Whaddon Hall is a country house in

Whaddon, Buckinghamshire Whaddon is a village and also a civil parish within the unitary authority area of Buckinghamshire, England. It is situated just outside of Bletchley, a constituent town of Milton Keynes. The village name is Anglo Saxon in origin, and means 'hill ...

. It is a Grade II

listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...

History

Old Whaddon Hall, Bucks Wellcome L0011737

The first manor house was built on the site in the 11th century. The present house was built in 1820, replacing a house which was demolished in the late 18th century. It was once home to the Selby family (also known as Selby-Lowndes), whose ancestor William Lowndes built the larger and grander

Winslow Hall Winslow Hall is a country house, now in the centre of the small town of Winslow, Buckinghamshire, England. Built in 1700, it was sited in the centre of the town, with a public front facing the highway and a garden front that still commanded i ...

. During 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 opposi ...

Whaddon Hall served as headquarters of Section VIII (Communications) of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6), under the command of Brigadier Richard Gambier-Parry. The "Station X" wireless interception function was transferred here from

Bletchley Park Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes ( Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years followin ...

in February 1940. That facility, known as Main Line, served in a number of capacities, the most critical the sending of

Ultra adopted by British military intelligence in June 1941 for wartime signals intelligence obtained by breaking high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. ' ...

intelligence from Bletchley Park to officers in the field. The term Ultra was used to convey the status of the intelligence which was considered to be above

Top Secret Classified information is material that a government body deems to be sensitive information that must be protected. Access is restricted by law or regulation to particular groups of people with the necessary security clearance and need to kn ...

. It consisted of information that was gathered by breaking

encrypted In cryptography, encryption is the process of encoding information. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Ideally, only authorized parties can deci ...

radio communications. At the time that France fell to the

Axis Powers The Axis powers, ; it, Potenze dell'Asse ; ja, 枢軸国 ''Sūjikukoku'', group=nb originally called the Rome–Berlin Axis, was a military coalition that initiated World War II and fought against the Allies. Its principal members were ...

in June 1940, only a small number of SIS agents were in communication with Whaddon Hall. Early in the war, until about 1941, inexperienced SIS agents on the European continent spent too much time on the air, and jeopardised their security. However, by 1943, Gambier-Parry and his staff had engineered a substantial improvement in clandestine wireless communication. The covert wireless network that Gambier-Parry established allowed him to stay in communication with SIS agents in many countries. The hall was converted for industrial use in the early 1960s and into a country club in the 1970s. Following a serious fire in 1976, it was refurbished and in the 1980s converted into flats; it is divided into four units.

References

External links

Colour photo
{{coord, 52.004, N, 0.825, W, region:GB-BKM_type:landmark, display=title Country houses in Buckinghamshire Military history of Buckinghamshire Y service