Trent Park: WWII listening centre to become a museum

Trent Park House in WWII

Plans are well underway to create a Museum at a little-known facility where what was then a new type of information gathering was carried out by the Allies. During WWII, Trent Park, a beautiful country home owned by Sir Philip Sassoon, was used to house high-ranking German prisoners of war.

What the prisoners never realized was that they were being systematically listened to, wherever they were in the house and garden. As well as built-in microphones, they could be overheard through bugs set in potted plants, trees and garden shrubs.

Nor did they dream that a concealed tunnel gave access to a basement loaded with listening equipment, where secret eavesdroppers worked night and day to record what the German military commanders discussed and pass the intelligence they gleaned to British military authorities.

As the masterminds of the plan expected, these high-ranking prisoners soon began to relax under the regime of special treatment in their new surroundings. As they did, talk among themselves became more lax. Conversing freely in their native tongue, the POWs discussed German war plans and new weapons technologies. Among the critical subjects the British minders learned about in this way was the V2 rockets — where they were being produced and how the enemy planned to do use them.

Today reconstruction work on the house is proceeding, in concert with the development by the Berkeley Group of a number of private homes, some of which have already been sold.