How scribbled names at an English stately home revealed an elite wartime Polish army unit

Walking around the quiet estate of Audley End House, situated in the countryside between London and Cambridge, you might be mistaken to think the country house simply has a long history of aristocrats wandering to and fro without much to worry about beyond horses and dinner courses.

You’d be wrong.

What may look like a typical English estate, was briefly the home of an elite training regiment of the Polish army during the Second World War.

May 1, 2022, marks the 80-year anniversary of Britain converting Audley End into a collaborative operation to create a special operative unit of the Polish army called the Cichociemni (pronounced chick-o-chem-knee). Or in English, “the Silent Unseen”.

After the death of Audley End’s owner Henry Nevill, 7th Lord Braybrooke in 1941, the British military took over occupation of the house. With Nazi Germany invading Poland, the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), Britain’s espionage organisation, worked alongside the Polish military to train the Cichociemni.

The Cichociemni were trained to be parachuted back into Poland to destabilise the Nazi occupying forces. Audley End was used for the most rigorous parts of the training programme.

They learned unarmed combat, sabotage, how to silently kill someone, safe cracking, and disguises,” Andrew Hann, English Heritage Historian tells Euronews.

Cichociemni would use the surrounding woods for shooting ranges. To train for being in the field, “they’d have to raid the local post office, escaping with some money having not been detected”.

“It was basically a criminals charter for everything you could possibly do to break the rules and cause mayhem in occupied Europe,” Hann says.

They would also be rigorously trained to not give up their false