Eira (left) and Betty (right) Hebert, with their parents, Wembley 1940

For two-and-a-half years now, I have been working on a page for this website entitled ‘Females in the Far East’. The aim of the page is to document as many of the women who went out to the Far East and support SOE as possible. The stories that have emerged have been fascinating, and the insight into women’s lives in the 1930s and wartime Britain quite special. What has made the project even more exciting, however, are the private messages I have received from relatives of these women. This post is the result of one such contact made through the website by the grandson of Eira Herbert. In what can only be described as a very generous level of sharing, Thomas scanned his grandparents’ photograph albums and enabled me to see glimpses of a very hidden world – the world of the women of SOE in the Far East through their eyes.

What has become abundantly clear after going through (so far) nearly 300 of these female files is that many of these women wanted some adventure in their lives. More than a few files have women writing to SOE saying that they would not resign from their job if they couldn’t get an overseas posting. They wanted to go abroad for at least a few reasons, including adventure, or to escape wartime Britain with all its restrictions, and sometimes just to get out of mundane jobs. There is also a sense of duty that shines through, but most of all, I get the sense that they felt bored and stifled by the rigid social expectations of the time. Here was a chance to escape, and by July 1945, approximately 723 women had managed to do exactly that – escape to the Far East with SOE.

Betty and Eira were born in South Wales in 1924 and 1919 respectively. They had already experienced something of living abroad, as their dad’s job took them to Pennsylvania from 1929 – 1937. Being five years older than Betty, Eira completed secondary school in Pennsylvania, attending the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) Memorial High School in Wilkes-Barre. After returning to the UK, Eira workd for the Ministry of Labour from June 1938 until joining SOE in November 1943. Betty was emloyed as a comptometer operator from May 1938, first at United Dairies and then with CAV Electrical Engineers. A Comptometer was the first calculator, invented in 1887.  They both joined SOE in November 1943 and then, after a passage to India, both worked as ‘Cypherenes’ in Meerut, India.

Betty and Eira: childhood in South Wales

Cypherenes, more commonly known as ‘Cipherettes’, were the women entrusted with working in Wireless Telegraphy (W/T). The volume of W/T traffic increased hugely from February 1945 as the number of teams inserted into the field by SOE across Southeast Asia increased. The surge in deployments was made possible by the delivery of Liberators and Dakotas to the RAF Special Duties Squadrons, replacing the old and very knackered Hudson airframes that SOE’s India MIssion had relied upon since 1942. The 14 Army was also on the offensive, having defeated the Japanese at the Battles of Imphal and Kohima. Betty and Eira would soon be facing twelve hour shifts, either encoding messages to be transmitted to the SOE teams behind the Japanese lines, or decoding the messages that these teams sent to India. For security reasons, they would have been either encoding or decoding, with separate huts allocated for these jobs.

When she joined SOE, little did Eira know that while working as a Cipherette in India, she would find her husband. Major George Charles USAAF was based at Chabua, but was sent to Delhi to liaise with the British, which is where Eira met him. Here he is, on the left, photgraphed with his family in Iowa in 1941:

George reached India before the girls. There are photographs of him and pals out sightseeing and hunting in their spare time:

The first photo in the album to show that he had met the girls is dated 15 March 1944. On the back of the photo, it was written: ‘What do you think of this? A candid snap. Elizabeth bending to hit a mosquito. Irene playing with her hands and Gwen wondering what everyone else is doing. Yakersian [?? unintelligable] Gardens.’

In May 1944, Eira was having fun on a bike. On the back is the caption ‘It’s easy when you know how!! Meerut May ’44:

Movement was restricted, but it seems they made the most of their leisure time:

Travelling around Delhi in June 1944:

By July 1944, the first photo of Eira and George looking more like a couple appears. He has his arm around her waist. The caption on the back reads ‘I think he likes those sunglasses’:

The bicycle was upgraded in July:

George is the original Steve McQueen:

Also in July, George was promoted to Captain. This is what a USAAF Captain’s accomodation (judging by the wardrobe) looked like in India:

In August, the girls were away in Kashmir together, taking photographs and writing on them to send them home to their parents. There were bungalows and houseboats, canoes and ponies:

A spot of swimming:

Lots of photos of sisters having fun on their holiday:

By September, George and Eira are clearly a bit more intimate:

The sisters were still out and about together, in this photo taken at the top of a minaret at the Taj Mahal is Eira on the right and ‘Gladys’ on the left. There are two Gladys on the ‘Females in the Far East’ page. Gladys Hobson was in Meerut and worked as a cipherette so this could well be her:

A snake charmer!

George relaxing in January 1945:

There is a seven month gap in the photographs between January and July 1945. This was SOE’s busiest period of the war in the Far East, so perhaps it was due to wok that there are no recreational photos for this period. In addition, between March and August 1945, Betty was posted to Kandy in Sri Lanka. This one was taken in Musoorie where just Eira and George appear to have spent some leave together in July:

In September, the sisters were in Simla. Here’s Betty. Simla was the more temperate Hill Station where the whole apparatus of the Raj used to reside during the hot months of the year:

In October 1945, George and Eira got married:

The sisters went home to Britain in November 1945, but it was not long before Eira was off to the United States to begin her married life in Iowa. Here, she has arrived off the boat, and George is about to drive her to her new home:

To finish, some snapshots of wartime India:

Eira passed away in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1990. Her grandson writes: ‘She never went into much detail about her wartime experiences, but even the vaguest stories of coded messages and commandos and spies were enough to capture this little boy’s imagination.’

A little of her wartime experiences were fortunately captured in these photographs; they certainly seem to show that the sisters got the adventure they signed up for when they joined SOE.