Visit to Brickendonbury
This weekend, my wife and I – together with friends Ivan and Ros – visited a place called Brickendonbury which is a little bit north of London in Hertfordshire.
The Brickendonbury estate, has a long and colourful history. Little is known about it until Saxon times (approx. 500 AD), when the hill site was claimed by the Saxon, Brica. The word don means hill – the bury was added in medieval times and indicates the site of a manor house: hence Brickendonbury, a fortified manor house standing on Brica’s hill. The estate is mentioned in the Domesday survey of 1086 and parts of the mansion are known to date back to the late 1600s.
The part of the history of Brickendonbury which really interested us four was the Second World War.
From 1939-45, the site was used by the Special Operations Executive, European Theatre of War, and became Station 17, specialising in training agents and resistance workers in industrial sabotage. Vital operations, such as the daring raid to destroy the Norwegian heavy water plant (part of Germany’s nuclear bomb programme) and the bombing of the Renault engineering plant in France, were launched from the estate. A television documentary “The Secret War” showed archive film of parts of the estate being used for rehearsing such raids and a reminder of these activities was found during building work in 1973, when unexploded hand grenades and live mortar shells were discovered in the drained moat!
Station 17 of the SOE had a link with the killing of the Nazi leader in Prague Reinhard Heydrich in May 1942. The two SOE agents who carried out the assassination were the Czech Jan Kubiš and and the Slovak Jozef Gabčík and both spent some time as part of their training at Brickendonbury.