the cold war

During the cold war era of the early 1960s  the WWII underground tunnels of Fort Southwick were re-used as a relay station for the Defence Teleprinter Network of the NATO Communication Organisation.

Although a secret installation, the NATO flag could be seen flying from Fort Southwick during this occupation.

It received multi addressed messages from the Admiralty at Whitehall and NATO HQ in Europe and split and relayed the messages to various Naval authorities as necessary. Rows of teleprinters chattered away day and night and punched tape hung everywhere. Each teleprinter machine had a print head attached to it through which the punched tape was fed. The head read the tape and operated the machine, although it could be over-ridden by the normal keyboard. Each machine had several strips of tape hanging from bull-dog clips awaiting feeding into the machine as soon as the previous message had gone through the head and operators wandered up and down the rows of machines, armed with a clipboard and wearing tapes around their necks, feeding the machines, logging and retrieving sent tapes and filing them away. Others would be intercepting inward message tapes, reading the multi-addressed heads and redistributing the tapes with individual addresses added, to the appropriate machine for onward transmission. Each shift at the Commcen was manned by a couple of MoD civil servants and half a dozen matelotes and it operated around the clock.

Later on a former escape tunnel was used as an entrance by the staff to avoid having to tread the 168 steps from the main entrance inside the Fort and this was manned at shift changeover by the MoD Police. Used tapes were burnt outside in a incinerator by the entrance first thing in the morning.

During the early 1970s it became apparent that the cost of maintaining and refurbishing the tunnels was becoming prohibitive. Also the Fort Southwick underground COMMCEN was considered to be a fire hazard after a fire in a similar installation at RAF Neatishead.

In 1974 the tunnels were closed when a new above ground COMMCEN was built on Fort Southwicks' parade ground.

There were two Soviet nuclear missiles aimed at the Fort.