The WRNS of the First World War was demobilized in 1919 but many of its original members enrolled again when the Service was re-formed in April 1939. It was set up to replace various categories of naval personnel in shore establishments and thus to release men for active service.
Although serving mainly on shore, the Wrens conformed to naval usage and naval ways of speech. Though living in buildings, they went ashore, and slept “below decks” in cabins. They never used a kitchen but worked in “galleys”.
Many of the Wrens were recruited from the families of naval personnel living near the ports at which WRNS units were being formed. Many of these were classed as “immobile” that is, they continued to live in their own homes after they joined the Service.
WRNS units were attached to nearly every naval shore establishment in the United Kingdom, and many service abroad in both the Middle and Far East theatres of operations. Many Wrens were employed in highly secret naval communications duties, and there was a specially trained class of ciphering personnel decoding German messages.
In all their duties Wrens displayed tremendous courage and spirit as has been shown earlier in this text.
There is one story which particularly typifies their sense of commitment.
A Wren ciphering officer had just finished her watch and gone into a hotel during an air raid, when the building was struck and she was buried up to her neck in debris.
Fire broke out in the upper storeys of the wrecked hotel and crept steadily nearer to the trapped Wren, as the rescue party worked frantically to get her out.
They succeeded with a bare margin of time and were trying to put her in the ambulance for hospital when she struggled off the stretcher saying there was something she must do first.
She had realized that the key to the secret ciphering office was still in her possession.
Terribly bruised and shaken as she was, she insisted on going straight back to the duty officer to give up her key.
Then she collapsed. Weeks later she was still in hospital recovering from her injuries.
Such was the spirit of the WRNS, proving the sister of the Senior Service not unworthy of its ancestry.
