Snarky Winston Churchill
Back across town we go! Some of the girls weren't super impressed with this site (it's not a pretty cathedral after all), but I loved it. In a basement, across from parliament, is a museum featuring the actual war rooms used by Winston Churchill at the start of the Blitz. We equipped with audio guides that led us through solid concrete hallways, adorned with fire alarms and yellow arrows painted to show the soldiers the exit; some of the rooms had doors with little peepholes, and some were just behind glass. We saw Churchill's bedroom (complete with desk and telephone and bottle of bourbon), his wife's bedroom (pink), his lieutenants' quarters (tiny), a little bathroom permanently occupied (the other side was a telephone to the United States government, no toilet at all), the stenographers' maproom complete with clicking and flashing and urgent reports, kitchen, mess hall, music from the forties, Churchill's voice from the news reports, and room-sized maps featuring the infiltration of those dirty Jerries across Europe.
I loved learning about Churchill, how he was the opposite of diplomatic, that he used these war rooms to be in the "middle of the action" (Parliament would get bombed first, for sure), and that his go-get-em attitude gave his men a lot of optimism where optimism was due. I certainly wish our goverment were like that; President Obama's diplomacy and inability to speak without a teleprompter makes him look utterly weak. At least guys like Churchill and Reagan said what they thought, and I don't remember them ever losing to some foreign power.
My favorite part was the gift shop. Everything was themed forties, and some were handbooks on how to get along with girls/boys, advice on bomb shelters, emergency preparedness, dresses, aprons, and even pro-British propaganda against the Nazis! So delightful. Will they ever have museums featuring the War on Terror? Hopefully it won't be on home soil, that's all I have to say.
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