The Story Begins

The story of Trent Park begins in 1779 when George III presented the royal doctor Sir Richard Jebb with a 99-year lease on 250 acres of the royal estate at Enfield. The gift was in recognition of his life-saving treatment of his brother, the Duke of Gloucester, in Trento, Italy. Jebb named his property Trent to memorialise the event.

George III’s architect, Sir William Chambers, was commissioned by Jebb to build a house on his new estate. This was an elegant, but relatively small, villa centred on a high domed music room facing an artificial lake. The house was finished to a high standard costing Jebb the enormous sum (for the time) of £19,000.

After his death it passed through several hands before being purchased in 1833 by David Bevan, a local Quaker who was a successful banker. Trent Park passed to his son and his grandson, Francis, who extended and rebuilt the house in the 1890s in the Victorian style. Eventually, in 1909 the lease was sold to Sir Edward Sassoon. Sir Edward was the head of a Jewish merchant dynasty who had moved to London in the 1870s. He only enjoyed the property for a few years, dying in 1912 and leaving Trent Park, several other houses and a large fortune to his son Philip.

The Sassoon Years

Philip Sassoon inherited the House in 1912. He also owned a grand townhouse in Park Lane and an exotic retreat created for him at Port Lympne in Kent.

After World War I Philip Sassoon remodelled Trent Park on the lines of an early Georgian country house, using bricks from the demolished Devonshire House in Piccadilly and reclaimed architectural features. Sassoon’s artist friend Rex Whistler added decorative murals and painted details in the principal rooms. The estate acquired a golf course and an airstrip and Trent Park became one of the most fashionable houses of the 1930s, with Edward VIII, Winston Churchill, politicians, artists and writers as regular guests.

Philip Sassoon died of influenza in June 1939. Trent Park was left to his cousin Hannah Gubbay although she never lived in the house itself, while his collections and the bulk of his fortune went to his sister Sybil, who had married the Marquess of Cholmondeley of Houghton Hall in Norfolk.

Secrets of the War

In the winter of 1939/1940, under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Kendrick, Trent Park House and grounds were transformed into a state-of-the-art surveillance centre. Interrogation blocks and administrative offices were built in front of the house, and the house itself was adapted and installed with a complex network of miniaturised bugging devices, hidden in every corner including walls, light fittings, plant pots, window ledges, the billiard table and even the garden benches.

The German generals held as prisoners of war were encouraged to relax in relative comfort, unaware the site was bugged and their conversations were providing intelligence. They could wander the gardens, listen to the radio and read books from the full German library “borrowed” from the abandoned German Embassy. There were even trips to London and the services of a visiting tailor to press and maintain their uniforms.

Around one hundred secret listeners worked across the three Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC) camps, about forty of them stationed at Trent Park. Many were German-speaking Jewish refugees recruited from the Pioneer Corps, able to follow the technical language and regional accents they heard.

Kendrick also introduced carefully selected “stool pigeons” into the company. These were undercover interrogators posing as captured German officers or members of the British aristocracy with Nazi sympathies. These stool pigeons would lead captives into conversation on certain topics.