“Life is going on just the same”: onboard with the WRANS

Doris Evelyn Jeffs was born in Perth in June 1922. She joined the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service (WRANS) at Fremantle, Western Australia on the 8 February 1943 and was posted to the local shore establishment, HMAS Leeuwin.

Women had been working as civilian telegraphists for the Royal Australian Navy since April 1941, but the WRANS was not formally established until October 1942. There were some restrictions to what the women could do within the service, including not being allowed to serve on board ships. However, there were plenty of other roles they could fill on land to free up the men to take on active duties.

Doris started out in the role of messenger but quickly gained qualifications in telegraphic communications and became a probationary telegraphist. The workbook from Doris's training, which she likely referred to throughout her service, is held in the Memorial's Private Records collection. In June 1943, Doris transferred to HMAS Harman, Canberra’s wireless receiving station, where she passed her probationary period in October.

Also held in the collection are letters exchanged between Doris and her friends, which provide a glimpse into their lives at Harman. Being a telegraphist was hard work, with long shifts decoding Morse signals from Allied vessels and intercepting Japanese radio messages, and it could be mentally and physically draining. As Doris wrote to her beau, Corporal Alwin Lacey: “I’ve had two years and have had it; I wouldn’t care if I never saw or heard Morse again ever.”

There were also the usual work-related discontentment’s. “Yesterday we had a stoppage of leave 'cause we didn’t pick up our liberty cards when we came aboard. This place is getting impossible”, Doris wrote. Her sentiments were echoed by her colleagues, one of whom wrote to Doris while she was on leave, “hope you’re having a wonderful time. I’M NOT!!”

But it wasn’t all hard toil. The women were granted shore leave to go into town for trips to the shops, football matches and the movies. The same month Doris arrived at Harman, she and some of her colleagues were given a private tour of Parliament House by West Australian Senator Robert Clothier. The senator was a friend of Doris’s father and ran into Doris and her friends during a trip into town.

On return from another outing, Doris wrote of the WRANS antics after they ran into a herd of cattle along a stock route: “We clambered up an embarkment and scaled a barbed wire fence. Peg got stuck halfway. We’d just got through when a drover came into sight, and he was laughing so much he nearly fell off his horse. He yelled out ‘don’t panic they’re only calves … Gee we felt prawns. I still reckon they were bulls for all that.”

Doris and Alwin were engaged in January 1945, when they both still on active duty, and married in December that year after Doris returned to Perth. Doris discharged from service in January 1946 and remained in Western Australia with her husband until she died in 2004.

Doris donated her letters, workbook and identity card to the Memorial in 1992.

To find out more about visiting the Charles Bean Research Centre to view non-digitised records from the Memorial’s collection such as Doris’ letters, please visit the Research at the Memorial page.