Guest post by local istorian Philip Grant in a personal capacity
The new Wembley Town Hall (Photograph from “The Architect’s Journal”, 26 January 1940)
Last September, I wrote about a visit to the former Brent Town Hall during Open House weekend, as part of the 10th anniversary of the Lycée International’s opening in Wembley. In December, they kindly invited me back for a tour of parts of the building which weren’t included during the public open day, particularly the basement. You may think this would not be of much interest, but please read on, as I uncover some of Wembley Town Hall’s wartime secrets!
The start of work on the new Town Hall, for the combined Urban Districts of Wembley and Kingsbury, was reported in the “Wembley News” on 23 July 1937: ‘The first sod of the site in Forty Lane, where Wembley’s new Town Hall is to be built, was cut on Tuesday morning by Councillor H. Gauntlett, Chairman of the Town Hall Committee.’ This photograph shows a surveyor setting out the site for where the basement of the building would be, a few weeks later:
A surveyor at work on the Town Hall site, 31 August 1937.
Although the outbreak of the Second World War was still two years away, the potential threat from German rearmament, and Hitler’s territorial ambitions, was already realised. The original plans for the Town Hall, prepared by the architect Clifford Strange, were amended to include a reinforced concrete roof for the basement areas, which could be used as shelters in the event of air raids.
The basement had a “secret tunnel”, linking it to the gardens alongside Forty Lane. It is shown on the original plans as a ‘fresh air intake duct’, and that may well have been its purpose, allowing air into the underground area which included the Town Hall’s boiler room. But it was also big enough to allow people to walk along, in single file, if the building had been bombed and staff sheltering there could not escape through the normal exit. I was able to walk along it a short way, before it dipped down and was flooded!
The doorway to the “secret tunnel”, and inside the tunnel itself.
War was declared on 3 September 1939, after Germany’s invasion of Poland, and by the end of the year staff had moved into the new Town Hall, and an Air Raid Precautions control room had been set up in the basement. A telephone exchange, linked to Wembley’s eighty A.R.P. warden posts and other wartime emergency services, was manned 24-hours a day throughout the war, with a staff room beside it where the Council volunteers operating it could rest when not on the switchboard. These were still marked on a post-war basement plan.
Extract from a Town Hall basement plan, with exchange arrowed.
But did the basement exchange have a wider wartime use than just for local A.R.P. services? In her commentary on the building in a book about the Lycée in 2015, Mireille Rebaté, the Head of School, wrote that it ‘played a major role as a secret communication hub during the Second World War.’ I’m not sure what her source of information was for that statement, but I do know from research on the Borough of Wembley’s Distinguished Visitors Book that a range of senior military figures came to the Town Hall during the war, and that their visits were not reported publicly in the local newspaper! Here is a small selection of their signatures in the book:
Some of the military “top brass” who visited Wembley Town Hall in WW2.
One of the reasons I looked through the Distinguished Visitors Book was to see whether Winston Churchill had ever visited the Town Hall, as the Lycée was named after him. His signature was not in the book, but in May 1943 an “All Star Ball” was held in the Grand Hall to raise money for a wartime charity fronted by his wife. Mrs Churchill’s Red Cross Aid to Russia Fund benefitted when around three hundred residents paid to join stars of film and stage at the ball. The stars signed lots of autographs, in return for a one shilling donation towards the fund for each, and hosted an auction of celebrity items. However, as the “Wembley News” reported, ‘The cigar box, autographed and presented by Mr Winston Churchill, was withdrawn, owing to its reserve price not being reached.’
Newspaper advert for the “All Star Ball”, and Clementine Churchill addressing the crowd at a Wembley Stadium wartime charity football match for her “Aid to Russia” Fund.
The Town Hall basement would not have been large enough to shelter all the Council’s staff, so a large space with a reinforced roof was created under the Grand Hall. According to Muriel Lander, who was a 17-year-old typist in the Borough’s legal department when they moved to Forty Lane from offices in St John’s Road at the end of 1939, it was ‘a vast, steel-doored bomb shelter.’ She told a “Wembley Observer” reporter in 1996 that they had to go down to the shelter when a whistle was blown to warn of a possible air raid. ‘A lot of the older Council staff were scared, but I took it in a light-hearted way because I was so young.’
Muriel Lander (right) and her typist colleagues at the Town Hall during
WW2.
(Brent Archives – “Wembley Observer” newspaper
microfilms)
Muriel also recalled that she and her colleagues had to take a turn at fire watching, because of the risk from German incendiary bombs. If you were on that duty, you slept fully-clothed on a Z-bed in your office, and when the sirens sounded an air raid warning, you ran up to the Town Hall roof and stood by with a hose, in case a fire bomb landed on the building.
The large shelter at the Town Hall was also available for local residents or passers-by to use, accessed by the service road from Kings Drive. The service road, at the back of the main office building, was used for deliveries, including coal or coke to fire the boilers, which would have been tipped through large manholes down into the basement fuel store beside the boiler room. The service road ended at a building, which was literally “the end of the road” for some Wembley residents, the Borough’s mortuary!
Plan of the Wembley Town Hall mortuary building.
The National Health Service was not set up until 1948, so that when the Town Hall was built it was Wembley Council’s Medical Officer of Health who had responsibility for carrying out post mortems, when deaths in the borough required them. My visit did not include the mortuary, as it is no longer there!
Something else no longer there is the entrance (or exit?) of the “secret tunnel”, at the Forty Lane end. It has been blocked off, and no one now knows where exactly it came out. You can’t go very far along the tunnel from the basement, because its lower section is flooded, but it still had to be checked (by a French Security Service frogman!) before the then French President, François Hollande, came to officially open the Lycée in September 2015.
François Hollande at the official opening of the Lycée in 2015.
(Courtesy of the Lycée International de Londres Winston
Churchill)
The photograph above is from the book about the building, “Un Espace d’Histoire & de Futur” (a blend of heritage and future). I found my visit to the former Town Hall’s basement, and its links to local World War Two history, very interesting, and I hope you have enjoyed reading about it too.
Philip Grant.
