by Helen Fry
The basement at No. 8 was extensive, stretching some way under the back terrace. In Lord Duveen’s day, it had accommodated a long billiards room, with its own separate staircase and exclusive access to the ground floor. There was a servants’ hall, kitchen, scullery, storeroom, butler’s pantry and butler’s office, a silver vault, and cellars for beer, wine and coal. Now it housed the interrogation quarters.
In its heyday, the adjoining property at No. 8a was just as grand, although smaller overall. The ground floor boasted a library, music room, hexagonal-shaped drawing room and grand dining room. Its basement had a kitchen, larder, two coal vaults, a billiard room, a scullery, butler’s pantry, toilet and servants’ hall. The first floor had a generously proportioned boudoir, two large bedrooms, each with its own dressing room and one with its own bathroom. This floor also had a separate room with a toilet and washbasin. On the second floor, there were several smaller bedrooms, bringing the total number of bedrooms in the house to nine. No. 8a had a distinctive tower-turret, with a single room at the top described as the ‘third floor’, reached via internal stairs. Its use at this time was never specified, but it had excellent views over London. In October 1942, No. 8a reverted to the Crown and remained vacant.
The London Cage was always intended as a temporary camp for the interrogation of enemy prisoners of war and the War Office sought to impose a five-day limit on their stay. Colonel Scotland, who did not want the length of stay of POWs to be restricted (as interrogations might take longer), wrote to the War Office:
it [is] difficult, if not impossible, for us to observe strictly the 5 day limit of stay which you have allowed at the London District Cage. We do not mean to imply that we require an indefinite stay for enemy prisoners-of-war but it appears to us necessary that we should be given latitude in this respect, we on our part undertaking to release prisoners-of-war at the earliest possible date.7
Forward cages
The role of the London Cage was clearly defined by the War Office as providing for the interrogation of German prisoners of war captured within the London District, as well as prisoners transferred from other cages for interrogation to glean ‘hot’ information.8 Its primary purpose was to assist MI5 and MI6 in gaining intelligence from German prisoners whose examination under military conditions had a stronger chance of yielding results.9
The London Cage became the headquarters of the other cages around Britain. Known as ‘forward cages’, these were responsible for the interrogation of POWs in each of the military command areas in the country. Cages were established at Kempton Park, Lingfield, Ascot Park, Dunstable, Swindon, Catterick, Doncaster, Newmarket, Edinburgh, Preston and Colchester (the latter, Camp 186, provided one interrogation room and quarters with the capacity to hold up to thirty men). All prisoners captured in Britain or transferred from the European theatre of war were sent to a regional cage for interrogation – usually to the one nearest the port of entry. The cages were serviced by intelligence officers from the army, navy and air force in a joint services venture to maximise the extraction of information. Colonel Scotland had twenty interrogators attached to his particular unit. Wounded prisoners were taken first to the Royal Herbert Hospital in Woolwich (London) and held under military guard until they were well enough to be interrogated at one of the cages. The hospital reserved 200 beds for Colonel Scotland for wounded German servicemen.
Two primary forward cages were established for army staff to undertake the registration and search of prisoners: one at Kempton Park racecourse, the other at Lingfield racecourse. It was not uncommon for U-boat crews to discover later that some of the best items in their kitbags had been confiscated and never returned: the spoils of war. One of the first priorities was the delousing of prisoners using DDT – especially important if they had served on the Russian front after June 1941. Between registration and the search of a prisoner, a rapid preliminary interrogation was conducted by an interrogator from Section ADI(K), the section of Air Intelligence that dealt with the interrogation of prisoners of war.10 It was important to interrogate a prisoner while he was still disorientated from his capture and at his most vulnerable in terms of divulging information. Important prisoners were swiftly identified and transferred to the London Cage for more detailed questioning.
Lingfield was the preferred immediate processing cage up until D-Day, after which the flow of German prisoners from the Continent reached such a level that Kempton Park took most of them, via Southampton. On arrival at the camp, the prisoners were escorted through a barbed-wire tunnel under the railway and onto the racecourse. The on-site stables became primitive makeshift sleeping quarters, enabling the processing of 120 prisoners at a time. The suites where rich punters once watched the races were converted into interrogation areas. Kempton Park had three interrogation rooms, plus a large workroom. Operating out of this camp was Captain Lawrence Green, whose role was to sift out any German prisoner who might be induced to work for the British, specifically on a radio propaganda station run by former journalist Denis Sefton Delmer of the Political Warfare Executive. The station masqueraded as a German radio station broadcasting from within Germany, but in reality its headquarters were at Milton Bryan, a few miles from Bletchley Park.
Prisoners processed at Kempton Park included Russian POWs who had been captured by the Germans and drafted to fight in the German forces. Their subsequent capture by the British or Americans did not exempt them from interrogation for useful intelligence, and they found themselves at Kempton Park before members of the Soviet Military Mission, headed by General Ratov. Soviet interrogators were overheard using undue physical force or torture on their prisoners; one poor man was found in a hut with his hands and feet bound. Ratov was dispatched back to the Soviet Union in disgrace by General Firebrace, head of what was then called the British–Russian Liaison Group.
The British cages worked in close cooperation with United States forces. The Americans had a POW camp under their own command at Devizes in Wiltshire, for prisoners captured by their forces. Their prisoners arrived exclusively via the port of Weymouth and were interrogated by US personnel. Around half of the prisoners captured after D-Day were sent to POW camps in America.
Among the duties of the cages were: providing expert interrogators for the War Office; examining all classes of POWs who came to Britain and interrogating them on any subject; selecting suitable POWs for long-term interrogation by a sister unit (the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre: see page 19); and providing advice on the handling of large numbers of POWs passing through Britain.
Across the various cages in Britain, Colonel Scotland’s officers carried out the detailed interrogation of German and Italian POWs captured in North Africa from 1942, and helped in the sorting and handling of thousands of POWs evacuated to America via British ports. German prisoners, especially after D-Day, generated so much work that Scotland’s men drafted several thousand reports. Some were of such importance that up to 100 copies were requested for distribution by various wartime departments. By June 1944, Scotland’s team consisted of twenty-nine officers and thirty-five sergeants who undertook the arduous but necessary task of processing and classifying the prisoners – tens of thousands of them in the course of the war. Reports specifically emanating from the London Cage were identified by the preface PWIS(H)/LDC. An average of twenty-five German prisoners of war passed through the doors of Kensington Palace Gardens every day. That alone generated reports in their thousands.
As the war progressed, the London Cage was used for the interrogation of prisoners who had escaped from other British POW camps and been recaptured, and of prisoners who had committed serious disciplinary offences in other camps, such as illegally passing documents from one POW camp to another in an effort to facilitate an escape. Scotland assisted the security services, MI5 and Special Branch during periods of tension, such as the planned mass outbreak from Devizes camp at Christmas 1944.
Handling so many prisoners across the war required the right trainin
g at all levels. Among Colonel Scotland’s duties was the training of staff across PWIS – not just those officers working at the London Cage. He personally hand-picked and trained his own interrogators, as well as assisting in the training of British and Allied interrogators of other military units, making Kensington Palace Gardens an important training centre. He visited cages around Britain to give lectures to field officers who worked alongside the intelligence officers at the special cages. He allocated an interrogator to lecture at the interrogation courses held at Cambridge, where an estimated 1,200 officers passed through the school; and there was special tuition for 700 German-speaking personnel in the Home Guard.11
Over 250 security troops received training from Scotland himself on the proper handling and transfer of prisoners between sites. He delivered lectures on how to march prisoners en masse from one destination to another, how to prevent their escape (especially near bridges) and how to bark orders at German troops to ensure their compliance. Scotland exhibited his own style and authority, characteristics which would mark him out as different from other intelligence officers during the war – with the possible exception of Colonel Robin ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens. Stephens was the commanding officer of MI5’s clandestine camp for captured German spies, known as Camp 020, and based at Latchmere House, Ham Common, near Richmond. It was there that MI5 successfully ‘turned’ a number of German spies to work as double agents as part of the Double Cross System, overseen by the Twenty Committee (or XX Committee). Its work included the successful turning of such famous double agents as Zigzag (Eddie Chapman), Tate (Wulf Schmidt) and Summer (Gösta Caroli). Colonel Scotland went to Camp 020 occasionally to interrogate prisoners. An unpublished source notes that on 10 April 1941 ‘Scotland arrived with JHM to Ham to interrogate Norwegians.’12 JHM refers to John Marriott, secretary to the Twenty Committee.
After the war, Colonel Stephens faced court martial for alleged brutal mistreatment of prisoners while running a special camp at Bad Nenndorf in Germany. Some of the techniques employed by Stephens were strangely reminiscent of those alleged to have occurred at the London Cage.13
Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre
The Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC) was a branch of MI9/MI19 that worked alongside the London Cage and its forward cages. It, too, was a clandestine interrogation unit in Britain dealing with German prisoners of war. The cumbersome title masked a fascinating long-term deception plan. A prisoner would be subjected to a ‘phony’ interrogation, then returned to his cell, where he would chat away with his cellmate discussing what they thought the interrogation officer should have asked. What the prisoner would not have realised was that the cell’s light fitting contained a tiny hidden bugging device that was wired back to an ‘M Room’, where teams of secret listeners recorded anything of relevance that was said.
The CSDIC’s commanding officer was Colonel Thomas Joseph Kendrick, Scotland’s intelligence colleague and friend from the days immediately after the Boer War and during the First World War. Seconded to MI5 from MI6, Kendrick headed three covert prisoner-of-war sites in requisitioned stately homes where the prisoners’ conversations were secretly bugged. Prisoners who required long-term interrogation and who could yield more information from secretly bugged conversations with their cellmates were selected from cages like Lingfield and Kempton Park and transferred to one of Kendrick’s three sites.
This elaborate deception began in the Tower of London in September 1939. With an insufficient allocation of space there, and the risk of bombing in London, three other sites were opened: at Trent Park in Cockfosters, north London, in January 1940, and Latimer House and Wilton Park in Buckinghamshire in 1942.14 CSDIC operated in a joint services capacity, having a strong team of interrogators from Naval Intelligence Division (NID), Air Intelligence (ADI(K)) and the army’s Intelligence Corps, as well as teams of American intelligence officers. Although an entity of the War Office, CSDIC consisted of intelligence officers from MI6 and Intelligence Corps personnel.
Prisoners transferred to the CSDIC sites were those who had special information or who had been earmarked for long-term interrogation. From May 1942, Trent Park was reserved for captured German generals, the first of whom, General Ludwig Crüwell, arrived that month. It was run like a ‘gentlemen’s club’ by British intelligence, where the life of relative luxury and stately surroundings fooled the German generals into thinking that they were being treated according to their military rank. They had already had a phony interrogation elsewhere – some at the London Cage, which was devoid of any comforts. Life at Trent Park was extraordinarily good for the generals, so they relaxed, their conversations were unguarded and they chatted among themselves about a host of top-secret military subjects. These conversations yielded revelations about Hitler’s secret weapon programme: the V-1, V-2, V-3 and atomic bomb projects.15
Located only 10 miles from Trent Park, the London Cage also acted as a transit camp for high-ranking German officers and generals who were being moved between different locations. When the London Cage or CSDIC had finished with the lower-ranking prisoners, they were transferred to a regular POW camp, where they received no further interrogation and where their conversations were not bugged.
CSDIC processed over 10,000 German prisoners of war between September 1939 and May 1945, as well as a few thousand Italians. The bugging operation generated in the region of 100,000 transcripts of conversations, intelligence reports and miscellaneous documents. No report of prisoner mistreatment was ever filed against any of the three CSDIC sites or their commanding officer, Colonel Kendrick. He and his team realised that vital intelligence could be gathered through a mixture of cunning and a soft approach. Prisoners could be rewarded for their cooperation with day trips into central London or extra rations of cigarettes. A late-night glass of whisky with a British officer was a particular favourite for softening up a prisoner, and this often induced them to talk or inadvertently give away information.16 It raises the important issue of whether Scotland’s actions and his particular style at the London Cage came with the sanction of MI5 and the War Office, or whether he was acting alone. The clever methods of deception employed at CSDIC suggest that there were more effective ways of gaining intelligence from prisoners than resorting to physical or psychological abuse.
Kensington Palace
Over the boundary wall, Kensington Palace remained vacant, except for a handful of staff. It had no royal occupants in 1940 when the War Office requisitioned the houses in Kensington Palace Gardens for the London Cage. In spite of its proximity to the cage, no officials at the palace had any idea of the conditions inside the POW quarters. Nearby was Kensington Barracks, which housed soldiers from the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) whose duties included acting as the palace garrison. They also knew nothing of life inside the London Cage.
In 1941, the War Office sought to extend the facilities at the London Cage and set its sights on the paddock behind the palace. A large grassed area that ran almost the entire length of the boundary wall of Kensington Palace Gardens, from the royal palace to the Bayswater Road, it had been given to HRH Princess Louise during her lifetime by her mother, Queen Victoria. On the death of Princess Louise in 1939, the land was considered for incorporation back into the gardens of the palace.
During her lifetime, Princess Louise had issued keys for the gates at the northern end of the paddock to various individuals (unnamed in official records) as a favour, so that they could take their leisure in the area. She had also allowed soldiers from the barracks to use the land for games of football. In addition to the northern gates, some wealthy inhabitants of Kensington Palace Gardens had access through the dividing fence between their properties and the west boundary wall of the palace, and were allowed to enjoy this part of the gardens. Security was tightened during the war, and the Crown Commissioners brought in measures to issue keys only under special licence so that there could be no unauthorised access. Privileged access was granted to the Duk
e of Marlborough (then living at No. 11 Kensington Palace Gardens), the Marquess of Cholmondeley (No. 12) and Sir Alfred Beit (No. 15). The area of the paddock immediately behind the palace was given over to Kensington Council as allotments for growing vegetables due to the wartime food shortages.
In December 1941, King George VI received a formal request from the War Office via his equerry, Sir Ulick Alexander, asking for the paddock running north and west of Kensington Palace to be ‘given over for secretive purposes’ as a centre for ‘examining enemy prisoners’. It was accompanied by a request to gain access via a pathway between Nos. 3 and 4 Kensington Palace Gardens on the Bayswater Road that ran directly into the royal gardens, ‘To increase accommodation available by erecting accommodation huts and an exercise area for the prisoners in the northern half of the paddock.’17 The area remained fenced in with a triple layer of barbed wire until 1946.