London’s Newest Museum Elevates Sir Philip Sassoon Above Lessons from World War II History

The Piccadilly line from Heathrow famously terminates at Cockfosters, leaving most American tourists to disembark in central London having giggled at the station’s announcement along the way, but seldom investigating what lies at the last stop in the far north of the city. However, the newly opened Trent Park House of Secrets offers three distinct if disjointed reasons to further investigate, and interrogate, the city’s latest war museum, a vanity project that could have been so much more than a cultural amenity improbably tucked into a luxury real estate development at the center of 400 acres of historic parkland.

First, there’s the museum’s ground floor, which serves as a decorative homage to its former owner, Sir Philip Sassoon, a wealthy Iraqi-Jewish merchant turned politician and patron of the arts, who turned his mansion into London’s last great pre-war salon, where he had a Gatsby-like passion to entertain high society from Chaplin to Churchill.

Then there’s the museum’s basement, which packs in Trent Park’s once-secret wartime relevance, only declassified a half century after Nazi Germany’s surrender. Immediately upon Sassoon’s passing in 1939, his estate was requisitioned by British military intelligence and transformed into the Cockfosters Camp. Sassoon’s prized collection of art and antiquities was packed and shipped to his nephew’s home at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, and the residence was repurposed into a high-security prison for high-ranking Nazi officers captured in northern Africa and France.

Of course, you might just be in the market for a new apartment. Trent Park House of Secrets is the unlikely anchor tenant for luxury residences on the mansion’s upper floors; 14 apartments priced from nearly $1 million are currently under construction.

“The Save Trent Park campaign was actually founded in 2014 with the aim of saving the house from demolition,” museum director Dr. Giuseppe Albano told Observer. “There were trustees who were very committed but who could never raise the money, so when the Berkeley Group stepped in with the money to acquire the estate in 2015, the trust worked to persuade them to give over part of it to create a museum.”

The trust ultimately got more space than it bargained for. Albano said the original offer on the table from Berkeley was to give the museum trust two rooms to create a kind of community museum but the trust persuaded Berkeley to give up two floors, “and not just any two floors but the two floors where all of the history happened: the ground floor, and the basement.” However, the intent of those floors is deeply divided.

In the final years of the war, captured officers were increasingly captivated by the bucolic grounds, and the free-flowing wine on offer ultimately gave way to loose lips. Meanwhile, everything from the chinoiserie wallpaper to the rosebushes was bugged, and candid exchanges, reflections and confessions between the Nazi POWs were secretly recorded and feverishly translated by German-Jewish civilian “listeners” working around the clock to help turn the tide of the war. When the museum opened this June, Trent Park’s legacy was heralded as being on par with Bletchley Park, the country estate that housed British codebreakers and today honors the lasting legacy of Alan Turing, but here allegiances are divided; the story of the forgotten translators manning the cramped basement listening stations remains down there, while the ground floor is primarily concerned with restoring Sassoon’s former standing among the 20th-century aristocracy. This makes the House of Secrets appear foremost as a personal history museum. (Albano was previously director of the Freud Museum in London, and the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome.)

The recorded conversations and piano music that play here are from Sassoon’s heyday, not captured by British intelligence, and the restored furnishings, returned by Sassoon’s grandnephew, David Cholmondeley, were never sat upon by a Nazi officer, leaving their treatment here to the imagination. The home is instead a picture of pre-war grandeur. “A lot of the decorative art, fine art, many family heirlooms, personal mementos, ceramics and lacquer cabinets, were returned for the first time since 1939; we didn’t have to purchase any of them,” Albano said. They were situated in their rightful places by museum curator Tori Reeve, from photos found in a 1931 issue of Country Life magazine.

Meanwhile, the furnishings brought in and wired by the military were ultimately “dispersed over time,” according to Albano. Between those two floors, the museum has declined to consider whether, following the early 21st Century’s War on Terror, which saw abuses occur at CIA Black Sites, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay with U.K. government complicity, there might be a valuable historical lesson to take away from Trent Park’s model of gathering actionable intelligence and winning the war through the humane treatment of prisoners.

Was that never a consideration? “You’re the first person to ask,” Albano admitted. “I will let visitors make up their own mind that there are political messages—lessons to be learned about how we treat people today.”

Rather than contemplate what impact dignified treatment of prisoners may have on earning their cooperation, the museum remains convinced the 84 generals and 24 colonels housed here were merely suckers wowed by a reverse Stanford Prison Experiment, a brilliant psyop of hot showers and a pool table, even as recordings showed some privately reconciled their roles in the Nazi effort and weren’t just clamoring for billiards. “It was a devious strategy, trying to get them to relax, to open up,” Albano said.

Trent Park House of Secrets could have been successful as a monument to the Western values that captured hearts and minds while vanquishing evil at the end of World War II, a once effective propaganda campaign of human rights that lasted through the end of the Cold War, but the museum doesn’t care to interrogate whether the lesson of the Trent Park operation isn’t that Britons build the best mousetraps, but that you simply catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

“Some of them were arrogant, some of them were conceited. They thought, ‘we are the generals, we are the highest-ranking, we deserve to be treated well,’” Albano said, continuing to make the case Trent Park made fools of the Nazis housed here. “They thought Hitler was going to win the war, so they thought, ‘our captors are treating us well because the captors in turn will become the captives.’” Somehow that philosophy, recorded at Trent Park 80 years ago, still hasn’t been fully heard.

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