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DAN ELLIN: A target would be sent down to the squadrons, to

the RAF stations, and they would pretty much choose their own

route, and they would navigate to what they thought was the

target. Because they were using a map and a stopwatch, still

using sextants and taking star shots to work out where they

were.

Although the air crew would come back and say we saw our bombs go

down on the target, quite often they were bombing what they

thought was the target, but they could be tens of miles away from

where they were meant to be bombing.

JAMES GRASBY : Hughenden Manor in Buckinghamshire is a house

with secrets. The historic building attracts thousands of

visitors, but underneath its grand exterior, these walls hold

a big secret that lay hidden for decades. A chance encounter

between some sleuthing volunteers and a mysterious

visitor became a catalyst for a fascinating history to be

revealed.

Because in World War II, Hughenden Manor became a secret

base for the Air Ministry to produce target maps for RAF

Bomber Command, and the workers here were carrying out vital and

at times harrowing work that aided the war effort in Europe.

Have you ever imagined being a fly on the wall of history? Join

me for an inside view of the stories of people, places and

moments that made us.

I'm historian James Grasby. Lean in for a tale from time back

when.

The National Trust works with academics who help us dig into

our histories. However, every so often it's our amateur experts

who actually uncover some of the most surprising stories. And

this was the experience of Mavis Laird, who recalls the discovery

she made when she signed up to volunteer at Hughenden Manor.

MAVIS LAIRD: I saw an advert in the local paper asking for

stewards at Hughenden Manor. I remember walking in and just

being amazed. It was a sunny day and there were trees everywhere,

lovely gardens. I spoke to Ros, the House manager, and that was

the beginning.

JAMES GRASBY : To acquaint herself with the story of the

House and its famous former resident, Mavis was given a

folder.

MAVIS LAIRD: When I opened the folder, it did tell the story of

Disraeli. I knew of him, but I'd never actually read about him.

I came back home and got my books out and started reading.

The story of Disraeli is... It's fascinating.

JAMES GRASBY : And the story of Benjamin Disraeli is best told

by Charlotte Clark, Hughenden's Senior Collections and House

Manager.

CHARLOTTE CLARK: Hughenden is a gothic, Victorian-looking

building. Parapets, pinnacles, elaborate window surrounds. I

walk through this place every day, and as you go in, you

really get a sense of Disraeli and who he is. So, follow me

this way.

Walking through the inner hall and into the library, we

remember Disraeli as a politician today but not

everybody knows that he was an author. He released his first

book anonymously and it was initially quite well received.

However, Disraeli was revealed then as the author and it was

criticised and the reason it was criticised is because Disraeli

had a Jewish heritage so he was criticised for his religion and

also it was thought that he was making comments on a society

that he wasn't a part of.

JAMES GRASBY : And this was a theme that was to continue

throughout Disraeli's political career.

CHARLOTTE CLARK: His maiden speech is famously a disaster.

He can't be heard over all of the name-calling. A lot of it

kind of Anti-Semitic slurs.

JAMES GRASBY : But despite his treatment, Disraeli becomes

Chancellor of the Exchequer three times.

And leads for two terms as Britain's first and only Jewish

Prime Minister. He also makes some very influential friends.

CHARLOTTE CLARK: The bedroom is quite a fitting place to talk

about Disraeli's relationship with Queen Victoria. The twin

portrait that we can see above the mantelpiece depicts Queen

Victoria as a young woman and Albert next to her. Surrounding

those here we've got portraits of all her children, which seems

a bit strange for a Disraeli's bedroom, but actually that was

very typical of Victoria, sending portraits of herself and

her family.

JAMES GRASBY : These gifts marked the beginning of a close

20-year friendship. Today Disraeli is still quoted in

Parliament and as a society we still feel the benefit of

policies he brought in over 100 years ago.

CHARLOTTE CLARK: He brings in acts for public health, acts

against animal cruelty, he abolishes public execution and

he improves sanitation in towns and cities.

JAMES GRASBY : And from his difficult beginnings as an

author Disraeli becomes one of the highest paid and most

anticipated authors in British history.

CHARLOTTE CLARK: By the end of his life he's an incredibly

successful author who really was rivalling the sales of people

like Charles Dickens.

JAMES GRASBY : And this is the story Mavis took pride in

telling visitors as they passed through the rooms at Hughendon

Manor.

MAVIS LAIRD: You know, people knew the name but didn't know

the person. So by the time I'd finished, they knew both.

JAMES GRASBY : That was until, in 2004, a man entered the

drawing room at Hughenden who seemed to know even more about

the manor than Mavis. And what she'd learned from him forced

her to rethink everything she thought she knew about the

manor.

MAVIS LAIRD: I was standing in the drawing room and he said to

me, all these pillars weren't here when I was here. And I

said, the pillars have always been there. So his son was with

him and said, I didn't know you were here.

I said to him, please speak to our House Manager because she

would like to hear further about what happened here. He went and

spoke to Ros, the House Manager. From the chance remark with him

thinking the room had changed, that the story, it just grew and

grew.

JAMES GRASBY : The mystery man was called Victor Gregory. And

the staff at Hughenden wanted to understand just how he had

acquired this detailed knowledge of the manor. So a group of

volunteers set out to dig a little deeper. Mary Edwards was

one of them. She tracked down Victor and, armed with a tape

recorder, she went to investigate more. But there was

just one problem.

MARY EDWARDS: He said, well, look, I'm still under the

Official Secrets Act. And so I can tell you about the people,

but I can't tell you about any of the work that we did.

JAMES GRASBY : Mary managed to track down Gillian Picken, who

as a child lived at the manor around the time Victor was

there. Her father was head of security, and in Mary's

recording, Gillian recalls what it was like to live among the

toings and froings of Hughenden's clandestine

operation.

GILLIAN PICKEN: Interspersed with this private accommodation

were offices of the people that were working there. There was

always so much going on there, so many people toing and froing.

My sister and I would play in the cellar.

There were all these mounds of paper which made wonderful

places to play hide-and-seek. We never went into the offices. I

can't ever remember anybody saying, you must not go in

there. There was nothing there that would attract five, six,

seven-year-olds, so we just let it be.

JAMES GRASBY : The team had started to piece together the

mystery at Hughenden, but to fill in the gaps, they needed

information from a more official source. They applied to the MOD

for the Official Secrets Act to be declassified, and after

months of waiting, their request was granted, and Victor Gregory

could finally talk.

VICTOR GREGORY: I, Victor George Gregory, wish to introduce

myself and recall the period between 1941 and 1945. When the

Miller House was taken over by the Air Ministry to produce

secret target maps for RAF Bomber Command.

JAMES GRASBY : The year is 1941. Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and

France are occupied by Nazi forces, providing them with a

formidable front line to launch an attack on Britain.

With the English Channel the only barrier between British

soil and, according to Hitler, the imminent invasion of

England, Britain was on edge.

But with the German threat stalled by their loss of aerial

superiority in the Battle Of Britain and from the sustained

bombing of British cities during the Blitz, Hitler's invasion of

Britain seemed less imminent. He then did something which may

have completely changed the trajectory of the war. Here's Dr

Dan Ellin, the International Bomber Command's digital

archivist.

DAN ELLIN: The Luftwaffe were not going to be able to defeat

the RAF. Russia seemed to be the way to go. They diverted all of

their manpower and material to the Eastern Front.

JAMES GRASBY : This strategy could have given British forces

an opportunity to invade Western Europe, but at this point in the

war, a land or sea offensive was impossible.

DAN ELLIN: The British Army had left behind an awful lot of

material on the beaches of Dunkirk and it needed to build

itself back up again. It was the job of the Royal Navy to protect

the ships that were coming in convoys across the Atlantic. The

only way there was of continuing the war was through air power.

JAMES GRASBY : At the time, the Air Ministry oversaw all aerial

activity. Under its umbrella was Coastal Command, fighting the

war in the Atlantic, and Fighter Command, in those iconic

Spitfires defending British airspace. And then there was

Bomber Command. It was only Bomber Command that had the

capacity to lead the aerial offensive and take the war to

Germany, and to attack enemy facilities.

The Air Ministry needed to understand the effectiveness of

their bombing campaign so far. And for this, they commissioned

the Butt Report.

DAN ELLIN: Although the air crews were coming back and

saying that they'd seen the bombs go and hit the target, the

Butt Report looked at over 600 photographs taken over June and

July 1941. They carefully analysed where the bombs were

actually falling.

JAMES GRASBY : The story the Butt Report told was in complete

contrast to the reports from Bomber Cruise. It read, of those

aircraft recorded as attacking their target, only one in three

got within five miles. Over the French ports, it was two in

three. Over Germany as a whole, the proportion was one in four.

In some cases, depending on weather conditions and

visibility, accuracy was as low as one in 15.

DAN ELLIN: At that point in the war, the bombing offensive was

quite haphazard. A target would be sent down to the squadrons,

to the RAF stations, and they would pretty much choose their

own route, and they would navigate to what they thought

was the target.

Because they were using a map and a stopwatch, still using

sextants and taking star shots to work out where they were.

Although the air crew would come back and say, we saw our bombs

go down on the target, quite often they were bombing what

they thought was the target, but they could be tens of miles away

from where they were meant to be bombing.

JAMES GRASBY : Even though the bombing offensive may sound like

it relied on luck rather than science, it was in fact based on

cutting-edge surveillance technology. In and around the

Buckinghamshire market town of High Wycombe were a cluster of

facilities gathering vital target intelligence.

There was Bomber Command Headquarters in High Wycombe

itself, and close by was RAF Benson. From RAF Benson,

reconnaissance planes equipped with 3D cameras would fly into

enemy-occupied territory and capture images of suspected

military targets.

A few miles to the south of Bomber Command Headquarters was

RAF Medmenum, where these aerial reconnaissance photographs were

analysed. It was at this facility that some of the most

important discoveries of the Second World War were made.

DAN ELLIN: They were able to spot things like V1 and V2

sites. It was a very robust system, yeah, it was

groundbreaking. The one step that was missing still at this

point was being able to successfully navigate to the

targets. Of course, for proper navigation, even with the

systems that they developed, you need to have accurate maps.

JAMES GRASBY : Bomber Command needed to find a location to

make these maps. It needed to house hundreds of personnel,

offices, photographic and cartography studios. And also to

be close to Bomber Command, RAF Benson and RAF Medmenham. There

was only one place that fitted the bill.

Hughendon Manor.

Victor Gregory again.

VICTOR GREGORY: In many ways, Hughendon Manor was an ideal

choice for this type of secret work. Located away from the main

road and hidden behind trees and wood.

JAMES GRASBY : Hughenden Manor was requisitioned and codenamed

SPC Hillside.

VICTOR GREGORY: Our challenge at SPC Hillside was to revise from

aerial photography and to produce and print specially

designed target maps for bomber crews on daylight and night time

raids.

JAMES GRASBY : Once Hughenden had been identified as the

location for SPC Hillside, the RAF wasted no time staffing the

facility. Here's Fritha Irwin. A volunteer at Hughenden, who

helped research the Hillside story.

FRITHA IRWIN: We had a mixture of service personnel at

Hillside, Royal Air Force, Women's Royal Air Force, but

there were also a number of civilians who worked there, an

architect, there were artists, there were cartoonists. Not many

of them had had previous cartography experience. So it

was quite an interesting mixture of people.

JAMES GRASBY : And the artists used a surprisingly low-tech

method of cartography.

BERNIE KNILL: They would identify the key elements of the

target, trace the various elements of the map.

JAMES GRASBY : Volunteer Bernie Knill, who also helped to

research the Hillside story.

BERNIE KNILL: They would then go from there to the print room,

and every night a couple of lorries would transport them

about three miles up the road to the underground bunker where Air

Marshal Harris coordinated and orchestrated the entire bombing

campaign and from there the maps were distributed to about 58

different airfields all around East Anglia, Lincolnshire,

Southern Yorkshire, etc.

JAMES GRASBY : The rooms were stripped of the antique books

and the paintings of royalty from Disraeli's time at

Hughenden, and replaced with office furniture, printing

equipment and rows and rows of artists' easels.

CHARLOTTE CLARK: We've just entered into the main exhibition

space, which would have been one of the drawing offices here

where the map makers worked during the Second World War.

JAMES GRASBY : Charlotte Clarke, Hughenden's Senior Collections

Manager again.

CHARLOTTE CLARK: We've got it set up as they would have had

it. So here is one of the target maps that were created here at

Huyenden. We've got different colours. So we've got magenta,

we've got darker magenta lines, white squiggly lines running

through. And this is all overlaid with concentric circles

and lots of numbers and letters.

JAMES GRASBY : As the war progressed, so did the

navigational technology available to bomber crews. With

systems like radar, radio navigation and new aviation

hardware like the Halifax and Lancaster bombers.

DAN ELLIN: These were big four-engined heavy bombers that

could carry a massive payload. They were also the platforms for

these new navigation systems such as H2S. H2S was a ground

radar system that created an image of the ground below the

aircraft on a monitor screen. The maps for that are very

bizarre things.

They're all funny shapes and blocks of... Purples and reds

and dark brown colours that correspond to the image that the

navigator could expect to see on their screen. Despite these

incredible advances in technology, maps were still of

vital importance to the navigator to be able to find the

target.

JAMES GRASBY : These maps also played a significant role in one

of Bomber Command's most controversial tactics.

DAN ELLIN: 1941, Bomber Command, they would attack military

targets, docks, places like that. Throughout the war, the

RAF also dropped propaganda leaflets. The message was, this

is a leaflet today, it could be a bomb later on.

JAMES GRASBY : But shortly after the Butt Report, the warnings in

these leaflets became a reality as Bomber Command changed its

tactics.

DAN ELLIN: In 1942, there was another report that looked at

the effects of German bombing on British cities during the Blitz.

And it calculated that an effective way of taking the

fight to Nazi Germany would be to bomb industrial centres, to

destroy the factories and to destroy the homes the civilian

workers lived in. And this was known as the de-housing policy.

They deliberately targeted large German cities with large

civilian populations and they deliberately created firestorms.

The high explosive bombs that they dropped blew the roofs off

the buildings and exposed the wooden frames and the timbers.

And then the incendiary bombs that they dropped set fire to

those.

Occasionally these created firestorms.

Attacks on places such as Hamburg and Cologne. Tens of

thousands, up to 40,000 people were killed in one night by the

bombing.

FRITHA IRWIN: The mapmakers were very well aware of the

consequences of the maps that they were making.

JAMES GRASBY : Volunteer Fritha Irwin again.

FRITHA IRWIN: One mapmaker, a lady called Kathleen Hudson,

said that when she completed a map, she used to send up a

little prayer and say, please, God, miss the children. So she

was very aware of it. They all were. But I think they balanced

that by realising that it was the only way at that time to try

and stop the awful carnage that was going on.

DAN ELLIN: People always talk about Bletchley Park. I think

the work done creating the maps is another important story that

helped in the war effort and people should know about. I

first heard about it a couple of years ago. I've been researching

Bomber Command for quite some time and it's not often told,

it's not often spoken about.

JAMES GRASBY : Hughenden Manor is now a property that tells two

stories. The story of Benjamin Disraeli. And now in a newly

opened exhibition, the story of Hughenden's contribution in the

Second World War.

And while the story of SPC Hillside would likely have been

released via routine declassification, if it wasn't

for the interaction between a volunteer and a visitor, the

colourful and personal detailed stories of people that worked at

SPC Hillside would likely have been lost to the sands of time.

VICTOR GREGORY: In making this recording, I have tried to

recreate a life and times for all concerned with Hughenden

Manor during the war years 1941-1945. I hope that it will

assist in the Living History Project and offer my best wishes

for the future. Ex-sergeant Victor George Gregory RAF P. S.

During my time at the Manor House, there were no trees on

the front lawn.

JAMES GRASBY : Thanks for listening to this episode of

Back When. If you've enjoyed this story, why not plan a visit

to Hughenden Manor, looked after by the National Trust. Please do

leave us ratings and reviews and get in touch with stories you'd

love to hear at podcasts at nationaltrust.org.uk. See you

next time.

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