Stalin’s latest double-cross has been at the expense of the Poles. He promised them arms a short time ago, and now he says that the entry of Great Britain and France into the war has altered the situation and he can no longer supply any armaments at all.
John Colville 11, September 1939
No country in the Second World War suffered as many casualties as Poland, not even close. Out of a population of 35 million in 1939, some 6 million were killed, approximately 17 per cent of the population, compared to Britain, who lost 450,000 men, women and children, representing less than 1 per cent of the population. Of that total figure for Poland, just 240,000 were military deaths, the rest were civilians. The only other nation with a percentage of deaths in double figures, both military and civilian, was the Soviet Union. It is a grim statistic for a country that has suffered more than most, on account of being sandwiched between two powers who fought over its land for 150 years. Between 1795 and 1918, Poland was partitioned three times by Austria-Hungary, the Germans and the Russians. It regained its borders after the First World War, but the twenty years between the wars were not peaceful for the Poles. They were at war with Russia between 1919 and 1921 and then with Germany in a battle of words as Hitler’s expansionist ideas led inexorably to the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 followed by that of the Soviet Union from the east two-and-a-half weeks later. John Colville, assistant private secretary to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, wrote in his diary the following day, 17 September:
The announcement by which the Soviet Government attempted to justify their act of unequalled greed and immorality is without doubt the most revolting document that modern history has produced. For the first time since the war began I felt really depressed, and frantic at the impossibility of our taking any effective action to prevent this crime.1
The Polish population suffered unprecedented brutality from both sides, although the Germans were responsible for the majority of the deaths in their effort to eliminate non-German citizens from the country over the six years of the war.
The Polish resistance movement was more or less in place by the time the German invasion took place. Their underground army was the largest, best organised and most sophisticated resistance army in all of occupied Europe at the time. It was known as the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) and ‘it expected all Poles to defy the Germans in every possible way, from non-cooperation to outright sabotage.’2 They had already laid the groundwork for a resistance army prior to the war with several hundred underground bunkers stashed with weapons and explosives. The Poles were agents in the sense that they were activists and the majority of operatives were drawn from a military background. ‘Freedom Fighters’ might be a better description, suggested author Ian Valentine, in his book Station 43. ‘Although many personnel – for instance, the couriers – did operate in civilian clothes, many of the soldiers worked with the Armia Krajowa in Poland in a loosely uniformed, paramilitary and partisan capacity. Their efforts culminated in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.’3
As we have already seen, Gubbins and other members of the security services had the highest respect for the Polish secret services. From 1918 onwards the Poles had ‘given top priority to spying and code breaking, specifically aimed at its two chief historic enemies, Germany and Russia. In the words of a former chief of Polish intelligence, “if you live trapped between the two wheels of a grindstone, you have to learn how to keep from being crushed.” ’4 Lynne Olson, in her book Last Hope Island, wrote that a Polish historian estimated years after the war that as many as 16,000 Poles, the majority in the Home Army, were involved in gathering military and economic intelligence within the country. The unstoppable force of the Germans meant that key members of the intelligence services fled into exile but they left behind them a widespread network with whom they kept in close contact from the outset. This was in contrast to other resistance movements that had to be built up over months and years before they could operate effectively and it gave the Poles a special status in the eyes of Gubbins and others in SOE. The great tragedy for him in his efforts to help the Poles was something nobody could change: distance.
The Polish government-in-exile was set up in 1939 in Paris and then Angers until June 1940, when Prime Minister General Wladyslaw Sikorski escaped to England with his ministers. When Sikorski asked Churchill if he would be prepared to help the Polish forces escape France so that they could continue to fight Churchill replied: ‘Tell your army in France that we are their comrades in life and in death. We shall conquer together – or we shall die together.’5 They occupied the Rubens Hotel in London, which also housed their military headquarters. The relationship between the Polish government-in-exile and their British hosts was fraught with difficulties and it often caused headaches in Whitehall as the British tried to balance the Russians on the one hand and the Poles on the other. Sikorski was an impressive leader and a vigorous defender of the Polish cause in diplomatic circles. He had no illusions about Russia’s plans for his country in the postwar world and was constantly frustrated that the British and French did not see Russia as the aggressor he knew it to be. Tragically for the Poles, Sikorski was killed in an aeroplane accident on 4 July 1943, just three months after the discovery of the Katyń massacre, when over 4,000 Polish officers were found in a mass grave in the forests of Katyń by the Germans. The Poles demanded an independent enquiry by the Red Cross into the massacre, which Sikorski always believed had been carried out by the Russians. Stalin was furious. He laid the blame firmly at the feet of the Germans and broke off diplomatic relations with the London-based Polish government-in-exile. This and the death of their charismatic and energetic leader left Poland in a weakened state. Thus the work of SOE and the Polish agents became all the more important for morale and to convince the Poles at home that their fight was not being ignored and that they had not been forgotten. It was not until 1990 that the truth of the Katyń massacre emerged. The Russians had indeed carried it out and executed over 22,000 military officers, police officers and intelligentsia.
The Polish section of Special Operations Executive was unusual in two respects. First, the majority of the 520 or so men and women trained by SOE were former soldiers and when they were dropped into Poland they were the responsibility of the Polish underground army, rather than civilian resistance organisations as agents were elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe. Secondly, they were kept together and trained by Polish as well as British instructors. In the requisitioned houses where they trained in secret, such as Audley End – home to Station 43 – and Briggens, also in Essex, only Polish was spoken.
The magnificent Jacobean mansion house at Audley End near Saffron Walden survived the Second World War with next to no damage save for one small piece of graffiti on a wall in the coal gallery and a broken stained-glass window that was cracked in storage. The gardens and grounds did not escape so lightly: the presence of Station 43 meant that features such as bridges, walls, streams and trees were perfect props for exercises. Thirty years after the war when the river Cam was dredged evidence of wartime activity was revealed in the very large amount of spent and live ammunition found in the mud. Although the obstacle course, the dummy tank and the aircraft fuselage had long gone and the gardens restored to their current beauty, there are still reminders of the Polish agents’ stay, the most obvious of which is the memorial urn at the corner of the Mount Garden. It commemorates the 108 Polish agents who lost their lives during the Second World War.
In June 1939, the elderly seventh Baron Braybrooke offered Audley End to the government as a casualty clearing station, but was piqued when he was told it was of no use as a hospital: ‘It was quite unsuitable, having available only two lavatories for the potential two hundred beds, and no electricity. . . Two bathrooms, even with the splendid brass and mahogany Victorian WC next to the chapel, were quite insufficient for the needs of even a convalescent hospital.’ 6 So the house escaped in the first round of requisitioning and the family stayed there throughout the Phoney War.
Life at Audley End had not changed at the outbreak of war, except that non-essential staff were allocated war work and the house was blacked out. Although it did not have as many windows as Blenheim Palace, it was a major feat of sewing to get the hundreds of window frames covered so that not a pin prick of light shone into the darkness. Each turret block has ninety-eight individual panes and the front facade over 250. The first ‘guests’ at Audley End during the autumn of 1939 were evacuees. They stayed in the service wing but remained for just a few weeks. The biggest change was the ploughing up of the East Park and the lawns to the west of the Cam for planting. The kitchen gardens were turned over to more intensive food production on the instruction of Lord Braybrooke, and his daughter, Caroline, helped to till the land until she joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) and left home.
Lord Braybrooke died in March 1941 at the age of eighty-five. ‘Within a fortnight of his death, and without warning, two civil servants from Cambridge arrived at the house and gave Lady Dorothy notice that she should be out of the house within the week, as it was required for use by the army.’ 7 This was a great shock, but fortunately Lady Braybrooke was well-connected and, through the family solicitor, she was able to make contact with someone who reasoned with civil servants in the Office of Works. A longer notice period was negotiated and also a proper contract drawn up with the government which allowed for the taxes owed on the death of Lord Braybrooke to be deferred until after the war. It also gave the family time to ensure that the valuable collection of paintings could be stored securely.
Wooden screens and panelling were erected to protect the interior of the house from damage. Only one entrance was used, via the north porch by way of an impressive oak door surmounted by, perhaps appropriately, an allegorical carving depicting the rewards of peace. A partition in the Great Hall was erected to close the main Vanbrugh staircase, with access to the other floors by the north stairs. The treads on the stairs and rails were also covered.8
The Office of Works was so successful in protecting the walls and covering up the mouldings that former Polish agents who came back to visit after the war did not recognise the interiors, though they immediately felt at home outside and in the grounds. They had no idea they had been surrounded by such opulence during their stay in the house. A photograph of a wartime celebratory dinner shows the Poles and their guests dining in front of Essex board decorated with flags and portraits. Above the board but invisible to the diners stand the arches of Vanbrugh’s staircase and the magnificent Jacobean wood panelling around the Great Hall fireplace. Lady Braybrooke’s possessions were locked in the Picture Gallery and that was the only room in the house that remained out of bounds for the entire war. The Braybrookes were fortunate that the incumbents who stayed at Audley End the longest, the Poles, were respectful of their wartime home.
By the end of June, just three months after Lord Braybrooke’s death, Audley End was handed over to the army. Lady Braybrooke moved into the Old Rectory at Heydon, but that was short-lived as the WAAF requisitioned it in late 1941. From Heydon she moved to Devon but returned to Essex and moved into a property in Littlebury owned by her family. She spent the rest of the war not far from Audley End. Hers was a tragic story. Her younger son George was an ordinary seaman in the Royal Navy, only twenty-one when his ship, HMS Picotee, was sunk by a U-Boat on 12 August 1941; all hands were lost. Two years later in 1943, her older son, Richard Neville, the eighth Baron Braybrooke, was killed on active service in Tunisia at the age of 25. He is buried in the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery at Medjez-el-Bab. The title and house were inherited by the baron’s cousin, Henry Seymour Neville.
Audley End was, in a sense, a strange choice of house for one of the most secret organisations in Britain during the war. Roger Kirkpatrick wrote in Audley End at War:
Audley End is built on an Abbey site, with all the characteristics that make it a security nightmare. The site is overlooked from all sides – often from cover or from public roads. It is bounded by a village and a hamlet; both closely integrated with the estate, whose inhabitants, sometimes by right and always by habit, were used to criss-crossing the park. Three roads skirt the park, one a major north–south route. The wall marking the boundary is of very uneven height, and easily scalable at several points, giving on to cover from which the house can be observed . . . various retired servants and estate workers continued to live in the grounds throughout the war, even though the family had been evicted from the main house. It was the last place that one would have thought suitable for secret operations of any sort.9
The overwhelming advantage of Audley End, however, was its size. It could accommodate over one hundred personnel in the house including thirty to forty agents at any one time. The fact that support personnel were seen running about in uniform probably convinced local people that it was merely another army training establishment.
Special Operations Executive was to occupy Audley End from 1941 until 1944 but it was not the Polish agents who arrived first, rather a contingent of forty-seven soldiers from Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Essex. It is believed that these men were either medically unfit for action or had been wounded. Their task was to maintain security at the house and on the estate and to undertake general duties as required. It is unlikely that any of them were briefed about the agents they were about to look after, but they became part of Station 43 and were later proud to have been associated with it. A number of the soldiers left memoirs about their time there. One of these was Sergeant Alfred Fensome, who was injured at Dunkirk and declared unfit for combat as his hearing was impaired following a dive-bombing by a Stuka. He broke his knee in the same attack when hit by flying debris and masonry. He lived at Audley End working as a driver, sharing the so-called transport bedroom above the 1780s laundry with four other drivers. As far as he and the other soldiers were concerned, the house was just a barracks with a fine exterior.
What the army got was a very chilly, very bare shell. Morale was always good in the house but all remembered it as being very cold, even when the fires were lit and the boilers were stoked. The house had no electricity before the army arrived, so they fixed wooden battens across the ceilings for electric lights.
Corporal Peter Howe and Sergeant Alan Watts provided written recollections from when they were stationed at Audley End from 1942 to 1944. As members of the Royal Army Service Corps they were part of the orderly room staff. Watts had previously served at Briggens, known as Station XIV, which housed more Polish agents and the forgery section of SOE. In 1986, he and Howe told English Heritage about the trials and tribulations, along with a great deal of hilarity, about running Audley End day-to-day. ‘Stoking the boilers at the back of the Lower Gallery in the house was not a popular job with the British soldiers. Howe said that he felt very vulnerable stoking in the dead of night, particularly as the other boiler to tend to was in the stables away from the main house.’10 Even though the risk of invasion was over, there was always an underlying fear of being attacked by German agents working in Britain. In the event, only one German agent who landed in Britain went unnoticed by the security services. The rest were captured and a number agreed to become double-agents. Of course, Watts and Howe couldn’t have known this, so the imagined threat of ambush or attack felt real.
The first officer in charge of the military establishment at Audley End was Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Terence ‘Terry’ Roper-Caldbeck. He had served with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in the Far East between 1926 and 1932, after which he was in Nigeria. At the outbreak of war he was part of the Regular Army Reserve of Officers and was mobilised in 1939, joining SOE in August 1941. He was a fair man who would not tolerate bullying behaviour. When the soldiers first arrived at Audley End, their company sergeant major used to send the men out on long route marches across Essex, get a lift back when he was halfway round and then pretend to run into the house, leaving his men straggling. He was found out. Roper-Caldbeck was livid and gave him his marching orders. The CSM had previously been involved in a fight with Alfred Fensome and everyone was pleased to see him go. His was not the only dismissal. Two quartermasters ended up in jail: the first for stealing rations and the other was caught dipping into mess funds. Roper-Caldbeck was sent temporarily to Canada in December 1941 as the first commandant of STS 103, known as Camp X, a specialist paramilitary and Commando training station on the northwest shore of Lake Ontario. He was liked and respected by the Polish personnel and was helpful when it came to working with the police and Home Guard in Saffron Walden.
One of the things that made for a happy atmosphere at Audley End was the presence of members of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, known universally as the FANYs. In 1907 the FANY was the first women’s corps to be set up to be at the disposal of the government in the event of hostilities. Members of the corps had to ‘qualify in First Aid and Home Nursing, and in addition go through, and pass, a course of Horsemanship, Veterinary Work, Signalling and Camp Cookery.’11 During the First World War they carried out their work on the continent without complaint and in some of the most gruesome conditions. They ran canteens and hospitals, brought wounded soldiers from the battlefields in their own ambulances purchased with donated funds, and for the first part of the war were the only women driving in France. One sergeant who worked with the FANY drivers said: ‘When the cars are full of wounded, no one could be more patient, considerate or gentle than the FANYs, but when the cars are empty they drive like bats out of hell.’12
They were a voluntary body largely made up of young women from wealthy backgrounds. FANY historian, Hugh Popham, summed up the special nature of their work:
That word ‘voluntary’ is important. The Corps was, and remains to this day, just that . . . Far from being paid, members themselves paid a subscription of £1 a year to belong to it, found their own uniforms . . . and for all running expenses were dependent on private generosity.13
By the beginning of the Second World War the FANYs were in a very strong position to help out. They had Motor Driver Companies scattered from the Highlands of Scotland to Devon and were well connected with friends high up in the military, government and civil service. The government wanted them to be subsumed into the ATS to work as drivers or driving instructors and wear ATS uniform but, as a special concession, they would be allowed to wear their own flash on the shoulder. It was an uncomfortable fit for some of the women, especially those who had been involved in the FANY for years, and a breakaway group formed – the Free-FANYs – which was run by two sisters, Marian and Hope Gamwell, who were called out of retirement in Rhodesia to help organise them. Unlike the other women’s services, who were restricted to non-combatant roles, the FANY had no such limitations, meaning that the organisation became an ideal cover for women being trained by SOE. The thinking behind this was that affiliation to a military corps gave wearers of uniform the right to claim prisoner of war status, whereas as civilians they would have had none. In reality, the Gestapo had no time for such niceties and women SOE members affiliated to the FANY who were captured were treated in the same manner as their civilian counterparts.
The Polish forces formed a special association with the FANY which began in the spring of 1940 when a small number of women operated a mobile canteen for the men held in a ‘concentrated’ camp in Brittany. Although they had only basic necessities on offer, this little gesture of help by three young women meant more to the Poles than they could ever express. One of the women, Pat Waddell, said later: ‘People came with all sorts of troubles, and sooner or later the inevitable pocket-case was produced with photos of wife and children, from whom as often as not they had had no news since the war . . . We represented home’.14
General Sikorski had refused to accept the German and French decision that the Poles would surrender and promised Churchill they would fight for the Allies. By 1941 there were some 24,000 Poles in Britain and this would gradually grow to 228,000 serving under the high command of the British Army. They formed the fourth largest Allied armed force after the Soviets, the Americans and the British, and fought successfully in the Battle of Britain as well as on the ground at Monte Cassino and Arnhem. Their contribution was vital to the defeat of the Germans in North Africa and Italy. After the war Churchill said: ‘His Majesty’s Government will never forget the debt they owe to the Polish troops . . . I earnestly hope it will be possible for them to have citizenship and freedom of the British Empire, if they so desire.’15
At the peak of their association with the Polish forces, about 250 FANYs worked directly with the Poles in all different roles, from conducting officers for agents to housekeepers and drivers. ‘ “We were supremely happy”: those four words . . . epitomise the FANY style and go a long way towards explaining their popularity with those they served. In a regimented world they managed to combine the efficiency of the professional with the enthusiasm of the amateur, and that is a rare and precious thing.’16
A big advantage for the FANY as a corps was that they had no specific brief. They acted as ‘a reserve of talent when there was work of special delicacy or high responsibility to be done. Thus they tended to turn up in high places, as drivers to very senior officers, or in a variety of posts in the War Cabinet, the Foreign Office, the War Office, and General Headquarters.’17 These often put them in confidential positions, none more so than with SOE.
The vicarage of St Paul’s Church at 31a Wilton Place, Knightsbridge, was made the FANY HQ in October 1940 when the vicar offered it to them rent free. It was a great boon to them because not only was 10 Lower Grosvenor Place, their previous HQ, a drain on their resources but also because they had to race down three flights of stairs to the basement during air raids.
When Brigadier Gubbins needed two women to do confidential work for him within SOE he thought of a family friend, Phyllis Bingham, who worked as secretary to Marian Gamwell in Wilton Place. He approached her and asked her to come and meet him. Although Mrs Bingham was unable to give her boss any reason as to why Gubbins needed to meet her, Gamwell agreed. Mrs Bingham and Peggy Minchin arrived at 64 Baker Street and entered the offices of the Interservices Research Bureau, and with that the murky world of clandestine warfare. Mrs Bingham was asked by Gubbins to see if the FANY could find volunteers for highly secret work. She agreed, and in July 1941 ‘the Ministry of Labour accepted a proposal that the FANY recruit girls direct from school, often as young as sixteen, and before they were subject to conscription at twenty-one. Thenceforth the FANY provided the backbone of SOE; the drivers, clerks, secretaries, and cooks who kept the organisation going worldwide.’18 Unwittingly, they had started an extraordinary partnership between the Free-FANYs and SOE that would last for the duration of the war and would be considered a perfect match.
The Free-FANYs unofficial status was key. According to Popham ‘they could literally go anywhere and do anything without questions being asked’.19 SOE, for different reasons, was in a similar position: not answerable to any of the service ministries and independent financially. There is another similarity: while they undoubtedly gave excellent service as drivers and instructors within the ATS, the FANYs most important contribution to the Second World War went unreported during the war. Since then it has been somewhat trumped by the more colourful stories of SOE agents. The FANY kept the service going and SOE could not have operated without the 3,000 women who kept the administrative aspect of SOE’s training units and holding houses ticking impeccably.
In Setting Europe Ablaze, Douglas Dodds-Parker wrote: They worked on every duty, from parachute packing to top-level staff duties’20, so that when the agents were going into the field they were relying on the work carried out by the FANYs back home who had packed the parachutes, ensured the explosives that they were carrying worked and had even forged the identity papers that were needed for the cool-headed agent to operate. So the mutual trust had to be there and it was.
Over the course of the war, the Free-FANYs were asked to do so many different types of work that an outsider, or an enemy agent, would have been very pushed to define the exact nature of their work. ‘This was an advantage in itself. It was particularly useful for the agents during their training: the FANY uniform gave them both a certain status and a form of protective colouring at a time when half the world was in one kind of uniform or another.’21 Once they were dropped into France, where most of them operated, or any other occupied country, no amount of uniform would ever protect them from the ‘loathsome attentions of the Gestapo if they were caught.’22
Probably the most skilled work undertaken by the FANYs was in communications. The women who worked in Signals and Ciphers became expert in Morse code, wireless and decoding. As Gubbins said, wireless was ‘the most valuable link in the whole of our chain of operations. Without those links we would have been groping in the dark.’23 Historian M. R. D. Foot agreed it was the most effective operational work they carried out during the war.
The rapid expansion of SOE in 1942 meant the need for FANY recruits grew. As well as signals work, they were needed to help at the Special Training Schools, such as the one at Audley End. They worked as FANY drivers and dispatch riders, clerks and accountants, cooks and orderlies, wireless operators and instructors, and coders. They were also responsible for the welfare of the agents. These were the women who vanished into ‘Bingham’s Unit’.
Phyllis Bingham was responsible not only for recruiting the girls into her unit, or ‘The Org’ as it was known, but also for their physical and mental wellbeing. As the girls could not tell their parents what work they were doing it was doubly important they felt held up by the organisation they had joined. Audrey Swithinbank was just eighteen when she joined the FANY in 1941. She spent four months training in Morse code at Fawley Court near Henley-on-Thames and then had to sign the Official Secrets Act, which meant she was unable to discuss her work with her parents. When she was posted to Grendon Underwood, a country house used as a wireless station, her parents were informed that she was working as an unpaid driver. This confused them as they were not aware that their daughter knew how to drive. It was not until four years later that she was able to tell them a little of what she had been doing.
Mrs Bingham became a legendary character for the girls who were recruited for the unit. Pamela Leach, later Lady Niven, was living with her mother in Folkestone in their house full of billeted soldiers. Pamela was moping around after leaving school at seventeen when one of the army wives told her to pull herself together and go and visit a lady called Mrs Bingham who was starting a new department. She took the train to London and presented herself at the vicarage in Wilton Place for interview. The first question surprised her: ‘Did you have a nanny?’ Pamela was somewhat taken aback but she said that her younger sister had had one and that she had loved her. ‘Good. You’ll do what you are told,’ came the reply. She was sent to the SOE station for Polish agents at Station XIV at Briggens. She nearly blew her cover in the early days of her stay:
The drive was about a mile long and I did the awful thing of posting a letter to my mother from the pillar box at its end – a drama because our address was secret (Room 98 the Horse Guards to be used for all correspondence). My mother noticed the postmark and then naturally wanted to tell some local friends that I was nearby.24
Pamela was sent from Briggens to Algeria in 1943 and was told that she could not tell her mother where she was being posted or even that she was going abroad. She did not see her mother for two years.
The FANY was a way of life and one most of the girls came to love. For those who started work straight out of school at sixteen it was formative and made a big impact on their later lives and careers. For some of the FANYs it became more than a job. Sue Ryder later gained fame for her charitable work and the homes she founded in Britain and abroad to support people in desperate need. This work was inspired by her experiences of working alongside the Poles during the war. She had joined FANY as a fifteen-year-old, lying about her age to get in, and her life was shaped by her wartime work. She said later: ‘I hardly did anything. I just had the honour of being with them. It was remarkable what they did towards the war effort.’25 She acknowledged her love of Poland and the Polish people when she was created a dame in 1979 and chose for herself the title of Baroness Ryder of Warsaw.
At Audley End the young FANYs were very popular. ‘They looked after the SOE agents and gave the place a relaxed atmosphere. The Poles were very proud that there was never a hint of impropriety at Audley End.’ Part of their job was to be friendly with the agents and to keep an eye out for them if one of them looked to be under pressure and at risk of cracking. Sue Ryder said:
It was like living with people under a sentence of death. Each group was different, each group had about three or four people in it and the groups were not allowed to talk amongst themselves. We got to know people very well. They talked about things that you would not normally talk about in life, like people who have got a terminal illness. So from that point of view it was extremely memorable. Above all we had enormous affection and admiration for them.26
Audley End House was used not only as accommodation for the Polish agents but also as the offices, lecture rooms and mess. The Great Hall doubled as a lecture room and dining hall for the Polish officers while the Bucket Hall became an orderly room and the former Museum Room a mess room for the students. Outside arms and munitions were stored in the stables and in hidden locations throughout the grounds. Only the specialist weapons for use by the agents were stored in the house in a long, narrow room leading to the wine cellar below the Butler’s Pantry in the basement of the north wing. The Polish weapons instructor was clear that he wanted these weapons to be used by Polish agents only and for training rather than guarding the house. The weapons included Webley .455s, Smith & Wesson .38s, Colt A .32s, Colt A .22s and Sectional Grenades. There was also a cupboard that contained dummys, oil bottles, pull-throughs for cleaning barrels, eye discs and grouping rings, which were the round paper targets used in firing practice. Years after the war there remained a pungent, oily smell in the room because of lack of ventilation – one of few reminders of the house’s activity during those years.
The commanding officers were allocated the guest bedrooms at both ends of the house on the first floor. The majority of the occupants of the house used the second floor where lectures, language training and other courses were held. One room was used as an examination room and another for making, or rather forging, the documents that agents would need in Poland. One of the most interesting rooms was the North Turret Room where authentic Polish clothes were tailored. When SOE was first called into being it had a reasonable supply of foreign clothing from refugees who were given new clothes on arrival in Britain. However, demand outstripped supply and the need for tailors and dressmakers with very high levels of skill were needed. They had to pay meticulous attention to detail to ensure the clothes had European cuts and that every care was taken to avoid using the wrong button or zip fastener which would give away an agent in an instant. ‘Other people were employed to “distress” clothes and the brief-cases that contained the radio sets so that they looked old and blended in with the civilian population.’27 At Audley End, the tailor went to the trouble of ensuring that he had Polish cloth and thread to make the suits and jackets required.
The second floor also served as dormitories for the instructors and agents. They were delighted to discover that they could gain access to the roof from one of the bedrooms and there they could sunbathe undisturbed. The old nursery was used as the orderly room and had an open fire, which was very welcome in the winter as the bedrooms on the second floor were unheated.
All Polish trainees were entitled to extra rations to help build up their strength, including bully beef from the army. Later there were supplies from the Americans, including cigarettes and chocolate. The Poles installed a bread oven in the old kitchen on the ground floor and were allowed to bake their own bread. The kitchen was presided over by Corporal Cottiss, a former Essex policeman, who worked there for two years and provided meals for the canteen. He was popular as he had a stock of chocolate and biscuits which could be bought. There was also a novelty in the canteen, which was a soda fountain. It operated with a gas canister and had flavoured tablets. It was popular but also somewhat unpredictable. One British soldier remembered that it had to be operated with great care otherwise there would be a ‘frightful mess’ if the glass, gas tablets and water exploded.
In addition to the regular supplies delivered to Audley End House, there were vegetables and fruit from the kitchen garden and the orchards, duck eggs and fish. Pike and carp were fished out of the Cam and kept alive in the disused Victorian fountain where they would swim until they were killed for the plate. Fresh milk was delivered to the stables every other day by a sixteen-year-old girl called Sylvia Thurston. She had no inkling of the real nature of Audley End, believing it to be a regular army camp. Little did she know that there were twenty tons of explosives just feet away from where she and the quartermaster exchanged milk for cash.
Audley End’s bathroom facilities were so inadequate that the majority of people on site, whether British or Polish, went to the public baths in Cambridge, some fifteen miles to the north of Audley End. They were driven in a Liberty truck and, if the timing was right, they would visit the local pub for a quick pint before driving home. The trainees were not allowed into Saffron Walden’s pubs so these visits were a great treat. However, the instructors of both nationalities were allowed into the town and would meet at the Forces Club.
The majority of the Polish agents came to Audley End from the Highlands where they received instruction at STS 25a, Garramor, five miles from Arisaig. After training in Scotland, they were sent to the headquarters of the Polish Parachute Brigade in the grounds of Largo House in Fife, or to Ringway, outside Manchester. The wood at Largo was full of apparatus that the students used to swing from and between as part of their training. It was variously nicknamed Monkey’s Wood, Monkey Grove and even Monkey Paradise. It was far from paradise and there were frequent accidents. Only one in four recruits passed their training and reached the final stage to become agents, which is a reminder of how dangerous their tasks were and of how tough they had to be to complete the course. This is the point at which they were sent to Audley End to await their instructions and papers for their return to Poland.
There was a wide range of training courses on offer at Andley End, including two most important ones: Clandestine (Underground) warfare and the Briefing or Dispatch course. The former required a great degree of physical fitness and expertise, self-reliance and discretion. If candidates characters did not fit the profile they were judged ‘unfit for Underground work’ on their training sheets and would be returned to their regular military outfits.28
The skills listed in Polish of the various specialist instructors reads like a spy novel: invisible inks and photography; shooting, driving and locksmith; partisan sabotage and guerrilla warfare; expert on creating ‘legends’ for agents and espionage; an artist in various fields including false documents and handwriting; man traps, mine traps and uses of heavy explosives; land mines and booby traps; tailor for special clothing. This ‘curriculum for criminals’ was as thoroughly followed as the training courses had been at Arisaig. Whereas there the focus had been on physical strength, resilience and expertise, this was engineered to help the agent develop the ability to become a seamless liar.
Some agents stayed at Audley End for up to six months because flights to Poland were only possible when the nights were long enough to make the round trip in darkness. During that time they were constantly undergoing top-up training. This sometimes involved carrying out exercises locally to simulate attacks they would undertake in Poland. Before being accepted as an instructor, Captain Alfons Mackowiak, known always as Alan Mack, was given the task to take something from Roydon post office and not to get caught by the police. To demonstrate how this could be done effectively, he dressed up as a woman and managed to carry out the raid and get back to Audley End undetected and in broad daylight. Other raids took place at night as this was more realistic for the agents who would usually favour working under the cover of darkness when dropped into Poland. The nocturnal exercises, while an excellent means of final training, were risky.
The police and Home Guard could not tell who was attacking them, and defended themselves for all they were worth. Usually the chasing, uproar and exchange of shots ended with a drink in some local pub, and there was much laughter over the absurd situations that arose, but on other occasions heads were broken and serious fighting took place in which people were maimed. 29
There were inevitably casualties as there were at other training stations. The only fatality directly linked with training was Captain J. Lemme, who was an instructor in combat fighting. He and Alan Mack were riding motorbikes during an exercise in thick fog. They drove to Lion Gate, Mack turning left and Lemme right. Unfortunately the fog was so dense that Lemme drove straight into a parked lorry and was killed instantly. It was a sad day when the trainees and instructors attended the funeral and laid him to rest in Saffron Walden Cemetery. A British Army corporal, P. Howe, recalled Lemme’s death: ‘He was blond and Aryan-looking, a big man. Everyone was very upset, as he had been very nice and well liked. The bike was repaired and no one had any qualms about using it.’30 The other death at Audley End was Major Jan Lipinski who died from a suspected heart attack in April 1944. Injuries were more commonplace, some of which were serious. One man lost his hand when a home-made bomb blew up. Doctors at Addenbrookes tried unsuccessfully to save the damaged limb. Another man sustained serious stomach injuries and a third man almost lost his leg when a bomb he was carrying in his pocket exploded.
Alan Mack became an instructor and was responsible for the outdoor assault course which he designed and had built in the wooded area north-west of the house. The obstacles were made from thick tree branches and there was a deep-water trench in the middle of the wood. He designed a precarious ‘bridge’ made of two lengths of rope which was strung high above the river between two plane trees close to the Stables Bridge. He did not mind how the trainees got across the river, just so long as they did not fall into the waist-deep and muddy water below. They also built pontoons to cross the river: anything that would better prepare them for natural hazards they might encounter. However, Mack was convinced that the greatest help the trainees could give themselves was to be exceptionally fit. He was able to speak from experience, telling them that being at the peak of fitness had saved his life when he was in Poland. At the outbreak of the war he commanded a light artillery battery but was captured by the Russians. He escaped from captivity and fled to Hungary and then to France where he fought in the Battle of Lagarde as a sniper. After the fall of France, he came to Britain and served with the First Parachute Brigade before joining the Cichociemni, the name given to the Polish agents meaning ‘unseen and silent’.
Sergeant Arthur Fensome taught some of the agents to drive. He was surprised to learn that many of the Poles could not ride a bicycle but soon learned that this was a luxury item in pre-war Poland and very expensive. They enjoyed cycling once they had learned and some of them went on to ride motorbikes under Fensome’s tuition. He got to know the Polish locksmith, Warrant Officer Gabriel Zając, very well. Even though the British and Poles were kept professionally separate and the British were not to speak English with the Polish trainees, they often mixed unofficially. Zając spoke excellent English and made even better coffee. Fensome often gave him lifts into Saffron Walden and the two of them found they had a great deal in common. So did Corporal Cottiss, who became friendly with Private Kazimierz Bilewicz who was in charge of workshops and motorcycles. A love of vehicles of all types proved irresistible to both men and they would spend hours together in the workshop tinkering with the machines.
One of the features of Audley End was explosives. A former trainee told Ian Valentine that ‘you couldn’t even lift the seat of a toilet without a small charge being set off’.31 Most trainees had already received explosives instruction in Scotland or, later, at Briggens. At Audley End it was expanded. There was a British Valentine tank that the instructors used for anti-tank weapons training, which was situated in the beautifully named Elysian Garden. The tenth Lord Braybrooke, cousin of the eighth Viscount who was killed in Tunisia, visited his ‘new’ home as an eleven-year-old boy with his parents in 1943. ‘I remember how exciting it was to see Lancaster [Halifax] bomber fuselages and the odd tank or two in the grounds, which were blown up on a fairly regular basis.’32
The explosives were stored in the stables opposite the 1830s carriage building that was used as a garage and for instruction in the use of arms and for bomb making. ‘It is strange to think that this building, built before Audley End House itself, fulfilled such a role when once it had contained royal racehorses.’33
Residents in nearby Saffron Walden had an alarming experience when windows in houses close to the estate were blown out because an ammunition, gas and fuel dump exploded. A soldier watching from the stables at Audley End described seeing shells bursting and cart-wheeling through the air in an extraordinary display of fire-power. Most explosions were better contained. Trainees were taught how to burst apart doors of safes, blow up trees to make them fall over to block a road and simulate blowing up trains. The bridges at Audley End were in regular use as props for practising laying mines.
A potentially explosive incident of another kind was averted by Colonel Roper-Caldbeck at the last moment. The recruits received training in the art of silent killing both using the F&S Fighting Knife and by strangulation. They were told that strangling an opponent was tricky and had to be done efficiently and quickly otherwise it would not be silent. One trainee, who wished to remain anonymous, described being sent into the stables in pitch darkness to strangle one of the local cats. Apparently it is difficult to strangle a cat quietly. When Roper-Caldbeck heard that neighbourhood cats, both tame and feral, were being rounded up and taken to Audley End to be used for various purposes to do with training he immediately stamped out the practice, telling the Poles that it was very wrong, as the British were deeply sentimental about animals.
Safety and security were serious considerations at all of the training bases. Officers and other staff were restricted to the areas where they undertook instruction. This was to help with security, so that if one was captured and tortured he could ‘divulge only his or her narrow contribution to the training programme and staff.’34 Local groups such as the Home Guard and other static army formations in the area knew as little as possible. The police were told about the presence of the Poles so that if a member of the public complained about strange goings-on at Audley End there would not be a visit from the local constable. In a further attempt to obfuscate, the Polish trainees at Station 43 wore British Army uniforms, with the Poland flash at the top of the left arm and the Polish White Eagle hat badges.
Another vital aspect of the training for agents was the ever-changing scene on the ground in Poland. They had to know what to expect when they were parachuted into their old country. Major Lipinski, who was the briefing instructor, kept up a permanent intelligence link with Poland in order to stay up to date. For example, agents had to be able to order coffee in a café without attracting attention. They had to know that ‘café noir’ was no longer the correct expression. It was simply ‘café’ because milk had been off the menu for many months. They had to learn about the latest bureaucratic changes and understand the uniforms they would encounter. They had to arrive out of the blue and become instantly inconspicuous.
The Poles also had to be taught how to cope with the numbers of Germans they would encounter on their return. Most of them had not seen the German invaders in September 1939 and were alarmed at the prospect of being confronted by one on home ground. In preparation, Audley End was periodically ‘visited’ by men in Nazi uniforms who would pop out and address a trainee vigorously in German. Sometimes students were hauled out of bed in the middle of the night and interrogated in German.
Once the trainees had learned everything that Lipinski and others could teach them about the Germans in Poland, the intricacies of café culture and the state of the police, they would be given a new identity. This was not just a piece of paper with a new name but a whole background or legend. They had to get used to their new alias and learn to construct the web of logical, perfectly fluent lies that fitted with their new identity. This was followed through to the very last detail: one man, Bronisllaw Wawrzkowicz, was sent from Audley End to a holding camp at Harrow where he had all the fillings in his teeth removed and replaced by a Polish dentist with the amalgam used in Poland. The forged documents that he took with him had been made in a room on the first floor at Audley End. In order to fade the documents and make them look convincing they were either aged under lamps or taped to the windows in the lower gallery on the first floor above the Great Hall where the sun would do its natural work safely out of view from prying eyes.
Adam Benrad was a Polish officer cadet who had come to England in June 1940 having travelled through Yugoslavia and Italy in 1939. At the beginning of 1943 he was serving with the First Rifle Brigade when he and a small number of other officers were told they were to be interviewed by an unidentified man who might be able to offer them a flight to Poland via a parachute drop. They were asked to consider this proposition and, if they liked it, to meet the man. ‘I thought about it and was told not to make a rushed decision. If people were too eager they couldn’t go on to become an agent.’35 Benrad passed muster and took part in parachute training at Ringway where the selection process for him started. He told a story of one young man who was in every way suitable to be an agent but could not be relied upon as he fell unconscious every time he jumped from an aircraft. After Ringway, Benrad was transferred to Audley End where he was first taught sabotage. He learned to blow up bridges, engines and factories. On one occasion, a group of Polish trainees were sent to blow up an unused stretch of railway between Cambridge and London. Unfortunately they misinterpreted their instructions and blew up the main line, causing massive disruption and delays. Engineers had to repair the track as quickly as possible but could not explain how it had been damaged in the first place. The line was out of commission for the best part of a day. After doing a course in basic Morse code, Benrad was taken to London to an area near Victoria station that had been badly damaged by air raids. There he was taught unarmed combat and street fighting ‘in an area that resembled bombed-out Warsaw.’36
When Benrad was interviewed for the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive in 1983, he talked of how little he knew about the organisation that trained him and others as agents. He said that he never heard the name SOE mentioned during the war and thought it was only in the postwar era that the name of Baker Street was dropped and Special Operations Executive was finally revealed as the overall operation. As far as he was concerned, all he knew was that he was going to Poland to meet up with the Polish underground. He said, ‘We never, for a moment, considered ourselves killers. We knew about unarmed combat and we would not hesitate to kill a man if the occasion arose, but we did not consider ourselves killers in cold blood. We saw ourselves as soldiers’.37
Benrad enjoyed his time at Audley End, despite his eagerness to get back to his own country. He liked the company of the FANY drivers and he was grateful that they understood the situation in Poland and the danger of the Gestapo. He said later that the one thing that played on his mind was ‘this uneasiness at seeing the Germans in the flesh.’38
Being confined to Audley End did have its frustrations for some but there were compensations, such as trips to other training establishments for specialised weapons training that required a pistol gallery or some other specific type of range. Agent George Iranek-Osmecki described what happened when they were let out of what he called the ‘High School of Falsehood’:
We used to leave this course to go to various towns, to mingle with the population and carry out prescribed tasks. Some of the exercises were short, others lasted several days. They were all done in mufti; picking out persons whose descriptions we’d been given, or shaking off the sleuths put on our scent, were among the easiest of the lot. The observation of troop rail-movements at railway junctions, the counting of ships sailing to and from ports, the following of day-to-day events in the docks, making contacts with unknown persons were among the more difficult. All this had to be done discreetly, without attracting the attention of the uniformed police or of security agents. Some, however, were not successful in this and found their way to the nearest police station. When such a thing happened one was not allowed to give the game away, to divulge that these were special exercises. When arrested, one had to lie one’s way out of the unpleasant predicament. To show one’s cards and own up disqualified one for service with the Underground.39
Audley End was also used for training couriers, both men and women, who would carry information to and from Poland for the government-in-exile. They were not flown into Poland as the agents were, or indeed the French couriers going from Tangmere via Mrs Bertram at Bignor Manor, but journeyed overland by train. Sometimes their journeys would take weeks, months and in one case almost a year. Theirs was an equally dangerous task and the length of time taken to complete the journey might mean that their identity papers were out of date by the time they arrived in Poland. There was only one woman agent who landed by parachute. Her name was Elzbieta Zawacka and she had brought reports of the atrocities being committed in the concentration camps in her country. She parachuted into Poland, aged forty-three, on 9 September 1943. She was an exception to the rule because she had worked as an instructor for the Polish Women’s Military Training Organisation before the war.
Of the seventy agents trained at Audley End only five were dropped into Poland from Britain. From 1944 it became possible for them to leave for Poland from Brindisi in Italy. One of the reasons why so few were parachuted into Poland was the great distance from Britain. The 2,000-mile round trip took the best part of twelve hours and it was only in winter that they could leave and return in darkness. The flight was cold, exhausting and dangerous, stretching the RAF almost beyond the limits of its capabilities at the time. Both the Poles and Czechs had been keen to form their own national section within the RAF 138 (Special Duties) Squadron, which was responsible for dropping agents and equipment inside occupied territory, but there was neither the aircraft available nor the political will to grant such autonomy. The agents therefore had to take their place in the queue, relying on the RAF and later the USAAF for aeroplanes and supplies. Naturally this led to conflict, with each nationality arguing for priority for its own ‘most important’ mission. Gubbins, by now an acting major general, was a supporter of the Poles and he did everything he could to argue for more flights to Poland but it was never easy and the RAF was always over-extended as it tried to fulfil the demands of the various governments-in-exile.
One of the Audley End agents who did make it to Poland was twenty-seven-year-old Major Antoni Nosek, known by his code name ‘Kajtus’. During his training in Scotland he had shown himself to be capable of living off the land, snaring rabbits and trapping fish in the river Morar. He and his fellow trainees were encouraged to learn breaking and entering by being fined sixpence every time they went through a door or gate at Garramor. Leaping fences and climbing through windows became second nature. By the time he arrived at Audley End, Nosek was determined to be one of those who would be chosen to fly into Poland. He trained hard under Alan Mack, appreciating the instructor’s emphasis on physical strength and fitness. When the two men met again at Audley End in 2002, Nosek thanked Mack publicly for his excellent tutoring.
To add to the confusion of names, Nosek, or ‘Kajtus’ had a new full name: Antoni Niechrzynski. He spoke about how he had to forget completely that he had ever been Antoni Nosek and become a car mechanic who worked in a garage in Chmielna Street in Warsaw. ‘When suddenly woken up during the night, I had to reply “I am Antoni Niechrzynski”. Here I also received new German identification papers, Kennkarte and Arbeitskarte.’40
Like Nosek, Adam Benrad was also given a new identity which he once had to use when he was arrested by the Russians. He had been born in south-east Poland but for his cover he came from a little village outside Warsaw that had been completely destroyed in 1939, making it almost impossible for the Germans to follow up his story. He chose a new surname from the pre-war Warsaw telephone directory and he was given a new date of birth. He kept his Christian name because it was a commonly used one. In real life his mother was still alive but he ‘killed her off [under] some mysterious circumstances’ when his village was bombed in 1939. His father was already dead so he did not have to make that up. Ian Valentine explained what happened when the agents had taken their oath and prepared to depart with their new identities:
Agents were separated into teams of between three and six . . . The day before the flight the dispatch of each team took place, when each person was told the destination address, safe house address and contact addresses, as well as passwords and any special instructions. The parachutists countersigned for money belts and post. The leader and deputy leader of the team received two copies of lists of equipment that were to be taken by the aircraft. At the departure session the document ordering the flight was signed by the whole team.41
Nosek’s flight took him via Brindisi where SOE had an operating station. He remembered seeing the Halifax bomber waiting for him and his fellow parachutists and how they climbed in and sat quietly on the floor. As the plane took off he realised that he was ‘cut off from the security of the British Isles, from the comfort of Audley End House, and now exposed to the powerful German security forces such as the Gestapo.’42 He described in the third person the feelings they had as they sat on the floor of the bomber, unable to speak over the noise and with their heads full of thoughts of the future:
The flight was long, six or seven hours, sometimes they heard strong anti-aircraft fire, but it did not bother them, because they were concentrating on adjusting themselves to this new role. They were possessed by a strong desire to do well and to accomplish everything that was expected of them, but more importantly, not to disappoint SOE, Audley End House training staff, General Sikorski and the army staff. They were ready to undertake any action, even if there was little chance of survival. When they were in prison, or Gestapo torture chambers, their thoughts went back to Audley End House, the place of birth. Pleasant memories gave them strength and the will to survive. That is why Audley End House is such a dear place for us.43
Nosek landed in Poland in May 1944 carrying two pistols, a large money belt strapped around his waist and his various papers and forged documents. Every scrap of material associating him with Britain had been removed, destroyed and replaced by Polish detail. It was an extraordinary transformation. From now onwards he was no longer affiliated to the British but to the Sixth Bureau of the Polish Staff to whom he had been handed over just before he left for Poland. After he jumped and landed, the bomber came round a second time to drop off the containers of courier material and other precious equipment destined for the Armia Krajowa. Nosek remembered looking up and seeing the poignant sight of the bomber retreating in the distance, becoming ever smaller until it was just a dot in the sky and not even a distant rumble of its engines could be heard. He felt very alone.
However, he was not alone. Nosek was taken by a female courier known as an ‘Auntie’ to a safe house in Warsaw where he stayed with a family while he acclimatised to his new environment. Soon after his arrival he was stopped by a Gestapo official as he crossed a street. He handed over his forged papers expecting the official to arrest him for documents ‘made in Britain’ but was relieved when they let him go. The Kennkarte was the most valuable document for agents but also the one most difficult to forge. There were four different types in Poland denoting racial background: the Reichsdeutschen were Germans born in Germany and they had a special card. Then there was one for people who could prove they had third generation German ancestry. Then there were the non-Germans who could prove they had no Jewish blood. They were chillingly referred to as Nichtdeutschen (not Germans) and Nosek was one of these. Finally there were the Jews who had their own card and had to wear a blue Star of David on a white armband. The Kennkarte gave civilians different rights for food coupons; it dictated where they could live and the curfew hours. All this had to be absorbed quickly by Nosek and other agents who landed in Poland.
Nosek spent many of the curfew hours playing bridge in the flat. His partner was the managing director of a civil engineering company who was so impressed that he offered him a job. Shortly after that, Nosek was held up and arrested by the Gestapo on the way to a meeting and taken to Monteluppi prison, a notorious place where underground agents were locked up, interrogated and often tortured. Nosek was released after his papers had been thoroughly checked and the managing director had vouched for him. It was so unusual to be released from this prison that he had difficulty persuading other underground members that he had not cut a deal with the Germans.
He remained active in the Armia Krajowa for the rest of the war, taking part in the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944. Three months later he was sent to Krakow to work with the District AK. When the Russians came in 1945 he was arrested and imprisoned. He was released after six weeks and returned to Britain where he lived in exile until his death in 2007. Many other agents who operated in Poland like Nosek did not survive the war. Working as radio operators or saboteurs there is no doubt that their assignments were among the most dangerous. Out of 316 volunteers from Audley End, Briggens and other Polish stations who were parachuted into Poland over the course of the war 108 lost their lives.
Like Nosek, Benrad flew out of Brindisi to Poland in a Halifax with a Polish crew. He was carrying £2,000 in gold, which was heavy and he worried that he would land too quickly, but in fact the parachute drop went without a hitch and he described it as the easiest thing that ever happened to him. Once he arrived in Warsaw with his appointed ‘Auntie’ he was put into quarantine for two weeks and given briefings on life in Warsaw under the Germans. He read German newspapers and gradually built up a picture of the situation in the city which had changed out of all recognition since his last visit in 1939. He joined a partisan guerrilla outfit and felt at home: ‘There is a feeling of elation that you are in the midst of something, that something is going to happen here, whether in a few days or a few weeks but you will be fighting again. We understood it was not a normal military fight with guns but that there will be a fight against the occupation.’44
The fight was brought to the Germans on 1 August 1944. The aim was to liberate Warsaw from occupation. The Warsaw Uprising was supposed to coincide with the Russian Red Army’s approach from the east, but Russians stopped short, allowing the Germans time to regroup and demolish the city, defeating the Polish Resistance who fought for sixty-three days with little support from its Allies. Churchill pleaded with the USA and Russia to help but his requests were stubbornly ignored. He ordered more than 200 low level supply drops without permission from the Russians for air clearance but it was a modicum at best. Without Russian and American assistance it was futile to think that the resistance could stand up to the might of the Germans. The death figures were horrific. Some 16,000 members of the Resistance were killed and several thousand badly injured. The figures for civilian casualties were between 150,000 and 200,000 – the majority of those in mass executions. By January 1945 it was estimated that over 85 per cent of the city of Warsaw had been destroyed. Poland had once again been let down by its allies. The uprising has remained an inspirational story for the Poles and it was the largest single military effort undertaken by any of the SOE-backed resistance movements during the war. It is perhaps one of the most heroic and tragic events in the history of the Polish nation and of Europe in the twentieth century.
As the uprising was entering its second month, Audley End was being wound up. SOE shut down STS 43 and moved its operation to southern Italy. It recorded the successes of the British-trained Polish agents in the field between January 1941 and June 1944: 6,390 locomotives damaged and 800 trains derailed; 19,000 railway wagons and 4,300 army vehicles damaged. In addition, agents had destroyed fuel tanks and depots; they had blocked oil wells and put faulty parts into aircraft engines, condensers and artillery missiles. It is even claimed that they were responsible for the planned assassination of more than 5,700 Germans.45
Audley End remained under the control of the Ministry of Works with a small contingent of British soldiers guarding the house and grounds until the end of the war when it was de-requisitioned. Even before the war ended the question of what to do with Audley End had been considered. The architectural historian James Lees-Milne, who was working for the National Trust, was invited to visit the estate with Lord and Lady Braybrooke. He wrote in his diary in May 1944: ‘I lunched at the Hyde Park Hotel with Lord Braybrooke who has recently succeeded two cousins (killed on active service), inheriting the title and Audley End. He is a bald, common-sensical, very nice business man of 45, embarrassed by his inheritance. At his wits’ end what to do with Audley End. Who wouldn’t be?’46 In January 1945 Lees-Milne endured a freezing cold picnic lunch in the house with Lord Braybrooke and became convinced that it was a house that had to be saved for the nation – but there was no suggestion as to how. The house and grounds were in need of work and the cost of two lots of death duties and running Audley End was too much for the family. They considered living in a small part of the house but this would have condemned the rest of the magnificent building slowly to rot away. The family took the heart-breaking decision to sell it. The tenth Lord Braybrooke, then sixteen years old, recalled a visit from Hugh Dalton, Chancellor of the Exchequer: ‘The future of the house was settled over lunch, when a deal was brokered that the family could keep the contents of the house and be paid £30,000 for the property.’47 The house and estate were put into the care of the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works and transferred to English Heritage in 1984. It is visited by thousands of people every year, including a small and sadly dwindling number of former Polish agents to whom the house and grounds will forever be part of their country’s history. At the 2002 reunion, Antoni Nosek spoke of the training at Audley End and of the great emphasis placed on fitness. Alan Mack’s assault course in the wooded area north-west of the house was remembered by all. ‘Collapsed culverts have been blamed for marked undulations in this area in recent years, but perhaps SOE and Alan Mack were responsible for certain amendments to Capability Brown’s schemes.’48
