In search of Sassoon House, former jewel in the crown of Enfield’s Trent Park, I stumble into a 413-acre estate `of mature farmland’ engulfed by a rash of Berkeley Homes. Scene of my third movement and drama year at Trent Park Training College fifty years ago, the site now resembles a Monopoly board of click-together playdough models: 270 soulless luxury houses and apartments within a 56-acre estate for those with millions to burn. In 1966, a vanguard of disaffected students (inspired, perhaps, by NF Simpson’s absurdist drama One Way Pendulum) laid out rows of empty chairs across the quadrangle as a finals examination prank – to be quashed with a mealy- mouthed threat of mass expulsion. That forecourt no longer exists.
Shielded from surrounding fields by layers of metal fencing, the stately home is now encased in scaffolding. It’s a bit of a no-man’s land; a straggling war zone guarded by hard hat workers from Romford to Romania. Bowing to local coercion, its lower floors sliced off into a `world class attraction museum’ plus café, with plenty of room left to house Downton Abbey-style, `residential units’ for those who fancy themselves as part of a resurrected, country club squirearchy. Happily reverting to its former haves and have-nots ethos, the old Orangery with its pineapple obelisks is designated as a private swimming pool, the converted barn where once I’d choreographed an avant-garde version of Brecht’s Good Woman of Szechuan:a private gym.
Originally part of Enfield Wood, this 9th century common land forest became private property in a manorialism enforced on the peasantry to `serve’ as a royal hunting forest. During the 1650s, the Cromwellian government sold off plots to clear army pay arrears. The commoners revolted, destroying hedges and ditches and smashing up houses before the Republican government itself was demolished in 1660 and the Royal Chase reinstated.
The 1932 mass trespass of Kinder Scout, Derbyshire highlighted walkers denied access to areas of open country. Might they have been fired by those 17th Century Royal Chase rioter-protestors staking out their own claim for a right to roam?
In 1909, Trent Park was snapped up by baronet MP Sir Edward Sassoon. Inheriting the estate in 1912, his son Philip, cousin of poet Siegfried, rebuilt the place into a Georgian-style country retreat flaunting ornamental lakes, water garden, stone urns, sunken gardens and private aerodrome.
Visitors included Charlie Chaplin, Lawrence of Arabia, Edward, Prince of Wales, Wallis Simpson and playwright Thornton Wilder. We may even have shared the same garden seat, Thornton and I, albeit a few decades apart. During that last college year, I’d made my mark as romantic lead Emily in Wilder’s `Our Town’, sweating in a belted mac under the glare of a single spotlight before my shiny skirt, tacked up at the waist, burst its moorings and slid with accelerating speed down to my ankles: lines lost, all glamour gone.
In 1939, the mansion was requisitioned by the British War office. Dubbed the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre run by top-secret unit MII9, it masqueraded as POW camp housing 800 high-ranking German officers possibly including Rudolf Hess.
Specialised recording equipment was installed in an eavesdropping operation whose nerve centre was the M Room, miked for covert conversation monitoring using cooperative prisoners and German Jewish exiles, many interned as enemy aliens on the Isle of Man as stool pigeons. Dressed in German officers’ uniform, these refugees posed as prisoners, proficient in technical language and a flush of obscure German dialects to lull captives into spilling secrets.
Embodying the trappings of a theatrical stage set, light fittings, fireplaces, plant pots, skirting boards, bedroom floorboards were bugged, microphones hidden in trees to catch officers’ exchanges as they strolled through a manicured park boasting a million daffodils.
From their luxury prison, inmates were entertained at supervised day trips to Harrods, Simpsons on the Strand, the Ritz and Savoy Hotels. Senior generals enjoyed ensuite sitting rooms accommodating a bugged billiards table, tennis, cards and festive Christmas Eve dinner.
A Scottish aristocrat Lord Aberfeldy (aka military intelligence officer and MII9 agent Ian Munro) presented himself as the prisoners’ welfare officer and second cousin of King George VI. Plying generals with shaving cream, chocolate and cigarettes, he instructed a Savile Row tailor to measure them up, presented pictures of his Scottish castle and let slip his admiration for the Fűhrer.
Behind this façade of a gentleman’s club, the audacious espionage operation placed M119 on the same par as Enigma codebreakers. Recordings (acetate discs marked with a red A for atrocity) proved early evidence of war crimes including graphic eyewitness accounts of the mass murder of Jews in the East, on occasion by the men who had perpetrated them, jovially recounting tales of Hitler’s casual acts of brutality. The project exposed radar system technologies assisting accurate German bombing raids, revealed intelligence on U boat tactics and early warning of the B1 and B2 rocket projects, disclosed potential landing places for Hitler’s planned invasion of Britain and monitoring of resistance activity in occupied Europe.
The subject of fiction, drama and documentaries, interest in the surveillance mission was augmented by historian Helen Fry’s The M Room: Secret Listeners who Bugged the Nazis and The Walls have Ears. The 1957 feature film, The One That Got Away opens with Hardy Kruger being bundled into the great mansion enveloped in barbed wire. Fast forward near seventy years on: Sassoon House is once again shrouded in wire fencing.
The history of Trent Park resembles a game of corporate pass the parcel in which my old college evolved into Middlesex University who sold it for £30m to a private Malaysian University who abandoned it to dereliction due to `financial difficulties’.
Now it’s an upmarket, `designer community’ Poundbury: Lime Tree Avenue, Wisteria Walk. Welcome to the New Deal, 21st century style. This is how strapped for cash councils bulk up their coffers with not one affordable family home as part of the deal. Rather, Berkeley Homes donates `millions’ to charity, services and infrastructure, including 30 acres of public open space and `restored heritage landscape’.
In contrast, I’m drawn to Liverpool, my spiritual home, into the welcoming arms of Granby St Market, a coalition of craft, community and creative activism celebrating the transformation of this Toxteth nucleus of former housing decay. Courtesy of imaginative artists’ collective Assemble helping regenerate ten derelict terraced houses showcasing an indoor winter garden, this breathing hub of activity centred around four reclaimed streets actually won the Turner prize, realising a vision for an inclusive, sustainable future.
But after its brief segue into education, my old Trent Park stamping ground is reverting to its former function as elite jousting pad for the hoi polloi with signposts announcing to the unprivileged masses: Please Respect our Privacy i.e.: Keep Out.
Seeking out a half-remembered pair of obelisks flanking the main gates, I come upon this silent grotto. Perhaps the tree preceded our crazy year of dance drama and rebellion. Hopefully it will outlive the primly slumbering Berkeley world. Spurred on by its peasant antecedents, its roots could well erupt, restoring this vast, leafy meadow to its original function. (Norma Cohen; Nov. 2022)