HEARING Well

Deepak

Jagota, from Hearing

Well on Chiswick High Rd, is honoured to have Pat Davies as one of his oldest clients. Pat served during the Second World War as one of the ‘Bletchley Girls’.

It was the job of the WRNS – the Women’s Royal Naval Service - to pick up what they could, listening on radio receivers, transcribe it on a teleprinter and send them to Bletchley Park to be decoded.

“Mostly it was in code but some of it was ordinary speech. When they were in action they had no time to put it in code”.

Even the mundane was potentially useful. “We knew everything could be important. Even one torpedo boat to another just saying they were going to be on shore leave next week.

“The messages could be very faint” she tells Deepak, “it really did need good hearing to do the job efficiently, so I still value my hearing very much.”

Pat was awarded the Légion d’Honneur by the French government in 2019 for her service. The intelligence produced at Bletchley Park is estimated to have shortened the war by approximately two years.

“I think Winston Churchill said that there were a lot of us but the ones who were in the services did cut short what might have been a very long war and what a happy time it was when it finished, and we could all celebrate.”