WAR TIME INCIDENTS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIV, Issue 291, 6 November 1934, Page 7

WAR TIME INCIDENTS.

RECALLED BY WOMAN’S APPOINTMENT.

The woman who, in 1916, handled the message that brought the news of the first Zeppelin raid over London, now supervises the telephone calls of nearly two thousand guests, daily, at a famous London hotel. She is Miss Edith Sanderson, who has been appointed supervisor of the new telephone exchange at the Regent Palace Hotel. It was while she was stationed at linmingham on the East Coast, in 1916, that the terse message came over the telephone, “Zepplins headed for the coast of England have crossed the German border.” Edith Sanderson, a girl of seventeen, calmly supervised the feverish activities of forty girls, who were warning Britain that the Germans had crossed the North Sea for their first aerial attack on London. Admiral Sir David Beatty (now Earl Beatty) himself presented Miss Sanderson with the 0.8. E. on behalf of the . King. ■ Another war-time incident Miss Sanderson recalls was receiving the message, “A German submarine inside the river Humber.” The Humber hummed with naval activity. At its mouth was a boom defence. This defence was opened only between sunrise and sunset, and then on the wireless instructions of a high naval officer. A German submarine had crept through in the wake of a British naval ship and had then submerged. She came to tho surface and Britain’s war dogs were unleashed. Until the submarine was captured, Miss Sanderson says, she sat with the head ’phones on, in tense excitement. Came the news of the capture and the "all clear,” and she breathed quietly again. When the prisoners were brought ashore Miss Sanderson tells how she was one of the first to see them. She confessed to feeling happy that after all their extreme daring they had been captured with no Joss of life. Daughter of a wireless warrant officer with thirty- years’ service in the British Navy, Miss Sanderson inherited her father’s interest in the telephone, and is an expert in all branches of telephony.