It was first used as a home for girls who were orphaned in the Crimean War.
During WW1 it was used by the Royal Army Medical Corps to treat military casualties. About 1800 soldiers were treated in the building or the surrounding marquees.
After WW1 it became a girl's school, until 1939. Then they were all evacuated to Wales.
During WW2 it was the London Reception Centre, where 38.000 people who arrived from occupied Europe were questioned to gather intelligence and filter out the spies. 50 spies were identified. 300 faced longer detention for further interrogation. The centre was run by MI5 and MI6.
Intelligence personel worked there, including Colonel Oreste Pinto.
He was born in Amtserdam, studied in France. He was what the Dutch called: a lamnguage-miracle.
In 1913 he as recruited by the French and he worked as a spy.
Before WW2 he was requested to work for MI5, but he stayed independent, because he didn't want to loose Dutch citizenship. He became a counterintelligence officer.
At the centre he interrogated more than 30.000 people, and became famous for identifying 8 spies.
His most famous: the pursuit and arrest of Christiaan Lindemans, known as "King Kong," He was a Dutch resistance member who became a double agent working for German intelligence. Lindemans has been linked to the failure of the intelligence preceding Operation Market Garden at Arnhem.
Because most people arriving from occupied Europe were genuine refugees the approach of them was different from the usual way of dealing with potential spies.
Upon arrival people were never placed with those of their own country, language or group. So they couldn't construct stories or false identities.
They were first interrogted by a socalled "breaker", who would try to break through suspicious cover stories, and worked through the facts and personality. Until the decision was mde the refugee was safe or cooperative.
Then an investigator would try to gather as much local intelligence as possible. One of the methods was
Exhaustive Chronological Mapping, by which escape journeys needed to be recounted step-by-step., asking for micro-details: exact dates, names of streets, shops, cafes, colours of train tickets, the landscape, names, etc etc..
Another method was the Cross-Ruff Method. When escaped in a group, all members were immediately seperated, and interrogated. Even minor discrepancies, for instance in timelines, would be investigated. At times a person would be challenged by being told another group member had told a different story.
MI5 used highly specialised and knowledgeable personel. They knew regional dialects, the local social scene and habits, landmarks and other pecuiarities. And of course Nazi bureaucracy.
Soon after the first refugees had been seen it was clear that they could provide a lot of information about the local situations. Locations of factories, railwaystations and schedules, schools and shelters, places where Nazis were, impacts of bombing raids, and also movements of troops and defenses, even troop morale. Information also enabled to locate resistance groups, and check previous or otherwise gathered information.
The unmasked spies were immediately transferred to a high-seurity detention centre like Latchmere House/Camp 020 where they were interrogated less friendly. After conviction execution could follow. 15 enemy spies, indetified at the centre, faced that fate at Wandsworth prison.
My father told about going to a kind of school where he was interrogated.
He might not have been very awestruck by the building, as we have schools looking like these in our city.
I could feel the interrogation had made quite an impression on him, even though he never said anything specific about it.
Looking back, I think he has been able to give a lot of information about our city and the surrounding areas.
- https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C137310
