page_title: Bentworth Hall
section_title: World War II
hierarchical_section_title: Bentworth Hall / World War II
caption_attribution_description: English: WW2 brick building in woods
context_page_description: Bentworth Hall is a country house in the parish of Bentworth in Hampshire, England. It is about 1 mile south of Bentworth village centre and 4 miles northwest of Alton, the nearest town.
  Before the 1830s, the building called Bentworth Hall or Bentworth Manor House is now re-named Hall Place.
  It was built in the early 14th century and is a Grade II listed building. It lies 330 feet south of the village green. The current Bentworth Hall is surrounded by woodland that was planted during building which started in 1832, after Roger Staples Horman-Fisher purchased the Bentworth Manor estate.
context_section_description: At the beginning of the war, the Bentworth Hall estate was taken over by the military together with other local large houses and estates such as Gaston Grange and Thedden Grange.
  In 1941 Bentworth Hall was occupied by a unit of the Mobile Naval Base Defence Organisation (MNBDO) as an out-station of Haslar Naval Hospital in Portsmouth.  The bedrooms were the wards and there was a doctor's office upstairs.  The upstairs bathroom in the middle of the west wing was a darkroom for developing X-ray plates, presumably because it had one relatively small window that was easy to cover.  This information came from N Crabb, a Royal Marine who was at Bentworth Hall during the war and married a maid who had worked at Medstead Grange, a country house 1.1 miles (1.8 km) south of Bentworth Hall.
   
  Later, other military organisations were there because in the woods there is a carving of "48 CDO" on one of the trees. This refers to the British 48 Marine Commando which presumably had a unit at Bentworth Hall before their main body deployed abroad for operations.  Several Nissen huts were erected in the woods to the west of the Hall and the concrete bases of several of them are still there (in 2019) together with small amounts of the corrugated iron which covered them, although some concrete was removed in the 1980s because it was causing vegetation and trees to die.  In the woods to the SW of the house, a brick-built enclosure is still standing which may have been an ablution block, and near the west boundary of the woods is a 3 feet (0.91 m) wide square drain cover under which are sewer pipes that would have been connected to latrines in the hut complex.
   
  In 1944 Bentworth Hall was occupied by American and British Commonwealth personnel.  A swimming pool had been put in, also two cookhouses and a water tower.  Huts in the woods were for accommodation although some officers lived in the Hall itself.  The cornfield to the SW was an airstrip with 3 L4 light aircraft (the US Army version of the Piper Cub) which the Colonel used to fly to the airfield at Lasham
  The above information came from Michael (Mick) Lennox, ex US Army, who visited Bentworth Hall from his home in New York on 6 June 1994 (the day of D-Day 50 years earlier).  Lennox said that he had been accommodated in one of the huts in the woods before D-day and on walking round the woods, he located where his bed-space would have been.
caption: WW2 brick building in woods
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