Nobody would guess that the Sussex village of South Heighton, a mixed community of ancient farmhouses and modern development, a mile north of the port of Newhaven, is the site of an extraordinary wartime secret, for it hides it well.
Walkers toiling up the steep road towards the South Downs, and the parents and children in the village playground, are unlikely to be aware that just metres away from them lies a labyrinth of underground tunnels, hollowed out from the chalk hillside to house one of the key naval communication facilities responsible for monitoring movements in the English Channel during World War Two.
Operation conducted under conditions of strictest secrecy
The tale of HMS Forward contains all the elements of a peculiarly English story – a hidden wartime communications centre whose existence was denied for many decades after the end of the war by the Ministry of Defence; a heroic campaigner who worked for years to save the facility for posterity; and a clutch of homeowners horrified by the potential threat to the value of their houses by the discovery of a network of tunnels underneath their properties.
The tunnels were excavated by miners from the Royal Engineers 172nd Tunnelling Company during 1941, an operation that was conducted under conditions of the strictest secrecy. Surprisingly, that secrecy held, despite the tons of earth and chalk removed and major pieces of equipment being installed. Only one seven-year-old schoolboy took a keen interest in what was going on at the time, curious about the mysterious excavations being conducted under South Heighton hill.
A vitally important war time communications centre
Geoffrey Ellis was that seven-year-old, and in his book “The Secret Tunnels of South Heighton” written many years later, he describes the arrival of the army in 1941 and his attempts to persuade the sentries guarding the entrance to the labyrinth to let him take a peek inside. With the abandonment of the complex at the end of 1945, he became the first of many subsequent unauthorised visitors to explore the dark and winding passages of HMS Forward. With two friends he ventured inside, only to discover that looters had been there before them and stripped the facilities of anything saleable.
Even so, there was still something left of the original working environment – desks, naval message pads and rolls of teleprinter paper, and complex air-conditioning trunking with fish-eye louvres. He describes the experience of navigating the labyrinth of dark tunnels with only a small torch to light their way as being “better than the adventures of the Famous Five in Enid Blyton’s children’s books”.
The office detritus was all the evidence that remained of a communications centre that had been enormously important to the course of the war, largely staffed by young volunteers from the Women’s Royal Naval Service. Ellis interviewed several of them for his book and they described their working conditions as extremely tough, with no food provided, “only cups of tea”, spending long hours logging teleprinter messages “down in the bowels of the earth”.
They were deeply involved but remote witnesses to the tragic Dieppe raid in 1942, and the Normandy D-Day landings in 1944, and continued to co-ordinate air-sea rescue in the Channel until almost the end of the war.
Abandoned but not forgotten
After 1945, it was as though the existence of HMS Forward and the people who had worked there had been erased from the communal memory. While most of the entrances were blocked after the navy vacated the site, one or two remained, only lightly barricaded. A few treasure-hunters continued to break in from time to time, but as the growth of vegetation gradually hid any sign of the entrances to the site, HMS Forward was forgotten,
One man had not forgotten, however. Ellis continued to be fascinated by the tunnels that he had glimpsed as a boy, and on taking early retirement from his job with BT he devoted himself to finding out more about their construction and history. He believed passionately that HMS Forward represented an important part of wartime history and that it should be preserved for future generations.
His campaign inspired a request from the Newhaven Historical Society that the boarded-up principal east entrance be reopened so that they could carry out a detailed survey of the underground site. It took them months, but they mapped every passageway, every staircase, every room and every remaining artefact. The result of their labour was the creation of an accurate model of the complex, displayed in the tiny but fascinating Newhaven Maritime Museum.
Failure of efforts to re-open the tunnels
In 1998, Ellis and his fellow enthusiasts founded the Friends of HMS Forward, hoping to raise enough money to support the opening of the tunnels to the public – a Herculean task, given the health and safety implications. For a time their plans, although ambitious, did seem realisable.
There was significant public interest, English Heritage visited the site and declared it to be “of national importance” – and then the inevitable happened. The owners of the houses built on Heighton hill after the war, learning for the first time of the existence of the tunnels, became deeply alarmed about the implications of opening the site to the public.
They worried that the value of their properties would be affected and that they might be liable for any accidents that happened below ground. Unlikely as that seems, there was a great deal of confusion about who owned the rights to the underground site, and therefore who might be held responsible for any harm that came to a member of the public. Was it the Ministry of Defence? The owners of the houses sited directly above the tunnels? The Glynde Estate, the original owners of the land?
Photo credit: Ginny Smith
The impetus was lost in the confusion of legal argument, and the tunnels remain closed to this day. The only previously accessible entrance on the west side of the site has been heavily padlocked, surrounded by high wire fences and ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’ signs.
Every now and then there’s a brief panic about the consequences of a tunnel collapsing and claims that the subsidence noticed on that stretch of the A26 has been caused by a roof fall inside the labyrinth. The panics pass, public attention moves on, and HMS Forward remains as hidden and inaccessible as ever.
Postscript: to get an idea of the extent of the tunnels, take a look at IKS Exploration’s video of a visit that they made to the site. A detailed model of HMS Forward is on display at Newhaven Museum.
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