My father joined the Royal Navy in the early 1940s. He didn't have to join up at all as he had been offered a place at Edinburgh University and would have been allowed to carry on with his academic career had he chosen to do so. But his younger brother had joined the Merchant Navy at the age of fifteen and had subsequently been killed when his ship was blown up in the mouth of the Thames and dad felt too guilty to opt out of the war in favour of a university education.
We know that he trained in communications and that he turned down the chance of an officer's commission as he wanted to stay with what he would have called "the ordinary blokes". He rarely spoke of his war service and we know he had signed the Official Secrets Act ( do all service people do that?) He was fluent in German, which might have some bearing on my question.
One day, in the late 1970s as he and my mum were travelling on a holiday trip, he pointed vaguely out of the car window and said "I worked over there during the war" and then left it at that. "Over there" was Bletchley Park. But he was in the navy - what on earth was he doing at Bletchley, we all wondered.
In 1945, he was in the Netherlands. We know this because of the gift ( a pair of tiny wooden clogs) which he brought back for his mother, a Dutch dictionary which lived on our bookshelf all through my childhood and a mysterious German document, dated May 1945, which we had never seen until my sister unearthed it in dad's belongings, quite recently, some thirty-seven years after he died. We had it translated by a German friend this weekend and it turns out to be a transfer paper for a German serviceman, from a hospital in Den Haag to a hospital closer to where he lived in Germany.
So, the questions are - What on earth was my dad, a Royal Navy rating ( so we believe), doing at, or very close to, Bletchley Park; why would he have been in The Hague in 1945, before the end of the war and how did he come to be in possession of a German soldier's transfer document ( surely that ought to have gone to the new hospital with the patient?).
I am sending for his war service record but I know from my partner's father's documents that we will only be given the names and dates of the "ships" he was on, with no detail as to where, or why.
Are there any naval WW2 historians who might be able to help us to fathom this out? We do know that we will probably never answer the question fully but any ideas are welcome.
Many thanks,
Jen
