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What are we looking at here? All this was buried. The whole idea of all of these guns, this is Churchill's orders to close the do straight to enemy shipping. There's another hatch. There is another hatch. It's such a wonderful time capsule. This rocky outcrop hid a secret. A secret that is finally being revealed to the public. The White Cliffs of Dover. You just have to say those words and it evokes one thing, doesn't it? The Second World War. Viralin, Britain's lonely defiance in 1940 against the Nazi menace. This was the first line of defense, the White Cliffs of Dova,
the Battle of the Channel. For 4 years, Dova was known as Hellfire Corner. But more than 80 years on, little remains of the gun imp placements that kept enemy ships at bay. And hidden beneath this famous landscape was a secret bunker. For decades, what went on here was classified. And the site was eventually buried and lost. And now I've come here to meet the people who finally uncovered the underground heart of Britain's first line of defense. This is it. This is the uh only clue you had as to where this secret location was. The whole site had been partially demolished, covered over after the war, and there wasn't any remains on the surface. So, you really didn't know where this thing was.
You'd had an idea. So, it was obviously hidden because it was ugly. I think for that first generation that lived through the war locally, it was quite an unhappy memory. the epic story of a people who for four years have defied the worst the enemy could do. So this landscape I'm guessing has changed a bit then in the last year or two. It has indeed. In fact, the road you're walking on now actually really didn't exist. It would all been buried as well as the actual plotting room. All this was buried. There was a lot of soil you've removed. Just that was an awful lot of soil that we dug out. And then you come down to this. But in actual fact, what you actually came down to was a concrete fence with just a concrete filled hole.
There's something down here, isn't there? There is indeed. What are we looking at here? You're looking at the main shaft, which is the entrance into the bashu plotting room itself. We're going to have to go down, aren't we? Right. Another staircase. This is quite deep down this, isn't it? And oh, we are exactly as it must have been when they first closed it down. Right, you are now at the base of the main shaft. This was the original entrance and there would have been steel rungs into the wall here and that was how the soldiers would have come down into this point.
Right. I think I might have to turn my light on here. Coat hooks. It's like they've just left. Peeling paint. ventilation along here. We are deep underground. It's really designed to withstand a blast, isn't it? Did it ever get a direct hit? No. Unauthorized persons are forbidden to interfere with equipment by order. The room we're standing in now. What is this? This is the actual battery plotting room. This is the plotting room. Yeah. What is plotting? The plotting is taking all the inputs things like your wind speed direction, your humidity, uh upper winds and um coordinates of the
target and putting them all into an electromechanical computer that is capable of providing a firing solution. So the whole idea of all of these guns, this is Churchill's orders to close the do straight to enemy shipping. Uh so the three the three gun sites of the 540th Coast Regiment and also the 520th Coast Regiment, their primary goal is anti-shipping. It's to close the do straight to enemy shipping. This is what Churchill wanted when he came in August 1940. I want something to be able to stop the ships going up and down the channel.
Indeed. Yeah. This was our Straits of Hormuse, wasn't it? In modern times. Yes. It was here in complete secrecy that radar and weather data was fed into a 1940s computer to help aim the artillery. Why didn't someone just run with a bit of paper? Because you have an inaccuracy. Then what you have is your ship may be doing um a significant speed. By the time the person leaves here with a piece of paper and runs across to the gun, that ship has moved several hundred yards. It's going to miss.
You need instantaneous information. You need to be able to transmit that bearing and elevation instantaneously. And this was secret. And that's what the mag slip does. There's another hatch. There is another hatch. This is where we actually came in originally. You can imagine our excitement when the excavator suddenly hit this metal cover and clang. What was that first moment like when in the dark here you heard the clang? Well, I remember it well because it had gone dark. Everyone else was really keen to press on, see if we could find it. And then all of a sudden, there was
this big boom as the excavator bucket hits the top of the emergency hatch, which is the first indication that it's intact inside. So, we're seeing the digging here. There's a moment, isn't there, when you hear the clang, the Tutin Carman moment you described as certainly of my career, the hatch was still actually locked. Watching all of this, what does it make you feel? This is really the final part of the story of Fan Bay. We've been having excavations here and we've been conserving the site for 15 years and this is the final part of the jigsaw and being in here. How does it feel now? I think it's still an incredibly emotive space. Um, and our ethos has been to leave everything how we found it so
people can come and see it as we first saw it. And now you can stand here in the plotting room and learn about what was for decades a complete secret. And for Dover, telling this story is important. This town endured 4 years of hardship, bombing, and shelling. There's a good reason this has become a community project with more than 90 volunteers. When you first came down here, what were your thoughts? Oh, my thoughts were that it's such a wonderful time capsule. First of all, I wondered why I was being led down a hole into the ground, but I quickly got used to the idea.
You realized this is a very special hole. Absolutely. And I admired the paint straight away because it's so decorative and beautiful in here. We do it for love, for entertainment, and for biscuits. a project fed by biscuits, powered by biscuits. I like that. Absolutely. And I'm often supplying the biscuits. And now standing here with all of this, what are your thoughts? Oh, that it's just amazing how wonderful it's come together. It's absolutely blown me away. It still makes me feel emotional every time I see the audio visual. and just from having come down here and it being untidy, messy, but
untouched to having it somewhere that it's it's actually nice to bring people and talk about it, having the knowledge that we've built up over the last few months of the technical understanding and sharing that with people. You're very proud of your hole in the ground, aren't you? Oh, immensely. Yes. We wouldn't do it if we weren't proud of it. We want this to stand for the future for other people to come and enjoy the history of the local area and maybe find out more about their own.
A secret underground command post using pioneering technology. And it could have remained lost and buried if not for the detective work and determination that led to that dark chilly evening when a digger struck a metal escape hatch that revealed this World War II time capsule.
