London - Roslyn Sulcas
The German generals were chatting freely, exchanging tidbits about the V-2 rocket, the world’s first long-range ballistic missile that the Nazis were developing. It was May 1943, and the soldiers, prisoners of war captured in North Africa, were living at Trent Park, a grand country house in a North London suburb.
Trent Park had been the home of Philip Sassoon, a wealthy politician and celebrated host, and the prisoners lived a life of ease in the spacious mansion set amid 400 acres of parkland. They wore their uniforms, retained the valets who had been captured with them, walked in the woods, read in the library, played billiards and card games, and foraged for mushrooms.
What they did not know was that they were part of an audacious, improbable and brilliantly successful strategy for extracting information that would play a major role in the Allies’ World War II victory.
Lulled into complacency by the apparent respect for their status, these top military commanders had no idea they were effectively on a stage set, a kind of “Truman Show” in which their encounters were engineered and their conversations monitored through a complex network of microphones hidden in light fittings, chimneys, plant pots, trees and statues.
The microphones were wired to a secret underground lair below the mansion’s grand reception rooms, where “listeners” — mostly German Jewish refugees — recorded and transcribed the conversations for British military intelligence.
The Trent Park operation remained classified until 1996, and until now this piece of wartime history has been little known to a wider public. But this week Trent Park House of Secrets opened as a museum that shows both the upstairs world of gracious living and the downstairs world of hushed, clandestine work.
“Everyone knows about Bletchley Park,” said Giuseppe Albano, the museum’s director, referring to Britain’s famed World War II code-breaking headquarters. “But Trent House was part of the same network of intelligence houses, and as important.”
A house has stood in Trent Park, once part of the estate of King George III, since the late 18th century, but it was Sassoon, the scion of a wealthy Iraqi Jewish merchant family who transformed it into a glamorous getaway in the 1920s. He changed the facade, opened up and extended the house, and added a swimming pool, tennis courts, a polo field, a golf course and an air strip.
There he entertained politicians, actors, writers and royalty, including Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Noël Coward, George Bernard Shaw and TE Lawrence, with what one guest described as hospitality “on an Oriental scale.”
“The whole house is a charade, a Victorian house rebuilt to look like a Georgian gentleman’s mansion,” said Damian Collins, the author of a biography of Sassoon. “The house was always a show and a fantasy, and Sassoon was like a stage director, moving characters around.”
After Sassoon died in June 1939, at 50, the house became another kind of stage set with a different cast of characters. Requisitioned by Britain’s war office and overseen by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Kendrick, the house was equipped with false panels and ceilings, secret microphones and recording equipment, all routed to the underground rooms where the listeners worked in pairs for 10- or 12-hour shifts through the day and night.
About 40 listeners garnered intelligence from 84 generals and 22 colonels, most captured in North Africa, and some later in France. It proved hugely significant, providing the Allies with information about the Nazi war machine, new warfare techniques, secret weapons programs and battle plans that could never have been gleaned through conventional interrogation.
Recognition of Trent Park’s pivotal role in the conflict came late. In the 1950s, the house became a teacher training college, later part of Middlesex University. In 2013, the neglected estate was sold to a Malaysian higher education institution, which declared bankruptcy soon after.
Jason Charalambous, a lawyer who had just been elected as a district councilor in the area in 2014, went on a tour of the unkempt grounds and saw the fenced-off house. “I read a concise history, and I decided something had to be done,” he said in an interview in the museum’s cafe. “How on Earth had I not known about this?”
Charalambous began a “Save Trent Park” campaign, assembling a team that included Helen Friy, the author of “The Walls Have Ears,” and Fritz Lustig, one of the last surviving listeners. He also approached David Cholmondeley, the Marquess of Cholmondeley and Philip Sassoon’s great-nephew, who arrived at their first public meeting with an album of photographs and newspaper cuttings.
In 2015, the estate was sold to a property developer, but after extensive lobbying, the group agreed that a museum could occupy the house’s basement and ground floor. Ten years after planning officially began, the new museum offers a meticulous reconstruction of the glamorous reception rooms of the Sassoon era and the gritty subterranean reality of the listeners.
Upstairs, the grand salons used by the generals sport Sasson’s scrolled initials, plush sofas and shelves of leather-bound books. “We were helped by great photos from a 1931 ‘Country Life’ article, and by Lord Cholmondeley who found some of the original furniture,” said Tori Reeve, the exhibition designer and curator.
Downstairs, in cramped quarters, a mannequin sits before the listening equipment and recording apparatus wearing headphones. Stores of period tinned staples (coffee, tea, salt) line larder shelves. The “draft room,” where the manuscripts were typed, translated and copied, and a mess room, have been faithfully recreated.
The New York Times
