Churchill War Rooms and Winnie-the-Pooh

Remember the lovely spring flowers I showed you at Tel Bet Shemesh? Well, shortly after my visit there I made a quick trip to London. There were most definitely no spring flowers blooming whilst we were there. It was freezing!

Our trips to London are usually jam-packed but our plans went awry because of the weather and it actually ended up to our benefit. We had a whole day in London with no car and thus no errands to run or people to visit. A museum day was called for!

Mister Handmade in Israel and I saw the Churchill biopic Darkest Hour, which covers Sir Winston Churchill’s uncertain first few weeks in the role of prime minister of a country poised on the brink of the second world war. We were inspired to visit the Churchill War Rooms, beneath the streets of Westminster, to see where Churchill and his inner circle directed the war. It was the perfect solution for a very cold March day, and the 90 minutes recommended for our visit soon turned into 3.5 hours! The place was fascinating.

The Churchill War Rooms is one of the five branches of the Imperial War Museum. The museum comprises the Cabinet War Rooms, a historic underground complex that housed a British government command centre throughout the Second World War, and the Churchill Museum, a biographical museum exploring the life of Winston Churchill.

Construction of the Cabinet War Rooms, located beneath the Treasury building in the Whitehall area of Westminster, began in 1938. They became operational in August 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war in Europe. They remained in operation throughout the Second World War, before being abandoned in August 1945 after the surrender of Japan.

After the war, the historic value of the Cabinet War Rooms was recognised. Their preservation became the responsibility of the Ministry of Works and later the Department for the Environment, during which time very limited numbers of the public were able to visit by appointment. In the early 1980s the Imperial War Museum was asked to take over the administration of the site, and the Cabinet War Rooms were opened to the public in April 1984. The museum was reopened in 2005 following a major redevelopment as the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms, but in 2010 this title was shortened to the Churchill War Rooms.

During our visit we viewed the cabinet room where the wartime cabinet was held, and the map room where pins were used to mark the progress of fleets across the ocean. Some sections of the map were so badly damaged by pinpricks that they had to be covered over with new material. These patch jobs can clearly be seen to this day. We saw the suite of rooms used as accommodation by Churchill, his wife and close associates, and Churchill's own bedroom, which he only slept in for three nights altogether, though he did use this room for many afternoon siestas and was famous for holding meetings there in various states of undress! A 'lavatory' with an engaged sign actually contained a secure transatlantic line for the American and British heads of state to communicate.
All the rooms are presented and furnished as they were. We got a real feeling of how busy it must have been, especially when you consider that hundreds of people lived here at any given time throughout the war. In the Churchill Museum I learnt so much about the successes, failures, trials and triumphs that made the man. The audio guides, which were included in the ticket price, allowed us to walk through at our own pace and truly enhanced our visit. Mister Handmade in Israel is not really a museum person, but he enjoyed the place as much as I did. Maybe we'll go back with the boys one day.

Our next stop was at the Victoria and Albert Museum, or the V&A as it is affectionately known. Whilst I didn't have time to explore the whole museum, or even just part of it, I did have just about enough time to go to the wonderful exhibition Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic. Now Mister Handmade in Israel did opt out of this one, but that was fine. It gave me more time to wander through the delightful exhibition at my own speed, all the time with a big smile on my face.

The exhibition celebrates the iconic little bear and his chums, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore and the rest, as well as of course, Christopher Robin. It features close to a century’s worth of Winnie-the-Pooh merchandise, including toys, books, clothes, and a hand-painted Christopher Robin and Friends china tea set presented to the baby Princess Elizabeth in 1926. The walls of the exhibition are lined with scores of ink and pencil drawings by E.H. Shepard, the English artist and book illustrator who worked with A.A. Milne on the books. The drawings show the care Shepard took, producing vivid sketches of real trees in Ashdown Forest, where the Milne had bought an old farmhouse, to get the setting absolutely right. The originals are from the V&A collection and are so fragile they were last displayed almost 40 years ago.

I absolutely loved the exhibition. It was good to see so many of the original drawings which brought back memories of all the Pooh stories, and it was lovely to hear people of all ages chatting, laughing and remembering their favourite books. A replica of Posingford bridge, the bridge on which Milne and his son first played the game Poohsticks, stands in the centre of the exhibition, while trees from Ashdown Forest and Winnie-the-Pooh quotes adorn the walls. Small visitors can climb a narrow flight of steps leading to a slide, and enter Owl’s tiny door with the brass bell labelled "RNIG ALSO".
The exhibition was designed by RFK Architects and the theatre designer Tom Piper. Piper created the installation of thousands of ceramic poppies made by the artist Paul Cummins, which filled the moat of the Tower of London to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war. It left me with a warm fuzzy glow of nostalgia. Even with all the snow on the ground outside.

* This post has been shared on No Rules Weekend Blog Party, Welcome To The Weekend, Seasons, Monday Morning Blog Club, The Good. The Random. The Fun. and Wordless Wednesday (on Tuesday).