The Diplomatic Wireless Service (DWS) was the name of the communications system set up for the British Foreign Office by Brigadier Richard Gambier-Parry, the first Foreign Office Director of Communications, in the latter part of 1945.
Its original base was at Whaddon Hall in Buckinghamshire, but it moved to Hanslope Park in the winter of 1946/47.
[3] The main UK broadcast operation was based under the Ashdown Forest near Crowborough in East Sussex.
This section of the DWS was renamed the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Communications Engineering Division in the mid-1970s and was ultimately transferred to the control of the BBC in 1985.
[4] DWS operators were also involved in radio eavesdropping, the gathering of signals intelligence (SIGINT) for GCHQ, from within the compounds of embassies.