun loving, always immaculately turned out aunt, but she never wanted to talk about the war years. It was as if she had intentionally drawn a curtain over that period, the better to suppress those memories. I had broached the subject with my own mother – who must have known a little of what her sister Diana had been doing – but she, too, was unwilling to explore the subject with me. Was I too young, or was it that the fairy-tale marriage that Diana had had with Uncle Geoffrey, came to an end shortly after the war ? Again, nobody was willing to discuss the matter for fear of letting skeletons escape their cupboards, or to keep other secrets ?

However, I discovered some of the (possible) truth in discussion with my cousin. Even he says that the second divorce from Uncle Geoffrey was most likely because twice Diana had flown to India over Burma from Nanjing which was terrifying enough wondering when the Japanese aircraft were going to find them and blow them out of the sky. Twice she made it to India miraculously without meeting any enemy aircraft or anti-aircraft fire, but on each occasion, she miscarried. Was this what caused her to run away from Uncle Geoffrey ? We’ll never know.

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Diana returned to South Africa – the land of her birth, after all – and married yet again. Was she looking for security, or was it something else ? My cousin and I are agreed that husband number three was so mean that his purse never saw the light of day. He had the distinction of winning the South African lottery from which Diana was provided a rail ticket from Cape Town to Southern Rhodesia where her brother and two sisters were living at the time. We thought that husband number three had hoped that it would have been a one-way ticket. Obviously, it was not a happy union and she threatened to start writing a book entitled, “One more for a bridge four”.

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The war was cruel to all the participants. Diana had divorced Geoffrey and because their son – my cousin – was to be schooled in Britain, he stayed with his father and only saw his mother very briefly once every three years thereafter. When finally Diana lay dying almost alone in South Africa of COPD and cirrhosis of the liver from her addictions, she spoke of being in hospital on a saline drip with breakfast, lunch and supper, and her gin and tonic being piped direct into her blood stream - but without any family beside her.

My cousin arrived too late and was the only relative at her funeral service.

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Diana’s mother – my maternal grandmother – wrote a very informative diary which must have covered around 45 years which allowed us to track the family with considerable detail, but when it came to the Second World War years, it stopped. Her son Jack scribbled some thoughts on his war placement in West Africa, together with one or two ink sketches, but none of the three girls kept a diary to our knowledge. Perhaps what Diana knew or could divulge if she was kidnapped or caught by the Japanese might well have inclined her to banish any such ideas, but her reaction to gentle questioning about her past may well have stirred the demons which she kept locked up. Or did the Diplomatic service make her sign an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) ?

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