In May 2011 it was announced that, subject to legal exemptions, all the Hanslope Park records would be made public. There can now be few doubts over the alleged massacre of twenty-four unarmed Chinese villagers by soldiers of the Scots Guards at Batang Kali during the Malayan Emergency. Their disclosure raises further questions about the conduct of counterinsurgency conflicts in Palestine, Cyprus, Aden, and Malaya. The documents give clear corroborating evidence of human rights abuses by British security forces fighting insurgents in Kenya. A persistent campaign by lawyers and investigative journalists armed with High Court orders finally compelled government officials to admit the existence of the records.Īpart from a small group of academics it might be thought that such long-forgotten archives from a colonial past would have little contemporary interest or relevance. Stonewalling Foreign Office denials only served to strengthen this belief. It had long been suspected that embarrassing documents dealing with British decolonization had been stowed in some clandestine recess out of public sight. Two years ago Hanslope Park was found to conceal a cache of official records dating back to the last decades of Britain's colonial empire. Interested sightseers will not be given time to linger. Even today it is reputed to house the secret service "boffins" who provided the model for the spy gadget creators of James Bond's "Q." The radio masts surrounding this well-guarded hide-away have long since gone, but not the sixteen feet high fences topped with razor wire. Hanslope Park was part of a complex of undercover intelligence activity. Not far away, Bletchley Park was the center of successful government efforts to break into enemy radio codes during the Second World War, an achievement crucial to Allied victory. There is more to Hanslope Park than verdant scenery. Less than an hour's car-ride from London it enjoys the rippling cornfields and fresh summer breezes of which many a colonial officer, sweating through the discomfort of a tropical Borneo night, may well have dreamed. Hanslope Park is an unassuming country house deep in the Buckinghamshire countryside.
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