On Wednesday 23 August 1939, two weeks before Britain declared war on Germany, one of the most extraordinary evacuation plans of the Second World War was put into operation. Staff at the National Gallery packed up the entire collection of nearly 2,000 paintings and sent them to nine different locations, mainly in Wales, including the University of Bangor and Penrhyn Castle. The move was completed a few hours before war was announced on 3 September 1939, but the collection's journey was far from over.
The assistant keeper, Martin Davies (who would later become director of the gallery, 1968-73), along with the gallery's scientific adviser, Ian Rawlins, were charged with the safe keeping of the paintings during their absence from Trafalgar Square. With the fall of France and the intensity of enemy bombing, the safety of the collection was an increasing concern. At Penrhyn Castle, damp rooms and the presence of a thousand boisterous troops back from Flanders, added to these worries. The trustees of the gallery considered shipping the collection to Canada for the duration of the war, but Winston Churchill was adamant that the pictures remain in the country: "Bury them, bury them in the bowels of the earth, but not one picture shall leave this island."
In July 1940, Rawlins was authorised to find underground storage for the collection in Wales. After visiting a number of slate quarries, he chose the Manod Quarry, above the small town of Blaenau Ffestiniog. The location was kept secret and became the collection's home for the rest of the war. The quarry, three miles outside the town, was high up in the mountains and could only be reached by a winding single-track road.
Extensive work had to be carried out in the mine, including widening the opening to receive some of the larger pictures such as the 12-foot-high Equestrian Portrait of Charles I by Van Dyck. Six brick-lined, air-conditioned chambers, hung with wire racks 30 feet below the surface, were constructed to keep the temperature and humidity stable, and thus create suitable conditions for the storage of paintings on wood and canvas.
Emrys Evans was home on leave in Ffestiniog in the summer of 1941. Returning from a fishing trip on one of the lakes high up in the valley, he witnessed the extraordinary sight of trucks laden with enormous, strangely shaped packages trundling up the steep, narrow track through the bleak wilderness of North Wales. The whole operation was conducted with precision planning: it took five weeks to complete, but by October the entire collection was reunited in the depths of the quarry.
Thanks to Rawlins and Davies, the paintings enjoyed better conditions than those in Trafalgar Square. Davies started work on the catalogues and many of his entries remain the definitive version. At the same time, Rawlins began a scientific study of colour in paintings that is continued by the National Gallery today. Kenneth Clark, the gallery's director at the time, described Rawlins as one of the most boring men he had ever met, but it is largely due to his efforts that the collection returned to London intact, undamaged and in a much better state than it had left.
By October 1944, with the end of the war in sight, the gallery began to make plans for moving the collection back to London. The first of the pictures returned to the gallery in May 1945, VE week. The converted mine at Manod had proved so successful as a secure hiding place in time of national emergency that the Ministry of Defence retained possession of it until 1983 when, following protracted legal arguments with the then owners, the Williams Brothers regained the right to start working that part of the quarry once more.
Today, there are few reminders of the role Manod played in protecting one of the world's greatest collections of European art - and one wonders if the National Gallery will be feeling its loss at this time. They admit that such a large-scale evacuation plan would now be inappropriate. The threat of military or terrorist attack is so much more complex than it was 50 years ago. While there are disaster plans in place and some suitable storage arranged within London (details of which they are understandably reluctant to make public), it seems that their ability to protect these priceless treasures remains as uncertain as the nature of the threat to the capital itself.
Lucy Lunt is the producer of Moving Pictures: the story of the evacuation of the collection of the National Gallery during the Second World War, to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 31 March at 11am
