Gubbins’s influence on the direction and overall policies of SOE was crucial. Throughout his association with the organisation from 1940, his period as deputy to Hambro, and his own period as CD to the end of the war, his personality and drive played a major role in developing and executing SOE policies. The team which grew up around him realised the vital importance of scientific and technical support in areas which were regarded traditionally as outside the normal military concern. As a result, SOE was able to provide the resistance movements in Europe and the Middle and Far East with substantial specialist support in the way of supplies, equipment and technical innovation. This was made possible through the work of the Directorate of Research, Development and Supplies under Col Tommy Davies and his Director of Scientific Research, Dr Dudley Newitt. The nature and extent of the activities of the DSR Sections form the subject matter of the rest of this book.
THREE
SOE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT ESTABLISHMENTS
From October 1940 the headquarters of SOE were in Baker Street, London. Its true purpose was obscured in the title Inter-Services Research Bureau which was displayed prominently for all to see on the blast wall protecting the main entrance of no. 64. In the course of the war it took over a number of office buildings in the adjacent streets and squares and gave them identities which were even more obscure. Wartime organisations undertaking highly secret work required accommodation and facilities for research and testing under conditions which would not arouse curiosity. To satisfy this demand the Government exercised its wide-reaching powers to requisition public and privately owned properties needed to meet the national emergency. Apart from the administrative offices around Baker Street, SOE acquired several other types of property. Establishments concerned with experimental work, storage and production were mostly in Hertfordshire and were denoted by Roman numerals. Those housing training schools, denoted by Arabic numerals, were mainly in three groups: paramilitary schools were in remoter areas of Western Scotland north of the Caledonian Canal; the so-called ‘Finishing Schools’ concerned with subversion and propaganda were around Beaulieu in Hampshire; the operational schools were located in Leicestershire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and several counties further south. In addition, the Signals, Polish and Norwegian Sections had a number of schools and there were Parachute Schools in Cheshire, Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire and Surrey. By its very nature it was inevitable that SOE would tend to use large houses on substantial estates, and in some quarters it was supposed frivolously that SOE stood for ‘Stately’ Omes of England’. In fact, SOE was in the second league in this respect. For example, SIS was in part housed in Woburn Abbey.
The Directorate of Research, Development and Supply under Tommy Davies (AD/Z) had its main stations in and around Hertfordshire. The more important of this group were Station IX at The Frythe near Welwyn, which had been taken over by Section D in August 1939 and later received the Experimental Section when it was moved from Station XII in 1941; Station XII at Aston House near Stevenage, to which the combined Section D and MI(R) moved from Bletchley Park in November 1940; Station XV, the Thatched Barn road-house at Borehamwood, which housed the Camouflage Section; and Station VI at Bride Hall, Ayot St Lawrence, which housed the Arms Section. Each of these had limited living accommodation for staff, although many of those employed in them lived locally in rented houses or flats. A full list of SOE Stations in this Directorate is given in Appendix A.
THE FRYTHE, STATION IX
It is believed that the name Frythe came from the old English word Ffrid (pronounced Freeth) which referred to an area of wooded country rather than a specific location. There is a 1260 record of land at Welwyn being owned by a John del Frith and the Prioress of Holywell. The Wilshere family took a 60-year lease on the property in 1539 but, at the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry VIII gave The Frythe to Sir John Gostwick, the Wilsheres remaining as tenants. Sir William Gostwick, Sir John’s brother, sold the estate to William Wilshere in 1547.
The Wilshere family prospered and their social status rose from ‘yeoman’ to ‘gentleman’. From time to time the house was leased to other families but they retained their ownership. In 1838 William Wilshere, who was then MP for Great Yarmouth, decided to enhance his status by commissioning the Hertford architect Thomas Smith to design the present mansion on the site of the earlier house and this was completed in 1846 in the then fashionable Gothic-revival style. An impressive portico was added in 1870 together with a clock tower without a clock face. The time was announced by chimes and so that hearers knew which quarter of which hour was being chimed, it struck first the hour and then the quarter in question. So at a quarter to midnight it must have kept people awake for a long time!1 There was an air of opulence and history about the grand staircase and the stained glass windows characteristic of the style adopted by the upwardly mobile classes in the nineteenth century. One of the dining rooms housed an organ which was still serviceable in the late 1950s and, indeed, was played on festive occasions. But the gargoyled façade which hid the true antiquity of the estate did not impress everyone. Bickham Sweet-Escott, a one-time classical scholar turned banker, a member of Section D and an early historian of SOE, described it as ‘a large hideous Victorian house’.
During the Victorian period the Wilsheres became enthusiastic collectors of trees from around the world, adding to the large number of native species imported Cypress, Redwood, Wellingtonia, Sweet Gum, Tulip, Japanese Maple and many others. The estate eventually contained almost 600 trees which became an important collection, reputedly the second finest arboretum in England. Unfortunately, many were lost in a serious gale in 1921 and some of their replacements were among the casualties of the Great Storm of 16 October 1987.
In 1934 Gerald Wilshere and a friend opened ‘The Frythe Residential Private Hotel’. It boasted central heating, eight bathrooms and fresh fruit and vegetables from the estate kitchen gardens. Among the local amusements listed in its brochure was the Barn Road House which had a large, floodlit swimming pool, dancing, cabaret and tennis courts. Little did they know then that the Barn was to share in the wartime activities of The Frythe. First-floor rooms cost up to five guineas a week including all meals but one paid an additional 6d (six old pence) per person for early morning tea. The hotel flourished in some splendour until war was inescapable. Then, around midday on the last Saturday in August 1939, a detachment of soldiers and civilians under the supervision of a ‘Man from the Ministry’ ascended the long drive to the mansion to advise the thirty or forty staff and residents that they must pack their belongings and be gone by eight o’clock that evening.2 Despite the protestations of the owner, a First World War veteran who had been captured, repatriated and then badly wounded when back in France, the authorities insisted that they were requisitioning the estate forthwith. War was imminent and the estate was needed immediately, in this case for Section D, the small semi-autonomous and largely unacknowledgeable branch of SIS. The ‘Man from the Ministry’ was almost certainly George Taylor, a severe man who later became one of the leading lights in SOE. Throughout the winter of 1939–40 the new residents began to establish Station IX’s first research group, the Wireless Section. By mid-1941 a number of single-storey, good quality, prefabricated, felt-roofed wooden huts, (typical size 35 ft × 15 ft) extended to the south and housed the rather basically equipped laboratories of the Experimental Section, which had been moved from Station XII in July. The internal layouts were fairly conventional with a hut being partitioned into, for example, two laboratories, a specialist room and two small offices. Central heating from a steam boiler plant was available in winter. The terrace had been excavated to form an explosives pit with a concrete observation bunker with bombproof windows. The Wireless Section occupied part of a wing of the mansion. The meadows leading down to the main road were used for trials of non-explosive devices. Some of the bedrooms in the house had been converted into offices, while others provided living accommodation for some officers and secretaries.
/> The Engineering Section started in a small way with one workshop of 600 sq ft area. As demand increased, an area adjacent to the explosives pit was excavated to provide a large workshop hangar and, nearby, an associated test tank was constructed. The Section finally possessed a Small Mechanisms and Fine Machinery Shop, a Heavy Metal Shop, Light Metal Shop, Electricians’ Shop, Carpenters’ Shop and a Drawing Office.
Later in 1944, the very primitive laboratory facilities were enhanced by the construction of a few specialist buildings. Among them was the so-called Thermostat Hut, which was of more substantial construction than the others, being brick-built with a corrugated asbestos roof. It was designed to provide a number of constant-temperature environments in which research could proceed into the problem of the time– temperature coefficients of delayed action devices such as the Time Pencil. In addition to two small offices it contained a laboratory, initially equipped with a hydrostatic pressure test apparatus, vacuum and compressed air services and a small refrigerator, which was later converted to simulate the humid conditions of the Far East; an analytical laboratory with soldering and glassblowing facilities and a fume cupboard; and the thermostat room. This contained eight temperature-controlled cabinets which varied in size from 3 ft × 2 ft × 3 ft high to 3 ft 6 in × 5 ft × 7 ft high. Two could only be heated above the temperature of the main room; two had heating and limited cooling; two had cooling only while two provided a range of temperatures from – 40°C to +20°C. Thus any conditions from the tropics to the arctic could be simulated. A large amount of space in the room was taken up by the main timing bench. Here, the controlled temperature chambers (thermostats) were linked to six panels, each with six electric clocks and twelve counters counting six-minute intervals (1/10 hour). So in all there were 36 clocks and 72 counters to record the delay times of fuses.3 The lack of this essential facility had handicapped the work of the Experimental Section until the construction of this building in 1944.
It is today surprising to learn that the security was such that many of those working at The Frythe during those wartime years did not know of the existence of SOE until many years later or that ISRB was part of that organisation.
At the end of the war, while a small Admiralty presence remained working on hydrogen peroxide propellants, The Frythe was leased to Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd, who set up their Butterwick Research Laboratories in the huts used so recently for clandestine sabotage research. A few years later the establishment was expanded with some permanent buildings and they purchased the site, renaming it the Akers Research Laboratories after Sir Wallace Akers, an ICI Director who had worked on the atomic bomb. In the early 1960s ICI sold The Frythe to Unilever Ltd and they subsequently sold it to SmithKline Beecham Ltd, currently known as GlaxoSmithKline.
ASTON HOUSE, STATION XII
Even before the outbreak of war there was recognition of a duplication of effort between MI(R), and Section D. A scheme was drawn up at the highest levels of the Civil Service for their amalgamation.4 Section D had, by the middle of 1939, two officers conducting experiments with weapons at Bletchley Park. But they were not yet in a position to experiment with and devise techniques for the use of the revolutionary plastic explosive which was still in the development stage at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich. On the declaration of war this experimental section was increased to seven plus a part-timer. As the Bletchley Park de-coding operation expanded, a search for alternative accommodation for Section D and MI(R) resulted in the move to Aston House in the village of Aston on the south-eastern outskirts of Stevenage in November 1939. It was initially designated Signals Development Branch, Depot No. 4, War Department. Later it was known as Experimental Station 6 (War Department), E.S.6 (W.D.) and, in SOE, as Station XII. It included a Research Laboratory and a Development Section responsible for the placing of orders with outside manufacturers. Later a separate Production Section was formed (see Chapter 13).
Aston House, sometimes referred to as Aston Place, had been built in the seventeenth century and, with its estate, occupied 46 acres close by the church of St Mary. The mansion itself in the Queen Anne style was constructed partly on three levels, while the wings to the west and east were lower, the stable block at the extreme east being on two floors. Included in the central part of the building was an octagonal library. In 1815 the estate, which included a walled garden, belonged to Mr Francis Wishaw, a local land owner, and was occupied by a Mr Edmund Darby, who also rented much of Aston and Aston End from him. Capt W.E.F. O’Brien took over the estate in the latter part of the nineteenth century until, in 1895, F.W. Imbert-Terry became the resident. In 1912 Arthur R. Yeomans bought the estate and it remained in his family until requisitioned by the War Office.5
The mansion became the officers’ mess. The additional buildings erected to meet wartime demands included one known as ‘the factory’, a NAAFI canteen, a Nissen-type entertainments hall and many Romney Nissen huts. Aston Park or ‘the pleasure grounds’ to the west of the mansion became underground explosives stores and testing grounds.
After the end of hostilities and when the disposal of all SOE assets was completed the Ministry of Supply sold the site on 1 February 1947 to the Stevenage Development Corporation, who were embarking on the construction of the New Town at the start of the postwar housing boom. Although the mansion was now suffering from the ravages of dry rot in the lounge and wet rot with worm and beetle in the dining room, the Corporation used it as its headquarters and the wartime buildings as stores, garages and a hostel for labour.
Aston House was eventually demolished in the early sixties. A high-class housing development was built in its place and incorporated by luck or design the wall of the former walled garden. The short road running through this small estate is called Yeomans Lane after the last private owner of the land and the area containing the explosives stores and testing grounds became a golf course.
BRIDE HALL, STATION VI
The Arms Section of SOE was not strictly part of its Research and Development organisation but it has been included here because of the close connections it had with Station IX in the early days of its existence.
One of the first requirements for a clandestine organisation charged with setting up a resistance network in enemy-occupied countries was to find a source of supply of small arms, a task that was none too easy after the humiliation and losses sustained in the fall of France and the evacuation from Dunkirk. Maj Hugh B. Pollard (who had been created a Don by Franco for services to him) was given this responsibility, along with a room at 2 Caxton Street in London from which to discharge it. The room became a small armoury for automatic pistols and machine guns and while Maj Pollard spent much of his time travelling abroad seeking batches of weapons to bring back, Mr E.J. Churchill, a well-known London gunsmith, shared his time between running his business and working voluntarily servicing the weapons procured. As can be imagined, this team of less than two full-time members quickly became overwhelmed with the burgeoning workload and managed to recruit Staff Sergeant Elliot, a gunsmith by profession. Shortly afterwards he was injured in a London air raid and a safer home for the Arms Section was sought. Before 1940 was over, Maj Pollard and Mr Churchill had both left and Lt Col J.N. Tomlinson, RE, took charge of the section and soon organised a move to Station IX. In December the North Road Garage in the village of Welwyn was requisitioned as a section store pending the erection of an armoury hut in the grounds of The Frythe. Some idea of the hard work and early success of this small unit can be gauged from the fact that, in February 1941, a consignment of 20 tons of arms was sent from this garage to Norway.
By this time demand for small arms weapons of all types had increased. Capt E.I. Rowat was appointed London Liaison Officer dealing with the War Office, Air Ministry (for the recovery of weapons from crashed aircraft), the Ministry of Supply, the police and various gunsmiths from whom he purchased weapons, these transactions being known euphemistically as BDPs (back door purchases). The search for weapons was very wide-ranging and give
n considerable impetus by Sir Norman Kendal, the Assistant Commissioner of Police at Scotland Yard, who later organised at least three appeals to patriotic holders of firearms certificates. It was at this time that the police chief regretted the fact that the British were not a very ‘gunminded’ nation. Nevertheless, in response to the appeals and in the course of other searches, the Arms Section started to acquire large numbers of various types of automatic pistols which were not available from Army sources and yet were so essential for SOE’s purposes. In January they secured the services of another armourer, Cpl Spice, and as the section became established a steady stream of weapons passed through their hands, every one of them having been serviced by the armourers before being sent on its way to the Continent, Middle East, or the Balkans. Soon, the accommodation at the North Road Garage was overstretched and the stores were moved to the splendid dining room at The Frythe. At the end of May Second Lt Kendal joined the Section and, in July 1941, as the accommodation of one hut and the dining room was clearly inadequate, the Arms Section was moved (lock, stock and barrel) the short distance to the large and rather beautiful, centuries-old barns at Bride Hall near Ayot St Lawrence, which became Station VI.6
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