This series of articles deals with the many hilltop sites on which MI6’s communications section (HQ at Whaddon) put up aerials to support the Allied war effort. But that network - The Whaddon Web - was but one small part of Allied intelligence activity in the Second World War. Leighton Buzzard is one place where Whaddon’s activities overlapped with others. While MI6 put up the aerials at nearby Royal Air Force (RAF) Stoke Hammond (for sending secure messages to the far east), the station itself was run from RAF Stanbridge, just up the road….
World War Two was the first major war in which aircraft played a crucial part. It was no coincidence that all of the three main Royal Air Force command headquarters (Fighter, Bomber and Coastal) were in the Intelligence Zone. Less well-known was a fourth major, secret, RAF station. This was the aforementioned RAF Stanbridge, on the outskirts of Leighton Buzzard.
Its code name, ‘Q Central’, kept its role deliberately vague. It was the place which ran nearly all communications with British forces overseas (as well as dealing with a good deal of Britain’s telephone services). It was, in effect, a vast telephone exchange; the Allied equivalent of the German, Italian and Japanese (Axis) command centres which Bletchley Park listened into. The major difference was that while Bletchley Park broke the Axis codes, the Axis intelligence services never broke the Allied codes used by Q Central.
The machines that the RAF used to encode and send the messages were teleprinters, essentially like the German enigma machines but with many more ‘wheels’. Q Central was very very hush-hush. It had no airfield, but plenty of communication masts. Its commander was a highly intelligent RAF officer called Oswyn Lywood.
RAF Stanbridge/Q Central was only one of many critically important wartime sites spurred off from Britain’s telephone backbone, which ran up Watling Street (the A5). Whaddon was another, Bletchley Park another. With a staff of about 600 servicemen and women, Q Central had become operational in May 1939, 6 months before the war began. It is a popular myth that Britain entered the war all unprepared and ‘winged it’ to victory. Nothing can be further from the truth, It had been preparing for war for years.
Q Central needed plenty of bandwidth as it was the largest telephone and teleprinter exchange in the world. Alan Turing worked on the development of this technology for a while. Again, this is no coincidence. The world’s first electronic digital computer – Colossus, a cornerstone of the modern world – grew directly from British telephone technology.
Because of its importance, every effort was made to camouflage the site. The personnel were largely underground; but in case the Luftwaffe was short of somewhere to bomb, dummy roads and buildings were built ‘topside’, complete with dummy cars. These were, needless to say, at some distance from the subterranean communication halls.
The scale of the operation is staggering. Upwards of a hundred operators were working in the various underground sections at any one time, night and day, seven days a week. The forethought and sheer intelligence of these operations is sobering: one of the sections was solely concerned with sending out dummy traffic, to confuse the enemy.
Apart from (and because of) its communication links, the women of the RAF (WAAFs) who were to work as radar plotters in Fighter Command were also trained at Q Central. Eileen Younghusband was one of them. In her fascinating autobiography One Woman’s war she says:
‘Everything was highly camouflaged. The buildings were covered by a heavy green fabric …matching the colours of the fields… I wondered what was so important here to receive this treatment.’
Eileen Younghusband
As well as disguising the camp from the air, the number of real buildings above ground were kept to a minimum. There were just two station buildings and only twenty-four married quarters. Proposals to build more were quashed so as not to draw attention to the site. Instead, the airmen and women (and more than half of the personnel were women: WAAFs), were billeted in the town of Leighton Buzzard – in the men’s case in Marley Tiles’ disused storage sheds, in the women’s (including Eileen) in the old Poor House (which still exists) – neither of which was conducive to cleanliness or comfort.
All of the radar stations around the coasts of Britain had communication lines leading into Q Central (lines also went to RAF Fighter Command HQ at Bentley Priory) and the backup Operations Room for Fighter Command was also based there.
The one thing about Q Central that could not be camouflaged, of course, were the ninety-foot high masts that stood above it. There were eventually thirty eight of them. However, there is safety in numbers. North Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire were a web of masts. Leighton Buzzard’s thirty eight were little more than a drop in the ocean when compared to the arrays of Whaddon, Chicksands, Bletchley, Hanslope, Beaumanor and all the other local sites (as I explain in The Intelligence Zone) – not to mention the web on the Dunstable Downs surrounding the Meteorological Office.
The Luftwaffe - no fools - did photograph the site, although they never bombed it.
German air reconaissance photo of the Q Central site. Germans intelligence has marked the ‘main building’ (3). This was a decoy. The site was underground and underneath the fields to the east.
Reproduced from ‘The secrets of Q Central’ (Spellmount).
As well as Q Central, 60 Group - the organisation that looked after the construction, maintenance and communications of the coastal radar sites - was also based at Leighton Buzzard (in the suburb of Linslade). Sixty Group were a key reason (along with the RAF, Spitfires and Hurricanes) why Britain won the Battle of Britain.
Leighton Buzzard (Leighton/Linslade) grew enormously because of its key role in the Intelligence Zone. As well as the airmen and women of Q Central and Sixty Group, it was home to many workers from Bletchley Park – which was one stop further up the railway line. The population of this attractive little English market town doubled from eight to sixteen thousand during the war. It is quite astonishing that Leighton Buzzard has no museum to celebrate its role during the war. If a museum can be built celebrating the cracking of enemy codes, surely some small space could be found to celebrate the hub of Britain’s radar and the islands’ secret communication hub?
My next and final blog in this series will be about the foreign services that MI6 provided aerials for; and a little more about the irrepressible supremo of Whaddon, Richard Gambier Parry.
©Alan Biggins November 2023
The Intelligence Zone is available here from Amazon.
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