Dungavel House
The Duke of Hamilton's seat — and the destination Hess never reached.
Dungavel House, near Strathaven in South Lanarkshire, was the country seat of the Duke of Hamilton in 1941. It sits on remote moorland with a private grass airstrip, and it was, by Rudolf Hess's own account given on capture, his intended destination on the night of 10 May 1941, when he flew a Messerschmitt Bf 110 solo from Augsburg to Scotland.[1] Hamilton had met Hess at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and was, in the documented assessment of MI5 at the time, a man with extensive Nazi contacts whose loyalty was sufficiently in question that he was monitored throughout the period leading up to the flight.
Hess never landed. He bailed out over Eaglesham, some miles from Dungavel, after his aircraft ran low on fuel, and was taken into custody by a local farmer before British intelligence arrived. The Dungavel airstrip itself was, in fact, almost certainly too short for a Bf 110 to land on safely — a detail that has fuelled decades of speculation about whether Hess's mission was better prepared, with external assistance, than the official account of a solo, improvised peace mission allows for.[2]
Cyril killed the lights at the second pass, not the first, exactly as he had been told, and afterwards he could never afterwards explain to anyone why those four seconds of darkness had felt so much longer than four seconds.