Today the Systems Administrator and I played London tourists, and went to see the Churchill War Rooms. We've been meaning to go for a while, indeed in April of last year we got as far as the pavement outside, and were so put off by the length of the queue that we decided to leave it to another day. November, we agreed, would be our best bet, after half term when the days are short and dark, and people might be thinking more about Christmas than military history. We slipped a year, but we made it.
The rooms form an intricate basement network underneath what was judged in the run up to WWII to be the most solidly built office in Whitehall. They had barely been kitted out by the time Germany invaded Poland and we were at war, and so Britain's war effort was planned and directed from a spartan rabbit warren beneath Whitehall. After the end of the war they fell into damp and disuse, before being resurrected as a museum in the 1980s. The core of the complex is the Map Room, where pins stuck in world maps on the walls were used to chart the progress of hostilities on all fronts, and you can see the room where the cabinet met, and the small room containing the secure telephone Churchill used to speak to the US president. Playing rather brilliantly on the English sense of embarrassment, that was disguised as Churchill's loo to discourage staff from loitering outside. There's the switchboard, Churchill's kitchen and dining room, bedrooms and offices, and odd details like a frame on the walls where a description of the weather above ground was posted. 'Windy' meant there was an air raid going on.
A dedicated Churchill museum has been tacked on the side, opened more recently by the Queen. That starts with the years of the second world war, then backtracks to his early life and postwar career. The WWII section is frankly confusing since the war was simply too big and too complicated to address in so little space or time, so there are some good Churchillian bon mots but very little sense of what was going on, apart from the fact that Churchill was a great orator, which most visitors would know anyway. The early and late years section is more interesting. I did not know that when our present Queen attended Churchill's funeral she was the first British monarch to have ever been to a commoner's funeral. And the early years section bring it home that Churchill was a Victorian, born in 1874. If sometimes he sounds like a dinosaur or a boor I must remember that he was a Victorian upper class Englishman, and that the past was indeed another country.
The war rooms are part of the Imperial War Museum, and from there we went to the main IWM site in Lambeth. The museum has recently had a major refurbishment, and seems jolly good once you get past the initial confusing lack of signs on the way in. We thought it had to have a cafe, but had to ask where it was. A keen and enthusiastic man who I think must have been a volunteer tried to press a membership leaflet upon us, but I explained that the SA already was a member, and the leaflet man positively beamed.
Our first stop after the cafe was the exhibition of Lee Miller's war photographs. I was keen to see them since encountering Lee Miller in her role as surrealist muse in the National Portrait Gallery's Man Ray exhibition. It seemed a long step from hanging out with surrealists in Paris to becoming a Vogue photographer to war photography. She had an interesting life. The SA could not understand why nobody had made a film of it, and somebody should. I nominate Cate Blanchett for the mature Lee.
Then we went around the First World War galleries, which are extremely well done, managing to present the fighting war and the home front as parallel but connected threads. There is much more there than anybody could really absorb in half an afternoon, but entry to the permanent galleries is free. Of course the trouble with exhibitions that are both free and permanent is that there seems all the time in the world to go and see them, so one doesn't as visits to exciting temporary exhibitions rise to the top of one's list of things to do.
I recommend the Imperial War Museum. It has a double handicap in image terms, what with the negative connotations of both 'imperial' and 'war' but it is very interesting, or at least the bits we saw today were.
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