H (Cottages) Wwii Communications Hut

WWII Communications Hut, Beaumanor Park

A communications hut built in 1941-2, deliberately disguised as a pair of estate workmen's cottages. Now used for storage. The building is constructed of red brick with a corrugated asbestos roof.

The exterior presents itself as a two-storey structure with a fictive central ridge stack. The front elevation features a 6-window range at first-floor level with renewed casement windows. The ground floor has four windows and two doors, all applied to solid brick walls but set with brick projecting sills, thin lintels and brick soldier courses above. The end walls contain genuine doors; the right-hand door was altered in the late 20th century and has a window above it. To the rear are outshuts and a long single-storey wing projecting from the centre. Behind the left end, a further casement window on the ground floor is applied to solid brick. This is probably the only original window surviving, though the sill and lintel remain on the opposite side beyond the rear wing.

Internally, the building consists of a single two-storey space with service rooms in the rear wing.

The hut was one of four intercept rooms built at Beaumanor during the Second World War. Each room was equipped with 14-inch blast-proof walls built into the structure and extending 8 feet up from ground level. The building contains 40 positions manned by 36 operators, together with four control sets for search work. A supervisor station was positioned at the centre of the room near the only access point, close to a pneumatic tube device used to send intercepted messages to the teleprinter room for onward transmission to Bletchley Park. The ground-floor windows were false; real windows were positioned high under the roof to provide minimal daylight. The huts were linked by underground cables.

H hut was staffed by civilian operators, whilst the three other similar rooms were manned by the ATS. The building was designed to appear as semi-detached estate workmen's cottages with front doors and glazed window frames, disguising its true function when viewed from the air and at distance.

The hut formed part of Beaumanor's operation as a Strategical Intercept Station—the most important intercept station of the War Office Y Group—responsible for the collection of enemy Morse-code radio signals. After processing, these signals were transmitted to Bletchley Park for decoding. By the end of the war, approximately 1,300 wireless operators were stationed at Beaumanor.