Listening to the Enemy: War Comes to a Cornish Village, St Erth Radio Station 1939-1964 by Michael Griffiths is now available!
If you take the road out of St Erth and travel up the hill towards St Erth Praze, you could easily miss, on your right, a dilapidated single storey concrete building. It is in a field close by the edge of the road. This is the guard/generator hut of a very secret and important MI6 Radio Listening Station. Together with its sister sites across the country, it had a profound effect on the outcome of World War 2.
Listening to the Enemy is a fascinating story of the Bletchley Park outstation. Over several years, Mike Griffiths has painstakingly researched the origins and purpose of this site. His father, Harry, was a radio operator at the station throughout the war and he recorded many of his contacts in a little black nook – his ‘Code Book’. This book – full of German and Italian radio nets, brevity codes and Double Agent call signs, encapsulates the role of Bletchley Park; the home of the Codebreakers.
St Erth Radio Station and its sister sites were quite literally the ears of Bletchley Park.
