Secrets Of Great British Castles - Season 1, Episode 1 Dover Castle
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00:00For me, a great British castle is a fortress, a palace, a home.
00:11And a symbol of power, majesty and fear.
00:16For nearly 1,000 years,
00:18castles have shaped Britain's famous landscape.
00:24These magnificent buildings have been home
00:27to heroes and villains in our national history.
00:31And many of them still stand proudly today,
00:34bursting with incredible stories of warfare,
00:37treachery, intrigue and even murder.
00:45Join me, Dan Jones,
00:47as I uncover the secrets behind six great British castles.
00:53This time, I'm in the south-east of England
00:56to explore the history of Britain's greatest defensive castle.
01:01This imposing fortress on the White Cliffs of Dover
01:05has resisted all enemies from the Middle Ages right up to the Cold War.
01:23The White Horse pub, tucked away on the back streets of Dover,
01:27is plastered in the names of people who've stopped in here for a pint.
01:31Not that the landlord seems to mind.
01:36This pub encourages graffiti, but only from a select group of people.
01:41If you can discover what connects all these scribbles on the walls,
01:46then you'll understand the key to Dover and to its castle.
01:53That key is just a stone's throw away.
01:57The Dover Strait, or as it's usually called, the English Channel.
02:06All of these people are successful cross-channel swimmers
02:10and they knew the same thing that the Romans knew and the Saxons knew,
02:14that the medieval French knew, that Napoleon and Hitler knew,
02:18that the quickest way across the Channel from mainland Europe
02:22to mainland England was through Dover.
02:26From Dover, it's just 21 miles to France.
02:30If you're quick, you can swim it in ten hours or so.
02:33It's even quicker on a boat, and that's why it's dangerous.
02:38If all of England is a castle, Dover is the main gate.
02:43Even Britain's word for water was dover, or Dover.
02:48This was the edge of the kingdom, beyond which lay the rest of the known world,
02:52so any invasion, any attack had to come through Dover.
02:56Dover was and is the key to England,
03:00and that's why it had to be protected by one of the greatest castles in Britain.
03:06It has towers, gatehouses and a curtain wall that's a mile long.
03:16And in the middle of it all stands the formidable inner bailey
03:20and massive stone keep.
03:25In its time, this gigantic fortress has kept Britain safe
03:29from the medieval French and the Saxons.
03:35It's also home to the French, the Emperor Napoleon and Adolf Hitler.
03:40But the story of Dover Castle starts long before any of that.
03:51Dover's strategic importance began with the Romans.
03:54In the 1st century BC,
03:56this is where Julius Caesar and his legions first landed in Britain.
04:01And here, on Dover's eastern heights,
04:04stands an incredible structure that still survives nearly 2,000 years on.
04:10It's called the Pharos,
04:12a great lighthouse designed to guide Roman galleys to the shore.
04:25When William the Conqueror invaded England and ransacked the Saxon fort,
04:29he was quick to realise just how important Dover was,
04:33and he wanted it built as soon as possible.
04:36But credit for the massive stone fortress you can see here today
04:40has to go to William's great-grandson, Henry II.
04:51Henry II ruled England for more than 30 years at the end of the 12th century,
04:56and he laid many of the foundations of the country as it is today.
05:01Henry II built what is still the centrepiece of Dover Castle,
05:06a great bailey wall with 14 defensive towers
05:10protecting one of the most impressive medieval keeps ever constructed,
05:15the Great Tower.
05:19In his day, Henry II was the big dog among the kings of medieval Europe,
05:24and he loved building castles as statements of his royal authority.
05:28Dover Castle.
05:30Well, that has to be the ultimate symbol of royal supremacy and power.
05:36But the magnificence and scale of Dover Castle that we see today
05:40exists because of Henry's embarrassment and guilt.
05:47Dover Castle was a fortress,
05:49but it was also a palace on which no expense had been spared.
05:54Inside were two palatial suites of rooms,
05:57suitable for putting up important guests as well as the king himself.
06:10But on the second floor,
06:12a narrow corridor leads away from the impressive state rooms.
06:16At the end of it is a room of special significance to the king,
06:20a place of reflection and regret.
06:24This chapel I'm sitting in now was built by Henry II himself.
06:29It was built to venerate a saint.
06:34But not an ordinary saint.
06:36This was a man that Henry had personally caused to be killed,
06:40to be murdered in the most brutal way imaginable.
06:46His name was Thomas Beckett.
06:48Beckett was once Henry's best friend.
06:51He was his fixer and his closest counsellor.
06:55But when Henry made Beckett Archbishop of Canterbury,
06:58their friendship blew up in spectacular fashion.
07:02Henry wanted Beckett to help him impose royal law on the English church.
07:07When Beckett refused, the two became bitter enemies.
07:12Ave Maria, gratia plena.
07:17In late December 1170,
07:19four of Henry's knights rode to Canterbury with murderous intent.
07:24Amen.
07:29The two were killed in the process,
07:31but one of Henry's knights was killed in the process.
07:36They found Beckett unarmed in his cathedral.
07:49They cut him down near the altar and mashed his brains into the floor.
07:57The two were killed in the process.
08:00They cut him down near the altar and mashed his brains into the floor.
08:08It was an atrocity that shook 12th-century Europe.
08:14Two years later, Beckett was a saint, but Henry was a hate figure.
08:19To restore his damaged reputation,
08:22the king performed an extraordinary act of penance.
08:27Henry turned up at Canterbury barefoot and dressed in sackcloth robes.
08:33Then he ordered the cathedral's 80 monks
08:36to beat him three times each with a wooden rod.
08:41The king then spent the night alone at Beckett's tomb,
08:44praying for forgiveness.
08:47From this point on,
08:49Beckett's shrine became Europe's number one tourist destination,
08:53visited by pilgrims from all over the continent.
09:00So, in a sense, this chapel, indeed the whole castle,
09:05was founded on Henry II's guilt.
09:09CHURCH BELLS RING
09:20Among the many visitors to Beckett's tomb
09:22were the great and the good of Europe.
09:24And in 1179, Henry received word
09:27that one of the greatest of them all was coming to visit,
09:30Louis VII, King of France,
09:32who was coming to Beckett's tomb to pray for his seriously ill son.
09:36The king of France was coming.
09:38This was the first state visit in English history,
09:41and Henry had to put on some kind of grand show.
09:48No French king had ever set foot on English soil before.
09:54But Henry had a problem.
09:57At this stage, Dover was a long way
10:00from being a suitable place to receive royalty.
10:06This was slightly embarrassing.
10:08Henry actually had to meet the King of France on the beach
10:12before riding with him all the way to Canterbury,
10:15and perhaps because of that humiliation,
10:17within a couple of months, Henry had started throwing money
10:21at the development of Dover Castle.
10:27In the last ten years of his reign,
10:29Henry spent more on Dover than on any other English castle.
10:33He did it to make sure his legacy would never be overshadowed
10:37by the murder of Thomas Beckett.
10:40Dover Castle would remind every pilgrim that passed this way
10:44the wealth and authority of a great king.
10:50But Henry also made sure to build Dover as a proper military fortress,
10:54and it's just as well that he did.
10:57Dover Castle was the largest and most strategically important
11:02English fortress of the Middle Ages.
11:05King Henry II, who founded the castle,
11:08would never see it tested in war, but his son would.
11:13At the turn of the 12th century,
11:15these walls would face their first great challenge
11:18under the command of England's most despised ruler,
11:22a monarch with one of the worst reputations in all of history,
11:26the infamous King John.
11:31Everyone knows King John from the Robin Hood stories,
11:34but actually his role in British history is much more important than that.
11:38He nearly destroyed Dover Castle and the whole kingdom.
11:43To find out why, I'm headed to Salisbury Cathedral in Wiltshire,
11:47160 miles west of Dover.
11:50Here, in the magnificent chapter house, is an extraordinary manuscript,
11:55a document that has resounded throughout history.
11:59Its name is Magna Carta.
12:02This is one of four surviving copies of Magna Carta,
12:06the treaty drawn up in 1215, 800 years ago,
12:09which is still one of the most famous documents
12:12in the whole of Western history.
12:14And today we think of Magna Carta
12:16as underpinning the rule of law, justice, human rights,
12:20English liberties and even the US Constitution.
12:23But in fact, in 1215, it was a peace treaty
12:27between King John and his rebellious barons.
12:31John was a cruel and vengeful king.
12:34He imposed crippling taxes to fund unsuccessful military campaigns.
12:39He alienated his subjects, plundered the church,
12:43and waged war on his barons when they finally rose against him.
12:47Magna Carta was a desperate attempt to bring the king to heel.
12:53There are about 4,000 words in Magna Carta,
12:56and we usually divide them up into 63 clauses.
12:59And if you read most of it today, it doesn't seem very relevant.
13:03It's stuff about tax rates and fish weirs and ballywicks
13:07and all things basically forgotten in England today.
13:10What was more important was Clause 61, right at the bottom,
13:13which we now call the Security Clause.
13:16And what that said was that if King John broke any of the terms of Magna Carta,
13:21a council of 25 barons is legally entitled to make war on him.
13:26And in 1215, that's actually exactly what happened.
13:32John appealed to the Pope,
13:34claiming that by restricting the rights of the king,
13:37Magna Carta was an attack on the authority of the church itself.
13:41The Pope agreed.
13:43The rebel barons were excommunicated,
13:46and England erupted into civil war.
13:50The barons knew they could never make peace with King John,
13:54so they invited Prince Louis of France to invade England
13:58and take the throne from him.
14:00Inviting a French prince to become king of England
14:04Inviting a French prince to become king of England might sound pretty treacherous,
14:08but actually the English were pretty used to it.
14:11In fact, it had happened three times in the 150 years since the Norman conquest.
14:16A French baron had come across the sea, hit the south coast,
14:20taken the crown and put up massive castles to enforce his power,
14:25just like the one at Dover.
14:28Within weeks, Louis and the rebel barons had control of Canterbury,
14:32Rochester, Winchester and London.
14:35England was falling to him.
14:37But what he really needed was the crucial communication centre
14:41between England and France, Dover Castle.
14:44The fate of King John and of his realm now rested with Dover.
14:51Louis immediately laid siege.
14:54Arranging his forces on a hill to the north of the castle,
14:58he battered the walls with catapults.
15:01But these defences held firm.
15:04So Louis changed his strategy,
15:06exploiting the very thing that made Dover famous.
15:11The White Chalk Cliffs beneath its foundations.
15:14Instead of going over the walls, the French would go under them.
15:20Beneath the walls of Dover Castle,
15:22French engineers began tunnelling through the rock,
15:25trying to weaken the foundations.
15:28A siege technology known as the catapult.
15:31It was the first time the French had ever used a catapult.
15:36Undermining, what are we talking about?
15:38Well, as you can see here, the chalk is the rock.
15:41So they have to tunnel through it, underneath the castle foundations,
15:45to try and make them collapse.
15:47So if the wall collapses and the gate collapses,
15:50you end up with a rubble slope,
15:52up which the French attackers can clamber
15:54and get into the rest of the castle.
15:56And how do you stop them?
15:58Well, one of the reasons is that the French
16:02And how do you stop them?
16:04Well, one of the methods that you use is to dig your own tunnels,
16:08and this tunnel that we're standing close to might just be one of those.
16:12What would that have been like?
16:14Would there have been hand-to-hand fighting in the tunnels?
16:16If you discover a French tunnel coming towards you and you break into it,
16:20yeah, they would have had a scrap in here,
16:22and it would have been pretty naughty because it would have been in the dark.
16:26They succeeded in undermining one of the towers at the gatehouse
16:30and brought it down, and actually got inside the outer belly of the castle.
16:34So they got over the defences.
16:37However, the strength of the English resistance inside
16:41forced them back over the breach that they'd made,
16:45and the English made it good, you know, with timber and rocks
16:48and other temporary measures, and the French couldn't get in.
16:51They'd lost the impetus.
16:53On 14th October 1216,
16:56frustrated by three long months of siege,
16:59Louis negotiated a truce.
17:02Four days later, having contracted dysentery, King John was dead.
17:10Dover Castle's one real weakness had been exposed.
17:14The castle's engineers repaired the undermined north gate,
17:19but they also expanded the underground tunnels.
17:23By the time they were done,
17:25Dover's defences would extend way beyond the Great Curtain Wall.
17:42Dover was enlarged and refortified by several English kings,
17:47but it would be 600 years
17:49before the castle and its tunnels would see action again.
18:00At the end of the 18th century, Britain was at war with France.
18:04All across Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte had crushed his enemies,
18:09and his eye was now firmly fixed on Dover.
18:19By 1803, Napoleon had assembled an army of 130,000 men
18:25and 2,000 barges at Boulogne in northern France.
18:30A massive force, just 60 miles from Dover Castle,
18:34dedicated to one purpose, the invasion of England.
18:41French invasion was expected on an almost hourly basis,
18:45but then Dover Castle was at the heart of history.
18:48The most obvious invasion route, Dover.
18:51The French would need a port to resupply their armies.
18:54Dover.
18:55The English needed to prepare with might and ingenuity,
18:59and they found it in a military engineer called William Twiss.
19:06Twiss set about turning Dover Castle into a modern fortress.
19:12He added five gun emplacements to the outer wall
19:16and a huge raised cannon platform at the north gate.
19:23He also reinforced the roof of the great tower with brick vaults
19:27to support heavy artillery.
19:35But it was below ground that Twiss showed real ingenuity.
19:42Because Dover Castle had a problem.
19:45There were troops, but there was nowhere to put them.
19:52During the Napoleonic Wars, we were expecting invasion at any time.
19:56The castle was full already of troops.
19:59There was no more space above ground.
20:01So a character came up with the novel idea to build one underground.
20:06So this is like digging out a basement under your house
20:10How was this dug out?
20:12This was dug out by hand, with picks, shovels and barrows.
20:16Hard labour.
20:17So we can see here, the wall feels pretty...
20:20I mean, my hand's green, it's damp and mossy.
20:22It is damp and it's cold,
20:24but to the soldiers of the early 19th century
20:27who were used to pretty awful conditions in the field,
20:29it probably wasn't too bad.
20:31And this whole thing, really, is just so ingenious.
20:34This is just one part under the castle
20:37and a network of fortifications for the whole country.
20:40Defending the south-east of England
20:42was one of the most important aspects of the Napoleonic Wars,
20:45as far as we were concerned.
20:47Even now, as Dover bristled with English military might,
20:51one weakness remained.
20:53The White Cliffs themselves.
20:56If Napoleon did manage to land an army on the coast,
21:00how could the English get their troops down to meet him?
21:04It's only about 300 feet from the top of the cliffs
21:07to here on the beach,
21:09but to get men on horseback down, it's about a mile and a half,
21:12and even to march men down,
21:14it's still a mile along narrow, winding paths.
21:17Twiss realised there had to be a quicker, better way.
21:23What Twiss designed was an express route
21:26from the barracks to the base of the cliff.
21:29It was called the Grand Shaft.
21:31A giant stairwell, 26 feet across and 180 feet deep,
21:37with three flights of stairs.
21:39It was one of the most brilliant building projects of its day.
22:02God, it actually looks a bit like a sort of futuristic prison.
22:07It's incredible.
22:12They needed a route to move the soldiers very quickly
22:15from the barracks site down to the sea front
22:18if Napoleon had invaded.
22:20Originally, there were just chalk paths,
22:22which would have been really slippery when it was wet.
22:25So what they did is they constructed, ostensibly, a well
22:29and put three staircases in it,
22:31which meant troops could be moved really quickly
22:34from the barracks site above us down to the sea front.
22:36So by having three staircases,
22:38you can move troops three times as fast, presumably.
22:40Three times as fast, yeah.
22:41Give us a rough idea of how long it would take
22:43to get 1,000 men from top to bottom.
22:45They did do an exercise at one point,
22:47and it was to get all the troops from the Grand Shaft barracks site
22:50and Dover Castle down to the Market Square,
22:52and it took 12 and a half minutes.
22:5412 and a half minutes for 1,000 men?
22:56Yeah.
22:57It's almost like water going down a plug hole, isn't it?
22:59It is very much like that, yes.
23:01Very, very simple, which is part of the genius.
23:08Though fully prepared, Dover's defences were never put to the test.
23:12Blockaded by the Royal Navy,
23:14unable to control the English Channel long enough
23:17to get his army across,
23:19Napoleon was forced to cancel the invasion.
23:22By 1805, the threat had passed.
23:26But the fear lingered on.
23:29In the early 19th century, there were real fears
23:32that Napoleon would tunnel all the way from France
23:35to here at Dover for an invasion.
23:37And that's not as mad as it sounds,
23:39because later in the century, in the 1880s,
23:42a test tunnel was actually dug more than a mile under the sea
23:45before it was cancelled on the grounds of national security.
23:49So this is an article from one of the London papers in 1882
23:52discussing the proposed tunnel
23:54that was going to be dug under the Channel.
23:56And there's been an interview with a man called Sir Garnet Walsley.
23:59He thought a tunnel would be
24:01a considerable source of national danger.
24:04At the dead of night, a small force might be landed at Dover, he said,
24:08and no-one might suspect their coming
24:11until they knocked at the door of the fortress.
24:15For the next 130 years, Dover Castle remained unchallenged,
24:20its tunnels abandoned and all but forgotten.
24:23But the threat of invasion would return.
24:26Once again, it would come from France, but not from the French.
24:32For nine centuries, the wars of Dover Castle
24:35have adapted to the upheavals of civil war
24:38and the threat of foreign invasion.
24:41But at the start of World War II,
24:43the protection of this great fortress would extend beyond England
24:47and into all of Europe.
24:49It would be the only fortress in the world
24:52that would be able to withstand the threat of an invasion.
24:56In World War II, the protection of this great fortress
25:00would extend beyond England, right across the Channel to France.
25:07In May 1940, the British army was facing almost certain annihilation
25:12on the beaches of Dunkirk.
25:14Here, on the coast of northern France,
25:17400,000 Allied troops were now surrounded
25:21by a German army twice their size,
25:24but Hitler's forces were closing in for the kill.
25:28Prime Minister Winston Churchill needed a rescue mission
25:32and the man he chose to formulate it was Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay.
25:39Ramsay's headquarters needed to be as close as possible to Dunkirk.
25:44He chose Dover Castle.
25:47Beneath the White Cliffs, the 100-year-old network of tunnels
25:51built during the Napoleonic Wars
25:54was still a secret to the outside world.
25:57Now they would be transformed into Ramsay's military command centre.
26:17The decision was taken to evacuate Dunkirk as quickly as possible
26:22and the retired Vice-Admiral Ramsay was put in charge of an impossible task.
26:27They called it Operation Dynamo
26:29and the first planning meeting took place in these rooms
26:32deep below Dover Castle on the 20th of May, 1940.
26:37Ramsay's operation, named after the Dynamo room
26:40that powered the tunnels to Dunkirk,
26:42was planned in just six days.
26:45Immediately, he began to commandeer a fleet of carriers and destroyers
26:49for a seemingly impossible mission.
26:56In this labyrinth of tunnels,
26:58there were operation rooms for the army, navy and air force.
27:02Plans were made here to offer as much cover as possible for the evacuation.
27:08Ramsay and his team were living in these tunnels 24 hours a day.
27:13It must have been incredibly intense and claustrophobic.
27:19And even with intelligence reports coming in from the outside,
27:22they still had no real way of knowing what was happening.
27:26They had no idea what was going on.
27:28They had no idea what was going on.
27:31They had no idea what was going on.
27:34They still had no real way of knowing what was happening
27:37to the Allied forces gathering on the beaches of Dunkirk.
27:41Sergeant, inform all gun sites to stand to.
27:46Almost half a million lives were at risk.
27:49Even at his most optimistic, Ramsay hoped to rescue 30,000 or 40,000.
27:55As well as the German forces,
27:57the ships would face the treacherous shallows of the French coast
28:01and an English channel littered with mines.
28:07From his bunker, deep below Dover Castle,
28:10Ramsay gave the order for Operation Dynamo to begin.
28:14And with that, a fleet of 35 destroyers and troop carriers
28:19set out for Dunkirk, 47 miles away.
28:23Once there, they would anchor offshore
28:26and use landing craft to ferry the soldiers out.
28:32These dunes, in fact, the whole beach,
28:36were swarming with men under German bombardment.
28:40But the inner harbour was out of commission,
28:43so the larger ships couldn't approach the beach to rescue the men.
28:49On top of that, the quickest way back to Dover was too dangerous
28:53because the sea was mined
28:55and there was constant fire from German positions along the coast.
29:02EXPLOSION
29:08It's almost impossible to imagine the chaos, fear and panic
29:12of that first day unless you were there.
29:1697-year-old Vic Viner was among the crew of a landing craft
29:20rowing soldiers from the beach to the destroyer HMS Esk,
29:24anchored further out to sea.
29:27The first day, they got 7,000.
29:30Right.
29:32When we looked around and found we'd been sweating blood, it was...
29:35You'd been sweating blood? Oh, yes.
29:37My colleague next to me said,
29:39Vic, your hands are all covered in blood.
29:41I said, so are yours.
29:43So we rolled up our sleeves and it was all the way down.
29:47When all this was happening, I overcame the Luftwaffe and did their bit.
29:53Quite a few were killed by the bombing
29:57and then there was a good number that just walked into the sea going home.
30:02Just walked? Just going back to England and off they went.
30:08I can vividly remember two big sergeants, six-foot-odd, crying
30:14cos they'd had enough. Really?
30:18And yet, once you sort of said something to them
30:22and made them look up,
30:25this is where their...
30:29..their discipline came back, you know?
30:35After three days, around 70,000 men had been rescued,
30:39but that still left hundreds of thousands stranded on the beach.
30:42But back in the tunnels at Dover Castle,
30:45the second part of Ramsay's plan was about to come into play.
30:54All across the south-east coast and Thames estuary,
30:57the Admiral had put out an emergency call for privately-owned small boats.
31:03Already, he'd assembled 700 of them at Ramsgate,
31:07everything from speedboats and private yachts to car ferries.
31:11By May 28th, they were headed for Dunkirk.
31:16So what's the idea behind the little ships?
31:20Well, what happened was, when Ramsay called for the Navy
31:24to go and evacuate the troops from Dunkirk,
31:27they realised that they couldn't get into the beaches,
31:31and the problem with the larger ships is that they had a depth of 10, 12, 20 feet,
31:36and they couldn't get into the beaches, the troops couldn't get off,
31:39so what you needed were the smaller vessels,
31:42to go into the beach, pick up the troops from the beach,
31:45and ferry them back to the larger ships.
31:47So these boats were doing lots of little journeys back and forth,
31:50full of troops being physically taken off the beaches?
31:53That's exactly right.
31:55And we know something about this particular boat, don't we?
31:58We know how many people were on it?
32:00It's unusual. Most boats we don't know much about.
32:03But New Britannic, we know that she collected up to 3,000 troops,
32:07which is a staggering number of troops.
32:11And therefore an awful lot of young men owe a lot to this fine old vessel.
32:17Larger of the yachts would take as many as 180 or 200 on board
32:22and then take them out to the ships, to the larger ships,
32:26the destroyers and the merchantmen which were waiting.
32:3130th of May, we got 68,000 away during that day.
32:39That's incredible.
32:41And the next day, just under 68,000.
32:58It must have looked like a scene from hell.
33:00That's right. Oh, yes.
33:02It's very difficult now to...
33:06I try very hard to explain, you know, how I felt.
33:12But it's so peaceful now, it's very difficult.
33:17But in a way it's peaceful because of what happened all those years ago.
33:20That's right, yes.
33:22And I'm just very humbled to know that I was part of it.
33:37On the 4th of June, the last destroyer left Dunkirk harbour,
33:41headed here for Dover, with the last of the men to be evacuated.
33:47Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsey had hoped to save at most 45,000 lives.
33:54In the end, his Operation Dynamo saved 300,000 lives.
34:02In the end, his Operation Dynamo saved 338,226 people.
34:18Sir, we must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance
34:23the attributes of a victory.
34:26Wars are not won by evacuations.
34:30But there was a victory inside this deliverance, which should be noted.
34:35In pure military terms, Dunkirk was humiliating,
34:39but its success saved the core of a professional army.
34:43And more importantly than that,
34:45what happened between Dunkirk and here at Dover
34:48helped create a pride, that Dunkirk spirit,
34:52and that probably changed the course of the war.
35:00We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.
35:04We shall fight on the beaches.
35:06We shall fight on the landing grounds.
35:09We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.
35:13We shall fight in the hills.
35:15We shall never surrender.
35:18By the end of 1940,
35:20the castle was on the front line of Britain's defences.
35:24As the Germans dug in along the French coast,
35:27Admiral Ramsay knew the secret tunnels beneath Dover Castle
35:31were crucial to the war effort, so he set about expanding them.
35:36Over the old Napoleonic tunnels, a new annex level was carved out.
35:42With underground living quarters,
35:44bathrooms, hospitals and operating theatres.
35:53From here, radio operators would transmit fake military commands
35:58and other disinformation to confuse the Germans.
36:02The work done here would be crucial in the run-up to the Normandy landings.
36:08Dover was used as a dummy launching point for D-Day,
36:12so down in the harbour, there were hundreds of fake landing craft.
36:19And thousands of fake orders and communications
36:22were sent through this repeater room.
36:29This is where the Germans would send their troops
36:32to the front line.
36:38Even when it was pretending, Dover was at the heart of the war.
36:49Yet again, Dover had played a vital role in the defence of the realm.
36:54Thanks to Bertram Ramsay,
36:56it had saved not only the British army, but Britain itself.
37:00Bertram Ramsay was killed in a plane crash in January 1945,
37:04so he never saw the end of the Second World War
37:07or celebrated the victory he helped to bring about.
37:11But what he did, and the part played by Dover Castle
37:15in defending Britain, is still remembered today.
37:205, 4, 3, 2, 0.
37:29But soon the world would fall under the shadow of a new kind of war,
37:34and if the worst ever happened,
37:36Dover Castle would be the best place to hide.
37:45For almost 900 years,
37:47Dover Castle has been Britain's most strategically important fortress.
37:52In all that time, it stood firm in the face of invasion.
38:03In May 1945, the war in Europe ended
38:06with Germany's unconditional surrender to Allied forces.
38:17By August, two atomic bombs ended the war for Japan
38:21and ushered in a sinister new age.
38:31Tunnels beneath Dover Castle,
38:33once the nerve centre of secret military operations,
38:37would soon have a new role to play.
38:48MUSIC FADES
38:57One of the main advantages of the tunnels was their secrecy,
39:00and after the war, this came into play.
39:03The lowest level, Level D, was codenamed Dumpy,
39:06and it was to be used as a regional command centre
39:09in the event of the outbreak of nuclear war.
39:13Now, most of the information about these tunnels
39:15is protected by the Official Secrets Act,
39:18and they don't let the public down here very often.
39:25As the Cold War intensified,
39:27the British government began to plan
39:29for the possibility of a nuclear attack.
39:32Britain would be divided
39:34into 12 designated regional seats of government.
39:38In 1968, Level D, beneath Dover Castle, became one of them.
39:46150 feet below the surface,
39:48seven corridors and over 30 rooms were modified
39:52to provide shelter for 300 government and military officials
39:56in the event of a nuclear strike.
39:59Here, deep inside the White Cliffs,
40:02doomsday rehearsals and civil defence training
40:05were carried out throughout the 60s and 70s.
40:16DOOR SLAMS
40:23If you found yourself down here during the Cold War,
40:26then the worst had probably happened.
40:28You'd have been whisked out of your bed in the middle of the night,
40:31brought to this bunker to help keep
40:33whatever remained of south-east England going.
40:40Fully stocked and equipped with filtration and ventilation systems,
40:44conditions were spartan and fairly claustrophobic,
40:48but practical in the case of nuclear Armageddon.
40:56The inhabitants of Level D would have been isolated
40:59but still capable of broadcasting to the world outside,
41:03if there was one.
41:05This is the BBC radio studio and they had instructions
41:08that in the event of nuclear holocaust,
41:11they were to play light, upbeat music
41:14to keep the people's spirits up.
41:31There was just one problem.
41:33By the 1970s, it was realised that,
41:36while the chalk surrounding the bunker
41:38would have been enough to keep out Napoleon and Hitler,
41:41it was also permeable, which meant that any radioactive rainwater
41:45from a nuclear disaster above
41:47would eventually have seeped through the rock
41:50and into the bunker below.
42:02Thankfully, Dover Castle has never had to defend anyone from nuclear attack.
42:08For the last 60 years of peacetime,
42:11it has remained a monument to Dover's 2,000-year-old reputation
42:15as the gateway to Britain.
42:27In all that time, Dover has contributed more to the defence of Britain
42:32than any other castle.
42:34From the Roman lighthouse and Saxon fort
42:37to the greatest and most formidable castle of the Middle Ages,
42:41from royal palace to underground barracks
42:45and one of the most ingenious military bases of the 19th century,
42:49Dover Castle has extended its defences well beyond these medieval walls,
42:55from the White Cliffs to the shores of Normandy.
42:59Today, the key to England remains a testament
43:03to Britain's determination, resilience and bravery.
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