TRENT PARK

House of Secrets

Trent Park in Hertfordshire was the country seat of Philip Sassoon, scion of the prodigious banking family, who died mysteriously young in 1939. During the Second World War the house was requisitioned by the Government and became a place of legend. Top brass German officers, who had been captured in North Africa, and, after 1944, in Europe, were interned here in comfort. They were allowed to wander round the beautiful rooms (though all the good furniture and pictures had been taken to Sassoon’s sister at Houghton in Norfolk ) they were permitted a limited amount of alcohol, and the stupider among them must have thought that, although the house and park were surrounded by watch towers and barbed wire, they were almost reliving the old house’s glory days, when Sassoon entertained his famous guests such as Charlie Chaplin,

Edwina and Louis Mountbatten, and more or less every rich flapper and silly-ass of the 1930s that you ever heard of. . With some of these famous guests, such as Nazi-sympathizer Edward VIII/The Duke of Windsor,

they might even have felt at home.

Unknown to these German officers,

their British hosts had bugged the place thoroughly - window-boxes, light fittings, picture-frames, even the nets in the tennis courts were bugged. It was possible for the hired listeners - a high proportion of them Jewish refugees - to note down what was being said, and the officers were loose-tongued.

It was from these officers that British Intelligence heard, for example, of the V2 bombers, and because of the German loose talk, the Allies were able to bomb the place where the V2s were being planned and manufactured. It took the Germans months to rehabilitate these deadly weapons.The allies learnt many other secrets from their German prisoners.

At the end of the war, when the Nuremberg trials began,