Secret history of stately home that swapped parties for Nazis in WW2
Houses, just like people, can lead double lives. But there can be very few houses whose lives are so dramatically different from each other. Trent Park House in Enfield, North London, was, up until the eve of The Second World War, the country home of Sir Philip Sassoon. Born December 1888 the product of the wealthy and powerful Sassoon and Rothschild families, Philip was a socialite with a reputation as “the greatest host in Britain”. After inheriting the 1890s-built Trent Park House from his father, Sir Edward Sassoon, in 1912, Philip extensively refurbished the house and 250-acre former royal estate to be the perfect “party pad”. He threw receptions, soirees, balls and other grand events there that were attended by some of the richest, most famous and well-connected people in the world at the time.
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His guests included King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, Queen Elizabeth II and her mother Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and the artist Rex Whistler (who added decorative motifs throughout the Georgian-style interior). Now the site of a fascinating new museum divided into two sections – one for each of its dual lives – the ground floor contains furnishings and artworks once belonging to Philip that are being displayed in their original setting for the first time since 1939. David Page, an authority on Sir Philip Sassoon, acted as a Research Consultant during the construction of the Sassoon part of the museum. He says that Philip “entertained lavishly at all three of his houses (in addition to Trent Park, he also owned a townhouse in Mayfair and a mansion in Port Lympne, Kent) but it was Trent Park that was his stage for glorious weekend house-parties, at which he could show off his taste, his social and political connections and allow his guests to bask in his energetic and varied hospitality.
His success as a host – possibly the greatest of his generation – lay in his lavishness, variety, consistency and thoughtfulness,” David explains. “He had all the usual ingredients for a country house weekend: a large home with grounds to enjoy, a swimming pool, a golf course and two tennis courts, built at right angles so no one ever had to face into the sun. But Sassoon always seemed to go further, go bigger. His guest lists were well curated, bringing together the worlds of society, politics, the arts, sports and celebrity in a way that almost no one else had done before.
Sometimes a light aircraft would pick up guests, landing at Trent Park’s own private landing strip. For one weekend party, six horse-drawn carts filled with flowers from Covent Garden arrived at dawn; by the time guests began to arrive, an army of gardeners had planted them all in beautiful borders. Rolls-Royces ferried guests around local spots for picnics prepared by his French chefs. A guest's favourite cocktail would be ready on their dressing table as they prepared for dinner. To be in Sassoon’s Trent Park orbit would be to enter a world of privilege, connection, fun and relaxation – all in a beautiful and tranquil setting, just 13 miles from central London.”
Despite his privileged upbringing and appetite for entertaining, however, Philip was no wastrel or dilettante. As well as a trained and qualified pilot, he was also a successful politician: elected MP for Hythe, Kent in 1912, he served as private secretary to Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig during the First World War, and from 1920 to 1922 as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Later, In the 1930s, Philip used both his political credentials and aviation expertise to campaign for the increasing of Britain’s air defences against the growing threat from the German Luftwaffe. His cousin, Siegfried Sassoon, meanwhile, was a famous poet who recorded the horror of life in the trenches during “The Great War”.
Unfortunately, Philip died in 1939 on the eve of World War Two, aged just 50. Described by his friend Noël Coward as "a phenomenon that would never recur", Philip’s death signalled not only the end of the party for Trent Park, but for the world at large. The house and surrounding estate was requisitioned by MI-19 (the division of British Intelligence charged with gathering enemy secrets during WW2) and used as a prisoner of war camp for captured senior Nazi officers. It gained the nickname, the “Cockfosters Cage”, a reference to the nearby underground station at the end of the Piccadilly line.
Whilst incarcerated there, albeit in relative luxury, prisoners were well fed, allowed their own staff and taken on cultural daytrips into Central London, even as Europe burned around them – the officers were subjected to questioning by British agents. However, unbeknown to the Nazis, their conversations amongst themselves outside the interrogation rooms were also being surreptitiously listened to.
Using miniaturised devices hidden not only in the house itself but in the gardens where the prisoners took long leisurely walks, an army of ‘secret listeners’ down in the basement was busy eavesdropping, recording and scrutinising almost every word they spoke.
These German-speaking secret listeners were mainly Jewish refugees who had been recruited by MI19 after they had fled mainland Europe to Britain to escape persecution at the hands of the Nazis. One of those refugees was Ernst Lederer, the Czech-German grandfather of comedian, actress and writer Helen Lederer who played magazine journalist Catriona in the TV series Absolutely Fabulous.
Walking around the ‘M’ (for ‘microphoned’) rooms in the basement of Trent Park House where Ernst worked as an undercover operative – now the ‘Secret Listeners’ section of the museum – Helen told the Express that her grandfather’s secret, heroic past had come as a shock to her :
“We knew that Ernst – whom we, embarrassingly enough, called “Big Bubba” – was in the Home Guard (an unpaid army of dutiful citizens who volunteered to help protect Britain against Nazi invasion) but I had no idea about his work here until I was invited to take part in a Channel 5 documentary called War Hero in My Family a few years ago.
“At the end of filming, after we had visited concentration camps such as Auschwitz, where a lot of Lederers perished, the crew brought me here to Trent and down into the ‘M Rooms’. They showed me a letter from The War Office, signed by Sir John Sinclair (the Army Major-General who later became head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6) congratulating my grandfather on his special war work.”
Helen becomes visibly emotional as she shows me the letter (which is going on display in the museum, along with some of her grandfather’s medals) thanking Ernst for his “keenness and self-sacrifice in volunteering to assist in this work” which, it confirms, “proved valuable, not only to the War Office, but also to the Forces in the Field.”
“That was a goose-pimple moment,” she says. “To think that my own grandfather was here in this room doing work that nobody knew about – not even his wife. She would have waved him off thinking that he was just going to do his bit patrolling the local heath, just like in an episode of Dad’s Army!”
Since those initial revelations, however, further information has come to light which suggests that, in addition to translating secret recordings of the Nazis’ conversations, Ernst Lederer had an even deeper undercover role at Trent Park.
“He disappeared for a year,” continues Helen, “and we think he was a ‘Stool Pigeon’ which, in this regard, means that he acted as a valet to the imprisoned German generals – so he would have had to put on a uniform and walk around with them, gaining their confidence to manipulate them into discussing topics such as U-boats, radar and bombing tactics. It’s absolutely mindblowing!”
Apparently, Ernst’s affable nature and likeable personality made him particularly adept at ingratiating himself with the imprisoned officers; a task that must have been abhorrent to him, given how their ideology had led to the death of millions of Jews. Undeterred though, his courageous work yielded crucial information to the Allied forces about Nazi hierarchy and military strategy, as well as delivering damning evidence of their complicity in the Holocaust that annihilated so many members of the Lederer family.
Museum Director, Dr Giuseppe Albano MBE, says it was a challenging task to chronicle and reconcile the two, such different, aspects of Trent Park’s former lives – both its glamorous party years, and the time when it was a centre of espionage during some of the world’s darkest days.
“Trent Park House has heard, and overheard, a lot of stories in its time,” he says. “And there’s such a contrast between the two periods in its history. The vast majority of visitors will come here to learn about what happened here during the Second World War. But there are plenty of other lessons to be learned about what happened here during the interwar years.
Upstairs is a beautiful country home; as soon as people enter the beautiful restored state rooms of Trent Park House, they will feel like they're entering the world of Sassoon. They'll get a sense of the luxury and the glamour and the excitement of the parties that took place here in the 1920s and 30s. But they will also get a sense of the looming difficult times as well: the conversations that were taking place, the preamble to war. Yes, there is a contrast, but when we look a little bit closer, the two periods, the two epochs are more closely connected than they might initially seem.”
Whilst Helen is careful not to overexaggerate the importance of the work that her grandfather did here, she has every right to feel proud of Ernst, who died in 1959, and his double life as a secret listener. Now that both of Trent Park House’s double lives are also now over, its new life as a museum is just beginning, offering the chance to delve into the two intriguing, and strangely intertwined pasts of this grand house of secrets.
For more information, visit trentparkhouse.org.uk; Helen’s memoir ‘Not That I’m Bitter’ is available from booksellers and at helenlederer.co.uk