Hanslope Park is located about half a mile south-east of the village of Hanslope in the City of Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England. Once the manorial estate of the village, it is now owned by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), and is also home to His Majesty's Government Communications Centre ('HMGCC') and FCDO Services. [1]
The manor was part of the jointure property of Anne of Denmark. Repairs were ordered to the lodge and barns in 1608. [2] A new manor house was built for Basil Brent in 1692. [3] It was acquired in Autumn 1764 by Edward Watts, son of William Watts, who had been a senior official in the East India Company, and of his wife, better known as Begum Johnson. [4] 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. [5] 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. [3]
In the Second World War the Radio Security Service was based at Hanslope Park. [6] The mathematician and cryptologist Alan Turing worked there in the latter part of the war on secure speech "scrambling". [7] Today HMGCC researches, designs, develops and produces communications systems, equipment and related hardware and software. [8]
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 papers relevant to the issue being referred to as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office migrated archives. It was described by Caroline Elkins as "the fortress-like warehouse for top-secret government files". [9]
These archives produced documentation that, unlike other papers, was never made public in the National Archives. These included details of the 1952 to 1960 Mau Mau uprising against British rule in Kenya, and their disclosure led to compensation being paid to people who had been maltreated at Hola camp and other places. [10]
In 2014, following reporting by the Guardian, [11] 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. [12]
The British government published guidance and a report on the scope of the task, including details of a rough timeline for the "weeding" and declassification process, originally in 2013 and updated from time to time. [13]
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) is the ministry of foreign affairs and a ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom.
The Mau Mau rebellion (1952–1960), also known as the Mau Mau uprising, Mau Mau revolt, or Kenya Emergency, was a war in the British Kenya Colony (1920–1963) between the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), also known as the Mau Mau, and the British authorities. Dominated by Kikuyu, Meru and Embu fighters, the KLFA also comprised units of Kamba and Maasai who fought against the European colonists in Kenya, the British Army, and the local Kenya Regiment.
Hanslope is a village and civil parish in the unitary authority area of the City of Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England. The village is about 4 miles (6.4 km) west northwest of Newport Pagnell, about 4 miles (6.4 km) north of Stony Stratford and 8 miles (13 km) north of Central Milton Keynes. The northern parish boundary is part of the county boundary with Northamptonshire.
Evelyn Baring, 1st Baron Howick of Glendale,, was Governor of Southern Rhodesia from 1942 to 1944, High Commissioner for Southern Africa from 1944 to 1951, and Governor of Kenya from 1952 to 1959. Baring played an integral role in the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion. Together with Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd, Baring played a significant role in the government's efforts to deal with the rebellion, and see Kenya through to independence. Baring was aware of abuses against Mau Mau detainees. He was elevated to being the 1st Baron Howick of Glendale in 1960.
Alan Tindal Lennox-Boyd, 1st Viscount Boyd of Merton, CH, PC, DL, was a British Conservative politician.
The 1959 Hola massacre was a massacre committed by British colonial forces during the Mau Mau Uprising at a colonial detention camp in Hola, Kenya.
His Majesty's Government Communications Centre (HMGCC) is an organisation which provides electronics and software to support the communication needs of the Government of the United Kingdom. Based at Hanslope Park, near Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, it is closely linked with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the British intelligence agencies.
Caroline Elkins is Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, the Thomas Henry Carroll/Ford Foundation Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, Affiliated Professor at Harvard Law School, and the Founding Oppenheimer Faculty Director of Harvard's Center for African Studies.
White people in Kenya or White Kenyans are those born in or resident in Kenya who descend from Europeans and/or identify themselves as White. There is currently a minor but relatively prominent White community in Kenya, mainly descended from British, but also to a lesser extent Italian and Greek, migrants dating from the colonial period.
The "Y" service was a network of British signals intelligence collection sites, the Y-stations. The service was established during the First World War and used again during the Second World War. The sites were operated by a range of agencies including the Army, Navy and RAF, and the Foreign Office. The General Post Office and the Marconi Company provided some receiving stations, ashore and afloat. There were more than 600 receiving sets in use at Y-stations during the Second World War.
A diplomatic courier is an official who secures and transports diplomatic bags. Countries have utilized diplomatic couriers to handle important documents, artifacts and supplies between different countries since the 12th century. Following the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, couriers are placed under diplomatic immunity while performing their work. Couriers are usually hired by a specific country and are tasked with protecting and managing bags from being opened. Some couriers are assigned on an ad hoc basis, but in those cases they are released from immunity once their bags have been delivered. The original definition of a diplomatic courier focuses on handling bags, but couriers today also deal with logistical affairs and digital communications.
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, published in the UK as Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, is a 2005 non-fiction book written by Caroline Elkins and published by Henry Holt. It won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
The Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, commonly known as British Kenya or British East Africa, was part of the British Empire in Africa from 1920 until 1963. It was established when the former East Africa Protectorate was transformed into a British Crown colony in 1920. Technically, the "Colony of Kenya" referred to the interior lands, while a 16 km (10 mi) coastal strip, nominally on lease from the Sultan of Zanzibar, was the "Protectorate of Kenya", but the two were controlled as a single administrative unit. The colony came to an end in 1963 when an ethnic Kenyan majority government was elected for the first time and eventually declared independence.
The Diplomatic Wireless Service (DWS) was the name of the communications system set up for the British Foreign Office by Brigadier Richard Gambier-Parry, the first Foreign Office Director of Communications, in the latter part of 1945. It grew out of the Special Communication Units (SCU) which were responsible for communications for MI6 during the war. Its original base was at Whaddon Hall in Buckinghamshire, but it moved to Hanslope Park in the winter of 1946/47. The primary role of the DWS was communications between British embassies and the UK, this part of its operations being based at Hanslope Park, which is still the HQ of its successor, His Majesty's Government Communications Centre (HMGCC).
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office Migrated Archives are a collection of about 20,000 files and other records created by the governments of 37 British colonial dependencies, removed to the UK at independence, and held clandestinely for decades in various repositories in and around London. They came only from territories administered by the Colonial Office, so not from India and other dependencies administered by the India Office and its predecessors, whose records are in the India Office Records at the British Library.
Operation Legacy was a British Colonial Office programme to destroy or hide files that would implicate the British Empire in wrongdoing, as to prevent them from being used by their ex-colonies. It ran from the 1950s until the 1970s, when the decolonisation of the British Empire was at its height.
Sir Richard Peter Moore is a British civil servant, currently chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and formerly Director General for Political Affairs, at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and previously the British ambassador to Turkey.
Christian Philip Hollier Turner is a British diplomat serving as Political Director of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office since 2023. He previously served as British High Commissioner to Pakistan from 2019 to 2023.
Uganda–United Kingdom relations refer to bilateral relations between Uganda and the United Kingdom. Uganda has a high commission in London and the United Kingdom has a high commission in Kampala. For 2022/2023, UK's aid budget to Uganda was listed at £32.8 million.
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire is a 2022 nonfiction history book by American historian and professor Caroline Elkins. The book covers the history of the British Empire from the Great Bengal famine of 1770 through the post-World War II period of recurring end-of-empire insurgencies up until the present-day, including the Mau Mau High Court case and the ongoing imperial history wars. The book was short-listed for the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.
