The voices of the veterans

A 100-year-old veteran has described how she went “from school uniform into naval uniform” when she joined the Wrens to help defeat Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

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Growing up in London, Dorothea Barron had been a schoolgirl during the Blitz before joining the Women’s Royal Naval Service in 1943, after turning 18.

During her three years of service she worked as a visual signaller and was responsible for communicating with ships coming in and out of port by Morse code, using an Aldiss lamp, and semaphore.

Her service saw her stationed at a number of naval sites around the UK-including in Scotland where she spent much of the war, initially at Port Edgar on the Firth of Forth and then Rosyth in Fife, Aberdeen, and Campbeltown on the Kintyre peninsula.