By Tori Reeve, Exhibition Designer and Curator
In part two of my curatorial blog on the development of Trent Park Museum, we turn our attention to the basement rooms. Hidden below the chintz perfection of Sassoon’s fine rooms on the ground floor, there lies a warren of interconnected basement spaces, cramped and vaulted, with few windows, roughly rendered stone walls peeling with decades-old paint and a network of ancient pipe runs.
In the autumn of 1939, Churchill had declared that Britain was at war with Germany and, following Philip Sassoon’s death in June of that year, Trent Park House was quickly requisitioned by the War Office. It was one of many grand country houses taken over and repurposed for use as a hospital, war supply depot or, as in the case of Trent Park, as a centre for military intelligence operations. In a period of 10 days in December 1939, the mansion block was wired for a complex bugging operation to enable it to be used to house German prisoners-of-war of high military rank, with rooms tapped to pick up every conversation then listened to and recorded by an army of secret listeners hidden in the basement rooms below.
As they stand today, the basements rooms are very much as they would have looked at this time, with all glamour left behind in these empty historic spaces ready to be filled with listening rooms, offices, mess room, bomb shelter, storerooms and a workshop that would have kept the whole system running seamlessly every waking hour of every day.
Recreating historic room settings upon such an excellent base layer is a curatorial delight but as we think about populating these spaces, there are challenges aplenty. Do we opt for recreation of a specific date, or a broader period? Do we want the rooms to be dressed using original vintage items that will now look ‘old’ or should we use specially-created props, ‘new’ and fresh from the box in 1940? We are working on the answers to these conundrums, and future blogs will show you the direction we intend to take…
However, one of the most significant challenges has been the question of recreating the very specific technical equipment that the secret listeners used to listen, record and document the conversations of the captive officers above stairs. I undertook research into the original kit, a project that involved poring over declassified intelligence files in the National Archive at Kew, reading contemporary accounts by the Post Office Research Station, who were responsible for the fit out of Trent Park House as an offshoot of the General Post Office who governed telecommunications at the time.
I also delved into the far corners of the internet, finding specialist groups and solo enthusiasts with unrivalled knowledge of the intricacies of technology of the period and were able to provide helpful leads and documentation. One such solo enthusiast is Neil Wilson, founder and curator of The Radio Museum in Watchet on the north coast of Somerset. Neil has made it his life’s work to document the history of telecommunications from the late 19th century to the present day, and his museum, housed in an old pub that speaks to a previous life as a smugglers’ haunt, is crammed with every piece of kit imaginable. If you find yourself at a loose end in Somerset then I encourage you to visit The Radio Museum and marvel for yourself.
Through this multi-pronged and thoroughly enjoyable approach I have been able to piece together the core kit and to document the tweaks and adjustments that took place as the intelligence installation came into operation in the winter of 1930/1940. I am now working with our exhibition designers, Hara Clark, to develop authentic kit for our basement rooms.
Let us now move on to the question of interpretation. Interpretation is the way that we connect our visitors to our historic spaces and collections, and how we communicate our stories and ideas. Interpretation can take many forms, and in many museum and gallery settings this crucial contextual information is relayed through layers of graphic panels and labelling, audio visual interventions, audio tour, companion guidebook and even costumed interpreters.
However, there is nothing that will spoil the magic of a perfectly recreated room setting quicker that an anachronistic museum graphic, undoing all one’s hard work in one fell swoop, and so the challenge is to tell the story without overreliance on modern interventions. Working again with Hara Clark, we are developing a visual language through vintage type-faced graphics and information bulletins, Pathe style footage, hidden audio and projections, whilst reserving space to offer more modern immersive interpretation without breaking the spell. In a future blog we will take a journey back to print and graphics of the period, and how we can translate this style for a modern audience.
Image Credit: Neil Wilson, founder and curator of The Radio Museum in Watchet standing with Tori Reeve
