Mauritius in Danger

When the war began in 1939, Edward Twining was working for the British Colonial Service on the island of Mauritius and entirely on his own initiative began monitoring Vichy French signals emanating from Madagascar and Réunion. In this he was helped by his sister-in-law, Evelyn DuBuisson, who turned out to have a talent for codebreaking. After the outbreak of war with Japan, Mauritius was in danger of invasion but Twining began to monitor Japanese communications, taking advantage of the height of Mauritius, which enabled it to pick up Japanese transmissions that could not be picked up in other Allied territories. Since he had shown that Mauritius was able to pass on valuable intelligence to London, three of the precious graduates of the Bedford Japanese School, Robert Sellar, Elizabeth Anderson and Francis Dashwood, were sent out to Mauritius. Sellar did codebreaking there, Anderson ran Japanese classes for locals working in Twining’s covert organization and Dashwood did intelligence work.