Hanslope Park is located about half a mile south-east of the village of

Hanslope Hanslope is a village and civil parish in the unitary authority area of the City of Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England. The village is about west northwest of Newport Pagnell, about north of Stony Stratford and north of Central Milto ...

in the

City of Milton Keynes The City of Milton Keynes is a unitary authority area with both borough and city status, in Buckinghamshire. It is the northernmost district of the South East England Region. The borough abuts Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and the remainder o ...

Buckinghamshire Buckinghamshire (), abbreviated Bucks, is a ceremonial county in South East England that borders Greater London to the south-east, Berkshire to the south, Oxfordshire to the west, Northamptonshire to the north, Bedfordshire to the north-east ...

, England. Once the manorial estate of the village, it is now owned by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), and is also home to His Majesty's Government Communications Centre ('HMGCC') and

FCDO Services The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) is a department of the Government of the United Kingdom. Equivalent to other countries' ministries of foreign affairs, it was created on 2 September 2020 through the merger of the Foreig ...

History

The manor was part of the

jointure Jointure is, in law, a provision for a wife after the death of her husband. As defined by Sir Edward Coke, it is "a competent livelihood of freehold for the wife, of lands or tenements, to take effect presently in possession or profit after the de ...

property of

Anne of Denmark Anne of Denmark (; 12 December 1574 – 2 March 1619) was the wife of King James VI and I; as such, she was Queen of Scotland from their marriage on 20 August 1589 and Queen of England and Ireland from the union of the Scottish and Engl ...

. Repairs were ordered to the lodge and barns in 1608. A new

manor house A manor house was historically the main residence of the lord of the manor. The house formed the administrative centre of a manor in the European feudal system; within its great hall were held the lord's manorial courts, communal meals with ...

was built for Basil Brent in 1692. It was acquired in Autumn 1764 by Edward Watts, son of William Watts, who had been a senior official in the

East India Company The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (the Indian subcontinent and Southea ...

, and of his wife, better known as Begum Johnson. Having passed down the Watts family, it was the scene of a murder on 21 July 1912 when William Farrow, Edward Hanslope Watts's

gamekeeper A gamekeeper (often abbreviated to keeper), or in case of those dealing with deer (deer-)stalker, is a person who manages an area of countryside (e.g. areas of woodland, moorland, waterway or farmland) to make sure there is enough game for s ...

, shot his master and then committed suicide. Robin Watts owned the house until 1939, when it was bought by Lord Hesketh who handed it over to the

War Office The War Office was a department of the British Government responsible for the administration of the British Army between 1857 and 1964, when its functions were transferred to the new Ministry of Defence (MoD). This article contains text from t ...

when it was requisitioned in 1941. In the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

the Radio Security Service was based at Hanslope Park. The mathematician and

cryptologist This is a list of cryptographers. Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties called adversaries. Pre twentieth century * Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi: wrote a (now lost) book ...

Alan Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical co ...

worked there in the latter part of the War on secure speech "scrambling". Today HMGCC researches, designs, develops and produces communications systems, equipment and related hardware and software.

Foreign and Commonwealth Office archives

Lieutenant General Sir George Erskine, Commander-in-Chief, East Africa (centre), observing operations against the Mau Mau

Hanslope Park gained publicity in 2011 for its extensive collection of Imperial records held as part of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's archive of Colonial Office papers, the papers relevant to the issue being referred to as the

Foreign and Commonwealth Office migrated archives The Foreign and Commonwealth Office Migrated Archives are a collection of about 20,000 files and other records created by the governments of 37 British colonial dependencies, removed to the UK at independence, and held clandestinely for decades ...

. These archives produced documentation of the

Mau Mau Uprising The Mau Mau rebellion (1952–1960), also known as the Mau Mau uprising, Mau Mau revolt or Kenya Emergency, was a war in the British Kenya Colony (1920–1963) between the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), also known as the ''Mau Mau'', an ...

in Kenya and led to compensation to those who had been maltreated at

Hola In molecular biology, the δ (delta) subunit of DNA polymerase III is encoded by the holA gene in ''E. coli ''Escherichia coli'' (),Wells, J. C. (2000) Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Harlow ngland Pearson Education Ltd. also known as ...

camp, among others. In 2014, following reporting by the ''Guardian'', a group of journalists were allowed to visit the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's archives at Hanslope Park, and briefed on the issues relating to the

declassification Declassification is the process of ceasing a protective classification, often under the principle of freedom of information. Procedures for declassification vary by country. Papers may be withheld without being classified as secret, and even ...

of the archive material, estimated to comprise roughly 1.2 million documents. The British government has published a report on the scope of the task, including details of a rough timeline for the "weeding" and declassification process.

References

{{coord, 52, 06, 18.0, N, 00, 48, 32.4, W, region:GB_type:landmark, display=title Country houses in Buckinghamshire Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office Organisation headquarters in the United Kingdom Military history of Buckinghamshire Y service