Cdr John Edward ‘Teddy’ Poulden RN

Teddy Poulden was an Admiralty officer who spent the majority of the Second World War at HMS Anderson, the GC&CS outpost known as the Far East Combined Bureau (FECB) in Colombo, Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka). He was the key Signals Officer at Anderson by October 1944. He represented the Commander-in-Chief Eastern Fleet at a meeting in Bletchley Park Naval Section in October 1944 to discuss Japanese Naval communications. Poulden remained at Anderson until April 1945 when he was ordered by the Admiralty not to engage in UKUSA policy matters without first consulting London.

Poulden was born in 1915 and joined the Royal Navy as a cadet, going on to become a signals specialist within the senior Service. During the early part of the Second World War he was deployed onboard the HMS Prince of Wales as its signals officer and was on the ship when Churchill sailed to Placentia Bay to meet the US President Franklin Roosevelt in August 1941. A year later he was onboard HMS Anson, Vice Admiral Fraser's flagship (then Second in Command of the Home Fleet), again as its communications officer.

In 1946 Poulden wrote the chapter on ‘Interception and Communications at HMS Anderson,’ as part of the Bletchley Park Naval Section History. The post war beginnings of the Australian Defence Signals Bureau (DSB) was going to be reliant on a new Director being seconded from GCHQ. Commander Poulden had already been identified as a suitable appointee from the breadth of experience he had gained during the Second World War. DSB formally began operations on the 1st April 1947 and Poulden took up his role on that date, after four Australian applicants for the Directorship role had been rejected.

In 1975 Poulden remarked that his appointment was largely due to the fact that at the time Central Bureau and FRUMEL did not agree on anything and had few open lines of communication due to political infighting. He went on to serve as DSB Director for its first three years with a salary of £1150 per year, leading an organisation that was only projected to have 132 personnel. He spent much of his early tenure working to shape an effective SIGINT organisation. The unit was originally located at Albert Barracks in Melbourne and Poulden would fill all the senior posts at DSB with twenty GCHQ personnel.

When New Zealand signed into the UKUSA partnership which became the ’Five Eyes’ it was Poulden who signed the document on behalf of New Zealand. In the 1950s and 1960s he went on to occupy some senior roles within GCHQ – including succeeding Bill Bonsall as the head of J Division and SUKLO (the senior GCHQ representative in Washington). In the mid-1970s Poulden retired as the Head of Engineering at GCHQ and was taken on part-time as the first head of Computing at SIS. He died in 1992.