Brickendonbury — a manor and sabotage school

Story period: Historic estate · wartime SOE use · training from October 1941

Location: Brickendonbury Manor / Station XVII, Hertfordshire

Brickendonbury is a historic manor estate in Hertfordshire. During the Second World War, SOE operated its STS 17 training school and Station XVII explosives-testing facility here. Kubiš and Gabčík arrived in October 1941 while preparing for ANTHROPOID. The site represents one British stage of their training, without identifying the location of a particular exercise.

An older manor estate

before the Second World War

Training occupied a property with an earlier civilian history.

Brickendonbury is recorded in the Domesday survey of 1086, and parts of the manor house date from the late seventeenth century. The estate served as a private home and later a boys’ preparatory school. During the war, the British state used it to train people secretly for deployment in occupied Europe.

STS 17 and Station XVII

Second World War

The same site served both training and experimentation.

Under the name STS 17, SOE taught sabotage skills to people from occupied countries. Station XVII referred to experiments with explosives and industrial sabotage techniques; parts of the grounds supported demolition research. The two names do not describe two separate places.

Training Kubiš and Gabčík

from 20 October 1941

The pair continued working with explosives here.

After training in Scotland, Kubiš and Gabčík transferred to Brickendonbury. They continued training with explosives of the kind included in the planned operation’s equipment. The grounds around the manor allowed practical demolition tests.

Postwar use

from 1974

The estate now serves research.

After its wartime role, Brickendonbury found other uses. Since 1974 it has housed the Tun Abdul Razak Research Centre. SOE training is thus one wartime chapter in the surviving estate’s much longer history.

The historical site is the extensive private Brickendonbury Estate, not an identified classroom. The reference point at 51.77676, −0.07311 derives from the estate’s present-day address and does not locate individual exercises.

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