Hotel's war secret back on the radar

Builders carrying out work at the Marine Hotel in North Berwick were left baffled after finding a bomb-proof room in the basement.

Hotel staff had used the room to store supplies and were unaware the ceiling above them had been reinforced with iron and concrete.

Workmen only discovered the alterations, which were not marked on any plans or surveys, while removing some plaster.

But the underground "strong-room" remained a mystery until a Second World War veteran offered an explanation.

Paul Smith, 88, spent three weeks on a radar engineering course at the East Lothian site while serving in the Royal Artillery. He revealed that Army chiefs had taken over the Victorian hotel and turned it into a secret training centre surrounded by armed guards.

And Mr Smith believes the room may have been used to store sensitive equipment and prevent it from falling into enemy hands.

"The hotel was being used a training base for radar," said Mr Smith, who lives in Somerset. "It was like a mental commando course and very, very secret. The Army tried to make it seem like an ordinary hotel and nobody was told what was really going on.

"The radar sets and books had to be locked away. This room in the basement could have been used to store them for security. "

The discovery was made during a 10 million renovation project at the hotel, which will include the creation of 43 luxury apartments.

The B-listed building, which counts golfers Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson and Nick Faldo among its former guests, is now owned by MacDonald Hotels.

Jack Mainland, from site contractors Ogilvie Construction, said: "This was certainly an unexpected find. The hotel is very extensive with a number of basement rooms and on first appearances we didn't have any reason to believe this room was any different from the rest.

"However, when we removed the plasterboard ceiling in this room we discovered the iron roof which we could tell was covered in concrete.

"Structurally there is no reason for this room to have been built in such a manner unless it was part of remodelling for the war."

Mr Smith, a retired farmer, was serving in the army when he was selected for radar training and sent to Bournemouth Municipal College in 1942. After five months of study, he was sent to the Marine Hotel to complete a course on repairing the latest equipment.

"We would be locked in the hotel rooms to take classes with the radar sets," he said. "We had to take our boots off outside the hotel because the sets ran on 60,000 volts. There was always the danger of being electrocuted."

Mr Smith was eventually based at a radar station at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands.

THE FACTS

THE Marine Hotel is not the only location in East Lothian whose secret war-time role has sparked debate. A historian has claimed that war criminals were brought to the nearby town of Haddington to be trained as spies against the Russians.

In his book, Morningside Mata Haris, Douglas Macleod alleged that 1000 Ukrainian SS men were brought to the county posing as genuine refugees at the end of the war. A former German prisoner camp in the town's Amisfield Park was adapted to house the men as the Cold War began to hot up.

Mr Macleod claimed they worked as agricultural labourers between 1948 and 1951, but through the Scottish League for European Freedom, some were trained as agents.

They were dropped into the Soviet Union, where there was a bloody civil war between Ukrainian nationalists (who backed the Nazis in the war) and the Russians. The book alleges that an unknown number of operations involving Haddington-trained spies were run by double agent Kim Philby.