According to GCHQ director Jeremy Fleming, Scarborough is home to ‘the oldest, continually operated, signals collection site in the world’. Its history began in 1912 on Sandybed Lane, on the western outskirts of the town, where the Admiralty founded a Wireless Telegraphy Station to transmit and receive British naval communications.
Not long afterwards, the First World War and new technology encouraged the development of Signals Intelligence – the systematic collection and decoding of enemy communications – and Scarborough began intercepting German naval communications, which they sent to London to be decrypted. The station quadrupled in size during the war.
The current site of GCHQ Scarborough was obtained during the Second World War by the Admiralty. The area was formerly home to Scarborough Racecourse. Impressively, they were able to move overnight to their new bombproof bunker on 1st March 1943 without any interruption to their intelligence work. The war was a time of rapid growth for Scarborough’s signals intelligence, requiring the recruitment of large numbers of military and civilian personnel, and women from the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS).
Scarborough sent intercepted intelligence via motorcycle or teleprinter line to the codebreakers at Bletchley Park and was part of the Admiralty’s ‘Direction Finding’ (DF) network which located German battleships, U-boats, tankers and supply ships. It was the DF control at Scarborough that plotted the movements of the German battleship Bismarck, verifying the battleship was heading for France. Using other sources of intelligence too, the British were able to sink the Bismarck in May 1941.
Following the end of the Second World War, the site’s main focus was the interception of Soviet Russian communications. Scarborough’s routine mission of monitoring Soviet Naval High Command and Soviet merchant vessels became crucial during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the station was able to report that Soviet ships, potentially carrying medium-range ballistic missiles, had turned back home instead of attempting to break the American blockade of the island.
Major new buildings were opened in 1974, and by 1981, 538 people were working on the site. It took its current name, GCHQ Scarborough, in 2001, and celebrated its hundredth anniversary as a listening station in 2014 with a visit from GCHQ patron Prince Charles.
