Editorial: Pamela Pigeon one of heroes miles from home

The most senior woman at GCHQ was Pamela Pigeon (centre, middle row), who became the first female intelligence officer to lead a unit. Photo / Supplied

Editorial

EDITORIAL:

Even after all these years, heroes continue to emerge.

For decades, indeed whole lifetimes, ordinary New Zealanders like Pamela Pigeon, now revealed as Britain's first female spy base commander, carried a weighty burden.

Plucked from the relative comforts of civvy street, they were fed into the Allies' desperate war machine and given a job to do, each a cog as important as the next in trying to defeat Hitler and Emperor Hirohito's rampaging armies. Linguists, like Pigeon, railwaymen, coalminers, bank clerks, nurses. Far from the front lines, they toiled, often thanklessly, and miles from home.

And in the end, when fascism was defeated and World War II was finally won, they were sent back home. Back to their old jobs, families, and everyday life.

You often hear that the veterans, the ones who came home, never wanted to talk about the war. The odd funny anecdote perhaps or quiet tear on memorial days. But more often than not, they wanted to put it all behind them.

And the former intelligence workers, the codebreakers and radio fingerprinters like Pigeon and the Bletchley Park lot, had no choice anyway. They had signed lifelong secrecy waivers and even with the publication of Frederick Winterbotham's book The Ultra Secret in 1974, which finally opened up public discussion on Bletchley's work, they took their secrets seriously, often to the grave.

We don't know what became of Pamela Pigeon after the war. Did she stay in the UK? Get married and have children? Or did she return to hometown Wellington and continue a promising languages career?

But what we do know, reiterated by the fact that even 70-plus years later there's still so much we don't know about the war, is that we continue to owe a great debt to those who served.

And not just to the soldiers and pilots, officers and seadogs, but to the quiet contributors, the steady minds and Pamela Pigeons, who gave so much and got so little back.