To get the big picture sometimes you have to look at the small details. There is a chair in a dusty room several feet below Whitehall that holds a unique clue to what it’s like to be prime minister. But it is not any chair, nor any room. It belongs to Winston Churchill and sits at the heart of the Cabinet War Room, from where he masterminded the battle to save Britain during the Second World War.
The wooden chair has a curved back and arms, with a green leather seat. On the right armrest the varnish has been scratched and chipped away. It was in this seat that Churchill would rat-a-tat his gold signet ring, digging it in as he lost patience with the pace of the war effort, and just occasionally his service chiefs who sat across the table from him. On the left arm rest, thinner lines have been grooved by the prime minister’s fingernails.
On the desk, his signature cigars in an overflowing ashtray, later sold by marines as souvenirs. A small rectangular wired box hangs from the ceiling, used to summon refreshments of coffee, or perhaps something stronger.
Each small detail gives an insight into what went on here, the people who worked, lived and often slept below street level, hoping it would keep them and their secret work safe from the bombs above. It very nearly didn’t. In 1940 Churchill complained that officials had “sold him a pup” in letting him think that it was a real bomb-proof shelter, rather than the normal basement of a government building a short walk from Downing Street.
For a special edition of my show on BBC Radio 5 Live, I was lucky enough to be given behind-the-scenes access to the Churchill War Rooms to mark the 80th anniversary of their closure on 16 August, 1945, the day after Japan surrendered. No war meant no use for war rooms.
The Map Room was the nerve-centre of the operation. A bank of different coloured phones lit up as they connected to other parts of the government, and the world. They didn’t ring though, because Churchill didn’t like the noise. I was joined by Alan West, the former head of the Royal Navy, who said he had a “tingle” down his spine as he stepped behind the glass and into the room where the movement and loss of troops, warships and aircrafts were painstakingly tracked.
“It looks old-fashioned,” West said, gesturing at the yellowing maps plastered across the walls. “But actually it’s not that many years ago that we stopped having huge maps with pins stuck all over them. Digitisation has stopped that, but in terms of being able to take something in, often a map with flags on is easier for you to understand, when it’s on a grand scale, on a global scale, than a digital screen.”
It was also from here in this network of gloomy corridors that Churchill delivered some of his famous speeches, sitting in his carpeted bedroom, while in a nearby tiny cupboard, Room 60, a BBC technician ensured it was broadcast to the nation. The relationship between the prime minister of the day and the corporation is never easy. David Dimbleby, the presenter whose father Richard was the BBC’s first war correspondent, told me: “The story of radio in the war is one of bureaucratic slowness to discover the power of radio and being constantly harassed by No 10 Downing Street – which, incidentally, is nothing new, is it? Because it’s what we all put up with all the time. No 10 is always complaining.”
It might have been all men in the War Cabinet – Churchill, Attlee, and assorted ministers and military chiefs – but women kept the place running, rattling out memos and speeches on silent typewriters, so as not to disturb the PM. In the Joe Wright film Darkest Hour, Gary Oldman won an Oscar for his portrayal of Churchill. His secretary Elizabeth Nel (née Layton) was played by Lily James, who told us how Wright wanted her to learn secretarial skills for real: “I’m touch-typing in so many of the scenes. I really learned to write on a typewriter. I had about six weeks of classes. So, when [Oldman] was narrating those historic speeches, I was really typing them out. It’s wonderful as an actor when it doesn’t feel like any acting is required.”
After the war the staff closed up and left for other work rebuilding the country. It was years before knowledge of the secret rooms became public. Then in 1981 Michael Heseltine, the heritage secretary, wrote to Margaret Thatcher asking for the funds and permission to preserve the Cabinet War Rooms and open them to visitors. Today he describes it as a “no-brainer”, adding: “If you live, as I do, in an historic house, what happens if you don’t look after them? They deteriorate. Exactly the same would have happened in the Cabinet War Rooms. I don’t know exactly what cracks would appear, what mould would develop. But fortunately, we got there in time.”
As the curators and historians swooped in to preserve this extraordinary place for future generations, they found an envelope in the desk of wing commander John Heagerty, one of the Map Room officers. Inside were three sugar cubes, with one partly scraped away as Heagerty shaved off his own rations. It is just another example of the small human touches that give life to these rooms and the people who worked here.
It’s poignant not just because of the momentous decisions that were made here. But today in a world of emergency Zoom cabinet meetings and emails deleted to save water, it’s unlikely we will ever see the likes of the people, or this place, again.
Listen to Matt Chorley weekdays from 2pm on BBC Radio 5 Live
[See also: The long shadow of Adolf Hitler]
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