This article first appeared in the author’s local parish magazine Focus (April 2023 edition)
For fifty years I have been living in the Home Counties (35 of them in Great Horwood) …and in that time. I’ve done a lot of walking. Over the years I have come across many, many, sites related to the Second World War war; and especially to communications, computing, spies and the special forces. Discovering how this treasure-trove of sites were linked together; and how they related to Europe and America, have resulted in my book The Intelligence Zone, which was published on Amazon two weeks ago.
Focus have been kind enough to ask me to write a series of articles about our amazing heritage of world-changing sites. That’s a tall-order; so I will limit myself to part of chapter 9 – ‘The many voices of the Whaddon Web’. I love maps, and the map I have commissioned of The Intelligence Zone will explain better, for each subject relates to a local place, or places, and each has its chapter in the book.
So what do I mean by The Whaddon Web? That’s my name for the series of transmitting and receiving sites which the British secret services, MI6, put up to run their communications; and which were managed from Whaddon Hall. Before that MI6’s communications had been at Bletchley Park, a couple of miles down the road. However, in September 1939, a few days after Britain declared war on Germany, it was thought that the aerial wires strung across the trees at B.P. were too obvious a target for the German Air Force (as well as being a bit amateurish) – so they moved them out to Whaddon.
‘Pop’ Richard Gambier-Parry
Whaddon was under the management of MI6’s director of Communications, a highly amiable old-Etonian from the top drawer by the name of Richard Gambier-Parry - ‘Pop’, as he was affectionately known by his staff.
Pop’s teams put up communications for all sorts of people – spies, saboteurs and governments in exile to name just some. And they put them up right here; almost in a circle spreading over the hills and centred more or less on Winslow. They were hardly ‘secret’ in the sense of not being noticeable. Aerial masts can’t be that. But they were secure; as you might expect from MI6. Patrolled by armed guards, surrounded by barbed wire and with strictly policed entry; they were part of the extraordinary story of how the British (and later American) secret services communicated with occupied Europe.
This is very, very, local. The magazine you are reading now was produced in one of the huts (at Little Horwood) used in this radio war. One of the most important of the secret sites – the other end of those exchanges between resistance agents in France and their MI6 controllers – was in this very parish.
The Whaddon Web is but a part of a gripping, exciting, moving, terrifying and often humorous epic. I have spent the last five years researching it, writing it and generally doing my best to do it justice. It is a saga of world-shaking proportions; for it tells of the fall of empires and the crashing of titans; as well as spies, saboteurs and heroes and heroines. And it is all true; all our history – and explains why the Intelligence Zone is one of the most astonishing places on earth; and why we should be proud of the place we live.
If you want the whole story – please buy the book. It (and its sequel) is on Amazon and priced at £9.99. Better, if you a fellow resident of the village, I will sign it (my contact details are in the book).
In my next article, I will explain how and why this astonishing web was built; and what it achieved; starting with Whaddon itself.
©Alan Biggins April 2023
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