The WRNS had first been established in 1917 during the First World War<\/a>, when around 6,000 \u2018Wrens\u2019 took on predominantly administrative and domestic jobs in the Royal Navy to release men for frontline duty. Disbanded in peacetime, it was reformed in April 1939, when war again became inevitable. Dame Vera Laughton Mathews, who had spent two years with the WRNS during the first war, was appointed as its new director.<\/p>\n In the Second World War, the only way for women to undertake military duties was to join one of the three auxiliary services that provided supporting staff for the armed forces. Alongside the WRNS was the Army\u2019s Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), and the Women\u2019s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). The WRNS quickly became the most popular. As the smallest of the women\u2019s services, entry into the WRNS was naturally more competitive.<\/p>\n Like many women, 18-year-old Barbara Smoker was anxious about factory work \u201cbecause I\u2019d feel I was making things that would kill people and wound people, and this seemed to me such an awful thing\u201d. She thought that in the services, she would be less directly involved in killing the enemy and so volunteered before she risked being called up for factory work. The WRNS also offered women more opportunities for skilled specialist work in addition to general domestic roles.<\/p>\n Newspaper adverts and recruitment posters depicted a smart woman in uniform calling for volunteers to \u201cJoin the Wrens \u2013 and Free a Man for the Fleet\u201d. Paulina Nichol, who served as a WRNS meteorologist, recalls wearing \u201ca straight blue serge skirt, black stockings, dark blue bloomers (a fleecy material) and a jacket which\u2026 fitted pretty well if you were lucky.\u201d<\/p>\n And, unlike the women of the ATS, most Wrens were volunteers rather than conscripts. With thousands of applications every time new positions opened, the WRNS was seen as the most exclusive of the auxiliaries, and the recruiting officers were able to take their pick of the best candidates. But when women were called up, they were in for a shock. Each one had to earn her place \u2013 and her uniform.<\/p>\n The women first reported as probationers to Mill Hill, London, for two weeks\u2019 basic training. Dressed in overalls, there was none of the promised glamour. According to 19-year-old Eileen Drury, the whole affair was \u201cdesigned to put us off\u2026 it was perfectly dreadful, nearly killed us!\u201d Lectured on naval traditions, the women were taught to drill, and any romantic notions of crewing sailboats were quickly dismissed. Josephine Pearce says, \u201cI remember spending most of the fortnight scrubbing rough bare concrete floors\u2026 cleaning, cleaning, cleaning and more cleaning.\u201d<\/p>\n The recruiters were seeking resilient women who weren\u2019t afraid of hard work or being shouted at by their superiors. Instead of joining an exclusive club based on social class or wealth, Wrens were selected based on their skills and experience. The director, Vera Laughton Mathews, insisted that, apart from the initial appointments in 1939 when the WRNS was being established, all officers should be appointed from the ranks.<\/p>\n After basic training, the women were interviewed. If they were accepted, they were given a chance to choose their role and finally receive their uniforms. Initially, the navy only wanted women for domestic and clerical duties, but even before the war began, they asked Wrens to take on coding and cypher work. To keep communications secret, a coder would encrypt messages to be sent between ships and bases by substituting the text with pre-agreed words and phrases.<\/p>\n However, a Cypher Wren dealt with more confidential material, substituting each letter using a more complex system. Enid Bruce began working as a Wren coder in her home city of Newcastle at the end of 1939. Then, in May 1943, she became a cypher officer on board a troop ship. Wrens were not permitted to serve on large Royal Navy vessels. As well as maintaining its ban on women in combat positions, the navy argued that it must ensure propriety \u2013 there were no separate female quarters on board.<\/p>\n Yet troop ships like Queen Elizabeth<\/em>, which Enid worked on, had been converted from luxury liners, so accommodation was not an issue. In total, approximately 30 Wrens worked on troop ships and handled sensitive information, including messages bound for the Allied leaders\u2019 conferences in Quebec and Tehran.<\/p>\n While the British worked hard to protect their own communications, they were simultaneously trying to break the enemy\u2019s codes. Eileen Drury was offered a role so secret that she wasn\u2019t allowed to tell anyone about it \u2013 not even her parents. If anyone asked, she was doing clerical work. Reporting to a top-secret building in Stanmore, London, Eileen joined a small group of Wrens in charge of Britain\u2019s first computers, a series of machines called Bombes.<\/p>\n Built by the country\u2019s top codebreakers at Bletchley Park<\/a>, the Bombes were set up by the Wrens according to precise instructions, and they waited for hours as they processed thousands of combinations, aiming to crack the German naval codes. Allied convoys transporting troops and valuable supplies were at the mercy of Germany\u2019s submarines, the U-boats. If Bletchley could break a code in time, the convoys could be warned in advance of the enemy\u2019s plans.<\/p>\n When the Bombe suddenly stopped, the Wren noted the position of the dials, and the information was sent back to the team at Bletchley. Eileen says the Wrens were under \u201ca lot of pressure to be quick and terribly accurate and not to make mistakes\u2026 we knew if we were quick and could get the message up quickly, we could save a lot of lives\u201d.<\/p>\n Eileen later volunteered for service abroad, spending two years working for South East Asia Command in Colombo, Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka), dealing with Japanese codes. Wrens first went overseas in 1941, and by the end of the war they had served in Ceylon, Egypt, Kenya, Singapore, Iraq, South Africa, the United States and Northern Europe. They supported the Royal Navy across the globe.<\/p>\n While the majority of women were still employed in domestic roles (such as cooking and cleaning) by 1941, the number of jobs available to women increased significantly. For instance, all naval despatch riders were Wrens, delivering messages by motorbike, and they also began crewing small craft within the navy\u2019s harbours. As meteorologists, their forecasts informed the navy and its air force, the Fleet Air Arm, ahead of manoeuvres. In the months leading up to D-Day<\/a>, the Wrens helped build up knowledge of how weather systems behaved across the Channel and the impact these could have on the operation.<\/p>\n From parachute packers to radar plotters, the list of jobs kept growing. New technologies such as radar required more people on the ground to install and maintain equipment, leading to a growth in mechanical roles. Female conscription was introduced in December 1941, and over the next year WRNS membership doubled from 10,653 to 22,898, peaking at 74,635 in 1944.<\/p>\nWhat was WRNS training like?<\/h3>\n
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>What roles were the Wrens given?<\/h3>\n
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>How did the WRNS change during the war?<\/h3>\n