Women's Emergency Signalling Corps

The Women's Emergency Signalling Corps (WESC) was founded by Florence Violet McKenzie in 1939 as a volunteer organisation in Sydney.

As she told The Australian Women's Weekly in 1978: "When Neville Chamberlain came back from Munich and said 'Peace in our time' [sic], I began preparing for war.

In 1939 McKenzie established the Women's Emergency Signalling Corps in Sydney in her Clarence Street rooms – known affectionately as "Sigs".

[4] It quickly became apparent that men in the armed forces also urgently needed training in wireless communications and McKenzie's female trainees were in a position to train the male servicemen directly: Early in the war, one young would-be pilot tried to enlist but was refused because he didn't know Morse code.

Sometimes military intelligence personnel would appear at the school with complaints from guests in the pub next door, who thought a spy operation was at work when they heard Morse code through the walls each evening.

[8] By August 1940, there was a waiting list of 600 women for the small school, and WESC-trained telegraphists were teaching men from the armed forces and merchant navy.

"[11] In early January 1941, Commander Newman, the Navy's Director of Signals and Communications, visited the WESC headquarters on Clarence Street to test McKenzie's trainees.

[15] Despite the formation of women's auxiliaries in the Army and Air Force, the RAN remained reluctant to formally enlist the telegraphists.

[16][17] The WRANS ranks expanded to some 2,600 by the end of the war, representing about 10 per cent of the entire Royal Australian Naval force at the time.

More than forty police officers attended the school in their spare time to reach the necessary standard for enlisting as pilots in the RAAF.