Secrets of wartime images revealed

​A FORMER Derbyshire man has told for the first time of his secret wartime role studying photos taken in  the skies above  Europe.

Geoffrey Stone, who went on to become head of Heanor Grammar School, was stationed in Buckinghamshire with a team of academics who examined the shots in a bid to gain vital intelligence.

Many of the millions of aerial photographs taken have now been released for the first time by the Edinburgh-based Aerial Reconnaissance Archives (TARA).

Mr Stone spent two years from 1941 as an instructor at the School of Military Intelligence in Matlock, then signed up to become a photographic interpreter.

On a country estate in Buckinghamshire, the intelligence officer carried out detailed research of aerial images captured by pilots on secret reconnaissance missions, looking  for clues about German activities.

Mr Stone, now aged 90, said: “You had to work out what you were looking at by the clues  around it.

“It’s rather like a detective story.”

A self-confessed railway buff, one of Mr Stone’s tasks was to produce a detailed account of train lines and bridges in France, while another project involved plotting the defences of Corfu.

Mr Stone described the set-up at the Allied Central Interpretation Unit   at RAF Medmenham as similar to an academic institution.

Women were on an “absolute equal footing” with the men and were taken on for their abilities, he said.

Many were archaeologists or geographers and included Cambridge University’s first female professor, Dorothy Garrod, and Winston Churchill’s daughter, Sarah.

The majority of work was routine and involved long-term research.

Moments of significance, such as sightings of German V1 Doodlebugs and V2 rockets and the sinking of the German battleship   Tirpitz, all went through the unit. , but documenting enemy activities sometimes led to lighter interludes.

Mr Stone recalled the time Prof Garrod turned to her colleagues while studying a picture and said: “I say, look, a circus”, before pointing out two elephants.

“About a month later there was a squeal and she said ’there’s a baby elephant now’,” he added.

Mr Stone also joked that he had once spoken to the British Prime Minister, saying: “One day Winston Churchill rang up and said ‘Is Sarah there?’ and I said ‘I’ll find her’. You couldn’t mistake the voice.”

Mr Stone had another contact with celebrity later in the war when he sat next to fellow photographic interpreter Dirk Bogarde  at 2nd Army HQ.

“He was then a trainee actor – Lieutenant Van den Bogaerde of the Queen’s Royal Regiment, as he was then,” Mr Stone said.

“He was acting a role the whole time. He played the young arty type.”

Mr Stone, who now lives in  Nantwich, Cheshire, was studying French and German at Manchester University when the war broke out. He joined the   intelligence corps in 1940.

He said: “I was a bit bored and was looking for something a bit different. I was keen on maps and photography.”

After the war, Mr Stone  went into teaching. He spent 20 years as head of Heanor Grammar School and then was the principal when it became South East Derbyshire College.

Widower Mr Stone, who is a founder member of the Medmenham Club for former and serving RAF and Army photographic interpreters, expressed his gratitude to  everyone involved in protecting the archive.

He said: “We might well have lost the archive and it would have been catastrophic. The great tragedy is that an enormous number of photographs were destroyed.”