 | ||
Hanslope Park is located about half a mile south-east of the village of Hanslope in the Borough of Milton Keynes. Once the manorial estate of the village, it is now owned by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and is home to Her Majesty's Government Communications Centre ('HMGCC').
Contents
History
The manor house was built for Basil Brent in 1692. It was acquired by Edward Watts (son of William Watts who had been a senior official in the East India Company) in Autumn 1764. Having passed down the Watts family, it was the scene of a murder on 21 July 1912 when William Farrow, Edward Hanslope Watts's gamekeeper, shot his master and then committed suicide. Robin Watts owned the house until 1939, when it was bought by Lord Hesketh who handed it over to the War Office when it was requisitioned in 1941.
In the Second World War the Radio Security Service was based at Hanslope Park. The mathematician and cryptologist Alan Turing worked there in the latter part of the War on secure speech "scrambling". Today HMGCC researches, designs, develops and produces communications systems, equipment and related hardware and software.
Foreign and Commonwealth Office archives
Hanslope Park gained publicity in 2011 for its extensive collection of Imperial records held as part of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's archive of Colonial Office papers. The archive produced documentation of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya and led to compensation to those who had been maltreated at Hola camp, among others.
In 2014, following reporting by the Guardian, a group of journalists were allowed to visit the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's archives at Hanslope Park, and briefed on the issues relating to the declassification of the archive material, estimated to comprise roughly 1.2 million documents.
The British government has published a report on the scope of the task, including details of a rough timeline for the "weeding" and declassification process.