LONDON SPY TRIAL

Press, Volume C, Issue 29467, 20 March 1961, Page 9

LONDON SPY TRIAL

Defence Case Opens Reuter—Copyright) LONDON, March 1«. A 4e-year-old woman civil em Noyed at the Admiralty’s UnderWater Weapons Centre todav . told an Old Bailey Court - trying her and four other persons accused of operating * spy ring of her work withsecret anti-submarine test pamphlets. Ethel Gee was the first of the five accused to go into the witness box when the defence case opened. She worked at the centre, at , Portland, on the south coast, from 1950 until her arrest in January this year. In 1958 she began handling the test pamphlets, which were kept m a strongroom. She said that when requests came from firms and dockyards to whom the pamphlets were sent, she took their numbers down cn a separate piece of paper, and would then go to the strongroom to look for them shown a piece of paper with test pamphlet numbers on it found by police when they raided her home, she said she had used it as a shopping list and mentioned Froceries listed m the back There must have been “dozens” of such scraps of paper, and she knew of no instructions as to what to do with them. Asked why she had taken notes on the workings of a hydroplane and an oscillator she said she had been dealing with a "particularly trying customer,” and writing things down helped her to remember. The Admiralty’s adviser on underwater warfare, appearing as a prosecution witness, said a film said to have been handed over to another accused included a photograph of details of Dreadnought. Britain’s first atomicpowered submarine. Protest March In support of nuclear disarmament a group of young people will spend Easter marching from the Featherston war memorial through the Rimutakas to Wellington. The march will end in a public rally in Parliament grounds on Easter Monday afternoon. It is timed to coincide with this year’s British demonstration against continued nuclear testing (P.A)