Under Wentworth, Remnants of World War II

When golf professionals and fans take the Wentworth Club of England for the BMW PGA championship, they will lead on a little -known portion of the history of World War II.

About 30 feet under the club parking lot there is an extensive bunker that was built by the British army and used after the sprout of the war in 1939.

The Ultraexclusive Golf Club, where the tournament will be played from Thorsday to Sunday, is located at the Wentworth farm in the town of Virginia Water, in Surrey, one hour southwest London. Now that it houses some of the country’s most exensive properties, Wentworth was once one of the many field farms required by the British military door of the war.

The site intended to be a safer alternative to downtown London, especially if the German German evacuations of the city.

“In war planning at the end of the 1930s, it was identified as a possible future government headquarters,” said Alex Windscheffel, a professor of modern British history at Royal Holloway, University of London, in Surrey. “You have to remember, in the late 1930s, there is a lot of fear about the bombers” and what they could do to the cities.

But the government stayed in London after all, so Windscheffel said: Wentworth “is still used, but I don’t think he has ever used in the way he imagined.” The Wentworth Club declined to comment for this article.

The Wentworth farm was used by different military entities. According to the “Secret Underground London” by Nick Catford, in the early 1940s, the local GHQ forces, the unit responsible for defending Great Britain in the case of a German invasion, Tokra residence there, with its signal regiment to the bunker.

Later, the farm became a rear headquarters of the allied expeditionary force of the supreme headquarters, the ally command that supervises the invasion of Europe, before day D.

The bunker consists of two parallel tunnels, each 25 feet in diameter, approximately 300 feet in length and divided into 11 rooms, Catford Wrive for a position in British underground, a beneficial organization with headquarters in the United Kingdom that documents the underground sites. A smaller service tunnel extends between the two main tunnels.

Martin Dixon, a member of British underground, said in an interview that the tunnels were built using the same cast iron segments as the London Tube Underground network, which explains why the tunnels have a close relative. Each segment is still marked with “LPB”, for the London passenger transport board, the entity that supervised public transport of the city at that time.

A concrete drool was placed pump proof on the bunker when it was built, and now it is part of the club’s parking lot. “The main access to the bunker was from within the Club House,” said Dixon. “So above, there would be leg lots or routine activity.”

The plans in the National Archives of Great Britain show that the military used the Club house and other houses on the farm as barracks and offices, and the campsites were established around the land. A camp was located in a group or tennis court.

Parts of the farm golf courses were left without arrangements or barriers were added so that enemy airplanes could not land. Virginia Water Lake, in the short term of distance, “was drained to avoid its navigation milestone by the enemy pilots,” according to the Wentworth Estate site.

“Everything was very silent,” said John Hammond, who helped build the camp, said Surrey Herald in 1986. “You could approach the camp without a pass.” He added that the only civilian he knew allowed within the bunker was the electrician.

Wentworth’s property was returned to its owners after the war, and the bunker was sealed. He thought that its structure is mainly preserved, the bunker walls are now covered with graffiti, and there is not much inside.

“Unfortunately, when the army moved, they touch everything with them, including wood floors,” Ron Davis wrote of the Historical Society Egham-by-Runnymedmed after visiting the bunker in 1990.

These days, the club rarely allows bunker visitors, they thought that urban explorers seem to find their way from time to time, Windscheffel said.

“A very interesting historical site is enhanced, but it is obviously quite forgotten now and escapes collective memory,” he said.

But the western course of Wentworth, where the tournament will be played, still has a pinch of the legacy of the farm, even if it could be apocryphal:

The course is nicknamed Birma Road, a possible reference to a crucial supply route that links China and what is now Myanmar. According to the story, it comes from the comment of an officer while supervising the German prisoners clearing the west course covered in the war: “That this is his path of Burma.”