The Summerfield fire service led by John Marriott STOCKINGS and suspenders Christmas parties, an in-house dance band, free haircuts and curries on the canteen menu, life wasn’t too bad for those working at a top secret government establishment just outside Kidderminster in the 1950s. In fact, Summerfield Research Station was something of a law unto itself. It had its own police force and fire brigade and even its own club tie.
Santa’s little helpers at a Summerfield Christmas party Quite a package, as befitted a facility at the cutting edge of the country’s answer to the Cold War threat coming from the Soviet Union in the decades following the Second World War.
THERE can be few properties in Worcester into which more money has been poured than Mount Battenhall. Indeed if pound notes were going down the drain, the sewers of this grand edifice, which sits on raised ground in the residential south east of the city, would be well and truly blocked. Quite possibly Worcester’s most opulent private house, it has been by turns a large Italianate villa, a glittering mansion, a wartime hospital, two short term family homes and then an independent girls school for 80 years. Now the Mount has got the builders in again, as it undergoes its latest transformation into a retirement community.
THANKFULLY the threat has disappeared into history now, but there was a time, not so long ago, when Worcestershire was the prime UK target for a Russian nuclear attack. The bomb would have been dropped on Evesham, but that wouldn’t have mattered much, because most of the county, along with a good part of neighbouring Gloucestershire, would have been flattened, while radiation would have covered many hundreds of square miles more. The area was in the cross hairs of the Soviets because it contained the Government’s hidden communications centre in the event of nuclear war. The specific location was Wood Norton Hall, the Jacobean style mansion just outside the town, which had served in a similar role during the Second World War.