Margaret Cooper, nee Douglas, (25 Jan 1918 - 18 Jul
2016) was a WRNS officer who served at Bletchley Park.
Margaret Cooper was at a car showroom in Hamilton,
Ont., in the early 1950s when her husband, Craig, struck up a
conversation with a young German immigrant. He mentioned that his father
had been the captain of a U-boat during the Second World War. Although
Mrs. Cooper knew the captain’s name, the submarine he was on and where
it had operated, she didn’t say a word, since she was still under the
strictures of Britain’s Official Secrets Act.
Mrs. Cooper, who
died on July 18 in Hamilton, Ont., developed her extensive knowledge of
German U-boats and their crews while decoding messages during the war at
Bletchley Park, the British code-breaking facility.
“We knew
everything about all the U-boats. We knew all their captains,” Mrs.
Cooper told a Canadian newspaper several years ago.
But for
decades she kept her work secret.
“She never spoke about her work
at Bletchley Park, even to my father, until the Official Secrets Act on
that aspect of the war was lifted in the 1970s,” said her son, Ian
Cooper. She then told her family about what went on and spoke on the
record for the Memory Project, a collection of veterans’ accounts of
their wartime service.
“In August, 1942, [Field Marshal Bernard]
Montgomery’s forward forces had brought [Field Marshal Erwin] Rommel’s
army to a halt. RAF bombers [and] British submarines had sunk 47 supply
ships totalling 169,000 tons. All except two had been a direct result of
decrypts from BP [Bletchley Park],” Mrs. Cooper told The Memory Project.
“In October, 1942, 44 per cent of Axis shipping leaving Italy for Libya
was sunk. By Nov. 4, [Rommel] reported, ‘Afrika Korps strength is down
to 24 serviceable tanks.’ [By] Nov. 10, [it was] 11 tanks. So that
really brought to the end the war in North Africa.”
Margaret
Elizabeth Douglas was born on Jan. 25, 1918, in Punta del Este, Uruguay.
Her Canadian father, Jack Douglas, had moved to Argentina to buy and
operate a cattle ranch. He was successful and had a beach house in
Uruguay, across the Rio de la Plata from Buenos Aires. Margaret’s
mother, Vera, was born in Argentina and was part of the large British
colony there.
At the time, Argentina was one of the richest
countries in the world, and there were so many Anglo-Argentines that
Buenos Aires had two English language newspapers, the Standard and the
Herald (the latter of which still exists).
Young Margaret led an
idyllic life on the family ranch in the interior of Argentina. She and
her brother, Sholto, were sent to school in Britain, but returned to
live in Argentina (after a trip to Indai). When the Second World War broke out, the two siblings
soon boarded a ship for the treacherous crossing to Britain. She was
unaware of it at the time, but the German U-boats patrolling the
Atlantic would become the focus of Margaret Douglas’s careful scrutiny
once she reached her destination.
When she arrived in England she
joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) and she was asked whether
she wanted to be a cook or work in coding, which involved encoding and
deciphering military messages. It turned out it was much more than that.
“We were called to the chief officer’s office and she pointed to a
letter which she said was from [British Prime Minister] Winston
Churchill asking for some volunteers to go on to a job which was very,
very, secret,” Mrs. Cooper recalled in The Memory Project.
“[The
chief officer] couldn’t tell us anything about it, but it was very
urgent. So [she asked us to] sleep on it and let her know the next
morning, so I think all but two of us – so that was eight of us –
volunteered to do this job. The next day, we were duly put on a bus; we
didn’t know where we were going and landed up in Bletchley [Park].”
“What we were going to do at that time was to work on a thing called
a Bombe, which had nothing to do with being a ‘bomb’ as you would think
of it. It was a machine which had been more or less invented by a man
called Turing, Alan Turing [the British computer scientist], which
helped to find the setting for decoding encoded messages.”
The
Enigma machine was used by the Germans to encrypt messages bound for
armies in the field and ships and submarines at seas. The standard
Enigma machine had three rotors that allowed the coding system to be
changed every day. The one used by the German navy was even more
complex, employing four rotors.
Though Margaret Douglas was told
at the start that her job offered no chance for promotion, she became an
officer. Most of her time at Bletchley Park was spent in the U-boat
room.
She dealt with all the messages regarding U-boats and
passed them on to the Admiralty, as the headquarters of the Royal Navy
is known.
“When a message was sent that a U-boat crew member’s
wife had given birth, they knew about it. That message was unusual and
it made it easier to crack the code,” said her son Ian.
A month
and half before the Allied invasion of Normandy, Margaret Douglas was
entrusted with a bigger job: helping track U-boat activity in the
English Channel, the route of the invading force.
“I was sent
down to Plymouth [on the coast] on the 26th of April 1944. Plymouth and
Portsmouth were really the chief naval invasion ports of France [for the
D-Day landings]. So absolutely everything was happening there. And I was
to be, well, I was on the staff of the chief of staff, but I was liaison
between Bletchley and Plymouth; should any U-boat messages relative to
that area come up that I could deliver them to the appropriate person,”
Mrs. Cooper told the Memory Project.
The members of the WRNS
(known as “Wrens”) stationed at Bletchley Park were billeted at nearby
Woburn Abbey, which had been seconded from the Duke of Bedford during
the war. One evening in 1942 the young officer Margaret Douglas was
standing on the platform at Bletchley Station during a blackout when an
officer of the Royal Canadian Air Force started a conversation with her.
His train to London arrived and they never exchanged names.
The
RCAF officer made the hour-long ride to London then continued to North
Africa, where he commanded a mobile radar group. He was so impressed by
the woman on the platform that he wrote a letter addressed to “The blond
Wren from Argentina on the platform at Bletchley Station.” It actually
made its way to the local post office, and even though the letter’s
intended recipient never told him where she worked, the letter found her
at Bletchley Park. A long distance correspondence sprung up.
When
Craig Cooper returned to England on leave, he proposed marriage to
Margaret Douglas. They were married in March of 1945. He soon returned
to Canada, and his new wife followed on a troop ship filled with war
brides.
Craig Cooper, who had taught Latin and Greek before the
war, returned to that profession. The family bought a 65-acre farm in
Carlisle, 15 kilometres north of Burlington. They raised cattle, kept
horses and operated a cherry orchard, thus the name, Cherry Hill Farm.
Mrs. Cooper raised four children and lived on the farm until 2001,
at which point she moved to Waterdown, a community in Hamilton, Ont. She
drove a car until last year and was mentally sharp. Her son said she
followed the Brexit debate in Britain and didn’t like the result.
Mrs. Cooper, who was 98, was predeceased by her husband, and leaves
her children, Elizabeth Salton, Ian Cooper, Jane Toews and Peter Cooper;
nine grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren.
Note: 1.
He brother, Sholto, was reportedly also an intelligence officer.
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