The villagers of Shenley must have been more than a little curious when, in 1942, armed guards suddenly appeared outside the gates of a country house in Green Street.

For all their whispered speculation, however, they could not have predicted the impact the top secret activities carried out there would have on the outcome of the war.

Lyndhurst house was used to intercept German intelligence messages sent in morse code, the transcripts of which were then relayed to code-breakers at Bletchley Park.

Historians recognise that the information deciphered at Bletchley Park, concerning German military and naval movements, shortened the war by up to a year.

One of the wireless operators at Shenley's interceptor station was Joyce Walters, who served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) and arrived there in 1942 when it first opened.

"We could not even tell our own family what we were doing we were warned that, if we went into a public place, we were not allowed to discuss our work," she said.

Joyce, who is now 82 and lives in Norfolk, was a member of one of four watches which worked in shifts to ensure that messages were intercepted 24-hours-a-day.

A watch had around 12 wireless operators, and each was given a radio frequency which they had to tune into and transcribe any morse code that they heard.

Their transcripts were written on special forms, which, once complete, were sent by teleprinter or courier to the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire.

Each watch would normally work a four-hour shift, although the operators would often struggle to intercept because the enemy was trying to jam its transmissions.

"I had no idea where the signals I was listening to were coming from and we were always kept in the dark about what was happening with the war," said Joyce.

"The only time we knew something was when the German wireless stations started closing down then we guessed that they must be on the run."

Intelligence from interceptor stations played a significant part in the naval struggle in the Atlantic, the North Africa campaign in 1942 and the D-Day landings.

The work of code-breakers at Bletchley Park was recently highlighted in the film Enigma, starring Kate Winslet, which was made at Elstree Film and Television Studios.

Joyce, whose story was told in Best of British magazine last year, spent around a year at Shenley, before moving to another station on the North Yorkshire moors.

"People in the village were very friendly," she said, "we were given the use of hospital's swimming pool and one or two of us got free beer for helping out at the pub."

Sixty years later, Joyce is keen to ensure that she and her fellow wireless operators get the credit they deserve for the part they played in the battle for information.

She feels too much publicity has been given to the mathematicians at Bletchley Park, with little praise afforded to those who worked tirelessly to pick up the radio signals.

"They never seem mention those of us who provided the messages in the first place without us they would never have had anything to work with," she said.