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Places&Faces | January/February 2012
Suffolk’s
Secret Army
Careless talk was said to cost lives but some Second World War secrets were so hush hush they’ve never really been written about – until now. Anne Gould speaks to Eastern Angles’ Ivan Cutting about his new play
ecrets have always got the power to fascinate and none more so than the manoeuvrings behind the scenes during the Second World War. Extraordinarily some of the plans were so sensitive and the men involved so loyal 26 | placesandfaces.co.uk
that they’ve gone to their deaths without breathing a word of what their war was really about. However, according to Ivan Cutting of Eastern Angles, the landscape in East Anglia bears testament to a secret plan that is at the
heart of his new play, Private Resistance. “It started with an interview I did back in 1986 for a production On the Home Front and an interview with a man from Weeley in Essex. “He told me that he was part of an extra division of the Home Guard called auxiliary units whose job it was to go underground and form a secret resistance in case of invasion. “Their job was to blow up bridges and railway lines to stop the Germans being able to use our transport links.” Fascinated, Ivan has, since then, scoured all available information about this secret army