House of Dogs: The Last Squires of Trecwn Part 15 – Trecwn from Armaments Depot to Dereliction

We continue our series exploring the history of a Pembrokeshire estate and its colourful family.

Howell Harris

Trecwn’s Golden Age

The more than fifty years during which Trecwn served as the largest concentration of many of the best jobs in Pembrokeshire, with Newton Noyes occupying a similar role for a smaller travel-to-work area around Milford Haven, deserve their own history.

But this short article is not it, partly because both Admiralty installations were quite successful at keeping out of the news during the decades of their routine operation, and they do not seem to have made up for it by leaving accessible records in public archives.

When Trecwn did get into the news, after the end of wartime censorship made it somewhat reportable again, it was often because the issue of its future was in doubt. It had been built at a particular time, in a particular place, to fulfil a particular purpose.

During the war it was intensely busy, employing thousands of men and women. But when the war was over it lost much of the Navy’s demand for its services, and most of those jobs.

As early as April 1946 anxious rumours of the depots’ closure were rife in the county, and the only reassurance the Admiralty could offer was that they did have a future, but there would need to be a significant change of scale.

The cloud of uncertainty hung over them until at least 1948, as Trecwn’s employment slipped from its wartime peak of a reported 3,500-plus to about 800.

There was always the prospect of more layoffs (“combing out”) and reviews, until the ramping-up of the Cold War provided a reason for the depots’ survival and even flourishing.

Thanks to the Cold War, Trecwn settled down to a secure future for a couple of generations, with 1,100 employees again by 1952.

As recently as 1969-1971 it still employed over 900 people, commuting from all over the north of the county, and during the 1982 Falklands War found itself ferociously busy once again.

But decline thereafter was inexorable, as the Navy shrank, the Cold War drew to a close, and the Peace Dividend loomed.

The writing was on the wall, and the rumours of layoffs and closure were back in the papers. Trecwn had its very own Action Committee by 1987, always a bad sign in Thatcher’s Britain.

By the late 1980s it was down to less than 600 staff, with Newton Noyes about half the size. It received its last major tranche of new investment — £40 millions from NATO to support its role as “one of the largest non-specialist ammunition storage depots in Europe” — in 1989.

The End of the Line

In January 1992, both depots were finally declared redundant under the “Options for Change” defence review, with the ending of flight training at RAF Brawdy thrown in for good measure. Despite the years of rumours and warnings, it was still a huge shock.

In the 1930s Pembrokeshire had once again placed a big bet on the armed services to support its chronically weak economy, even though the fate of the Dockyard had demonstrated how unreliable they might be. But for decades that bet turned out rather better than others.

The oil industry, for example, produced relatively few permanent jobs — far fewer than initially promised.

But it subjected the county to the feast or famine rhythm of its construction, booms followed by a bust requiring a new refinery or power station to keep the cycle going, with plenty of environmental damage along the way, some of it apparently permanent, and stubbornly high local unemployment remaining or returning.

Now the county found itself to be the largest casualty of the national cutbacks. What made the jobs lost at Trecwn and Newton Noyes so important was not just their number, or the inevitable indirect employment effects that magnified the damage, but their quality.

The two depots had a predominantly male and skilled manual, clerical, technical, and professional workforce, with wages, salaries, and other employment provisions also well above local norms because they were paid according to standard, national, negotiated terms.

Employment had been relatively stable and long-term. There were excellent apprentice training programmes, good opportunities for promotion from within, and also, for example, provision for workers with disabilities that was rare in the local private sector.

Nothing comparable would or could ever replace them, however hard the County Council tried to encourage new investment.

For the workers at Trecwn, the Depot was their community, with two or more generations of the same family and numerous other family members and friends involved.

They took pride in the place and the work that they did, and enjoyed the strong bonds with their fellows that the Depot’s isolation and its extensive sport, leisure, and welfare programmes encouraged. Even thirty years after the closure, this sense of a good world lost is still palpable whenever they talk or write about it.

Brave New World

The closure of the depot was not the end of the story for the valley. What would happen to it next?

No thought seems to have been given to the possibility of landscape restoration of the kind that old coal mining sites experienced at the same time.

The depot was not even thoroughly decontaminated; it would have cost too much, the Ministry of Defence explained.

So the two heavy-metal hot spots, the “Burning Ground” in the Red Area and the “Acid Dump” just the other side of the security fence from the Barham School playground and canteen, were simply left for some future owner to deal with.

The thousand acres of Trecwn were simply more — slightly tarnished — family silver to be flogged, with the assumption that new job-creating uses could and should be found for them, in an area that desperately needed something to soften the blow.

The valley, on the edge of the National Park and still a high-value landscape full of biodiversity, was deemed to be a brownfield site. The core of it, nearest to Trecwn village itself, has even become an “enterprise zone,” to little obvious effect.

But nobody seems to have wondered whether the particular conditions that drew the Admiralty to it in the first place — particularly its isolation and topography — do not make it a quite unsuitable location for industrial activities that are supposed to be profit-making, and are not quite so concerned to avoid the attentions of the Luftwaffe.

Selling the Family Silver

Trecwn’s long, sad afterlife started off mired in scandal and, thirty years later, has still delivered almost nothing of value.

The Tory Armed Forces minister who took the decision to close the depot, Sir Archie Hamilton, left office in 1993. Almost immediately he formed a company (in which he was a major shareholder) to bid for the purchase and redevelopment of the redundant site as a leisure, industrial, and housing scheme, at a price of £500,000.

But, like many subsequent plans for Trecwn, his — which ended up rather less grandly, for a toxic waste processing plant — did not come off.

Trecwn enjoyed a short respite under continuing Ministry of Defence control, a “care and maintenance” period during which live explosives were thoroughly removed and much equipment was dismantled and transferred, sold, or scrapped.

The workforce was eventually reduced to a small security detail and grounds staff.

Redundant and substandard MoD housing beyond the security fence was demolished, and as the local population diminished the village lost its post office and shop, and the Barham School its pupils, so that eventually that closed too, and rapidly deteriorated into the Grade 2 listed, but vandalised and derelict, tragedy that it is now.

Trecwn turned with shocking speed into the shrunken, service-deprived, back-of-beyond community it has remained ever since, the few remaining houses on Barham Road only accessible via a private road that is more pothole than surface.

Their most recent affliction has been the loss of a reliable and drinkable water supply, because the inevitable decay of the infrastructure the Admiralty built ninety years ago turned its private water system, now operated by the valley’s new owners, brown and foul.

During the “care and maintenance” interlude railway buffs were able to make organized visits to the site, and the Welsh Historic Gardens Trust’s Pembrokeshire branch surveyed the remains of the Mansion’s gardens and magnificent woodlands.

It made fruitless efforts to interest the county council or anybody else (the Methodist Church, for the Barham School; the Forestry Commission and even the Ministry of Defence) in launching a conservation scheme for what was still left after 60 years “despite the best efforts of the MoD to obliterate it”.

Local naturalists explored the silent valley too, and found it full of wildlife. Behind the security fence birds and mammals thrived.

Peregrines and ravens nested on the crags, woodpeckers hammered away, and the starlings still came in thousands for their autumn and winter roosts. The valley bottom was “a visual delight” in spring and early summer, carpeted with more than 150 species of wildflowers including rarities.

There was one proposal from a local businessman, Paul Conti, for a development that might have made good use of the site while conserving most of it.

He suggested the establishment of a community trust to buy it and turn it into a “spectacular Celtic theme park” with angling and boating on a man-made lake, landscaped gardens, nature trails, mountain bike trails, rambling and pony trekking, and, the centrepiece, a heritage railway and of course the tourist accommodation to support it.

His vision might even have worked, and enhanced the tourist economy of an area lacking in man-made visitor attractions, but he lacked the capital, and support from the community was insufficient.

A company like the one behind Bluestone could have realised it, but not a single entrepreneur, however well-intentioned.

In any case, the political winds were against him: all that the county council and local MP could think about was attracting inward investment of some sort to recreate a few of the hundreds of good industrial jobs that had been lost — an understandable cargo-cult mentality in a high-unemployment area.

Disposing of a White Elephant

The Ministry of Defence made a complete botch of the sale process.

They did not even check whether the site was governed by Crichel Down rules, a set of principles established in the 1950s requiring that former owners of properties acquired by government under threat of compulsion were to be given first refusal when the government no longer needed them and placed them back on the market.

When they eventually discovered that the rules did apply they hurriedly contacted Barham descendants giving them the opportunity to buy land back at current market value, which they probably exaggerated.

But none were interested, so they were free to go back to a public sale.

They lost one potential German buyer as soon as the company discovered the existence of the contamination hot-spots, a complication that the MoD had for some reason not highlighted in its sale particulars.

They lost their next preferred bidder, a newly founded and very sketchy little firm, when it proved incapable of coming up with any actual money.

At last, in 1997 they did find a buyer of sorts, a small Anglo-Irish firm with the misleadingly grand name Omega Pacific, which snapped it up for a reported £350,000, a knockdown price after the two or three previous aborted deals.

Omega Pacific’s original proposal was to use some of the site’s buildings for the refurbishment of jet engines, but this never happened, partly because they could not obtain planning consent for the very noisy testing required.

Their other schemes were for a tyre-recycling plant and for specialised warehousing, which also came to nothing.

But they also had the bright idea of turning the tunnel magazines into repositories for the storage of low- and intermediate-level nuclear waste, another industry of which they had absolutely no experience, on the edge of the National Park and in the watershed of the Western Cleddau.

They had not mentioned this in their negotiations with the MoD. As a local MP summarised the matter in sharp questioning of its civil servants by the Public Accounts Committee, ““What you are saying is you knew nothing about it and the company lied to you.”

Fortunately nothing came of that proposal either, apart from a lot of worried local opposition and a petition to Parliament with 20,000 signatures.

Omega Pacific did at least find a use for some of the magnificent old specimen trees around the ruins of the mansion, felling them across roads to prevent locals from using the site for dumping old cars.

Trecwn Acquires a New Squire

A court order soon compelled Omega Pacific to dispose of the property to the Hampton Trust, which sold it on to the developers Manhattan Loft Corporation in 2003 for a reported £10-20 million but probably a tenth as much.

Manhattan Loft was a firm with considerable experience and success in building and selling high-end urban apartments and hotels.

It was very professional and had access to capital. But it was taking on an unfamiliar and rather unlikely challenge.

Manhattan Loft’s CEO Harry Handelsman and his then business partner, also a property developer, seem to have bought Trecwn almost on a whim.

Handelsman found the valley “incredibly magical,” as John Wesley and Ronald Lockley would have agreed.

But the partners did have what seemed to be a plan: to use the tunnels for the secure, remote storage of “mankind’s most precious objects: fine art, museum pieces, historical records, fine wine — even, possibly, our DNA — stuff that is too valuable to risk being locked up in urban vaults, especially with the threat of terrorism.”

Mr. Handelsman still owns it, working through a transnational network of subsidiary businesses.

There was a company called The Valley (Pembrokeshire), founded in 2003, of which he was the sole director and shareholder, and which appears to be dormant after years of non-trading (its accounts have shown no new activity since 2007), but whose name is still on the gate.

It was established to “investigat[e] potential business opportunities” for its parent company, Manhattan Loft, but does not seem to have found any.

Trading activity, such as it was, appears to have been carried on through other subsidiaries. Trecwn Barham Ltd., also founded in 2003, became dormant in 2017 when ownership transferred to Manhattan Loft Trecwn Ltd.

This is now a Guernsey company whose beneficial ownership is divided between Mr Handelsman in person and a Swiss service company managing a private trust with a significant degree of control.

This means that even less can be known about it than when the subsidiaries were British-registered and their controlling ownership was lodged in the Dutch Antilles. The other subsidiary was Trecwn Energy 50 Ltd., established in 2010, which by 2022 was also not trading.

Decades of Disappointment

So nothing has come of Manhattan Loft’s original plans — was there ever any real demand for the service it intended to offer? — and the tunnels have now had thirty years of neglect, interesting only to urban explorers (trespassers with cameras) against whom they have had to be sealed.

A few of the old buildings near the main entrance to the site have been leased out for light-industrial use, and the acres of conifers planted in the 1940s to shield the valley from the eyes of onlookers beyond the security fence have matured into a resource for some commercial forestry.

There have been other recent proposals for far less appropriate uses than Mr. Handelsman originally envisaged, presumably the reason for founding Trecwn Energy 50 to realise them.

First was a diesel-powered peak-load generating station, not the greenest energy source one could choose, fortunately scuppered by the problems of the valley’s isolation and the difficulty of obtaining a grid connection.

Then in 2015 they won planning permission for a quite inefficient “biomass” (wood-burning) power station instead, which would have generated 53 HGV round-trips a day from Pembroke Dock, the last miles along the private road leading from the A40.

These schemes were designed to take advantage of government subsidies and the vagaries of the electricity “market” (defining biomass as “green”, and offering extraordinary prices for meeting short-term demand peaks).

A thick coat of greenwash was helpful for winning them support for using part of the site for purposes that would otherwise have little chance of getting planning approval in the midst of open country, even in a county like Pembrokeshire that is desperate for development of any sort, however damaging, and however few the permanent jobs it promises to create.

More recently there has been a “greener” alternative, involving a big solar farm at Llanstinan and three enormous wind turbines on the high ground north of the valley where they would have been visible for miles around, and particularly from the neighbouring National Park.

These would power a “green hydrogen” plant down in the valley itself, generating about three tonnes of gas a day for potential uses which do not yet exist, and hardly any employment — ”all pain for no gain,” as local opponents have described it.

This too has been stalled by the same problem that did for the diesel-powered scheme — the lack of a grid connection.

But the threat of development will not go away. Meanwhile, Trecwn continues to generate costs for Mr. Handelsman rather than revenue.

t the same time as he was overseeing the magnificent conversion of the derelict Grand Midland into the St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel near the centre of London, and building sparkling high-rise apartments and hotels at Stratford on its east side, his Trecwn acquisition has carried on going nowhere.

The site has been kept secure, vandalism has been limited, it has been maintained so that it has not become overgrown, and buildings have decayed gracefully rather than falling down. But it still lacks a user and a use.

The Future Beckons

So what of the future? In a review of development sites across Pembrokeshire and Carmarthen in 2022, Trecwn was still identified as one that “could attract highly specialised industries with specific locational requirements,” as indeed it did between 1936 and 1992.

But the only examples offered are tourism or users requiring a secure site.

Perhaps the ideal combination of hospitality and security would be a private prison, but nobody seems to have suggested that yet, so I might as well do so here.

A new “House of Dogs” would be no worse than anything else proposed so far, and much better at job-creation.

You can find the rest of this series here.