Memorabilia from Cabinet War Rooms to go on display on 70th anniversary of opening of Churchill's nerve centre
In September 1940, Patrick Duff barely survived an ordeal more terrifying than any of his experiences over a wartime year as permanent secretary at the Office of Works.
His shaken letter, hours after a blistering encounter with the prime minister, will go on display for the first time next month in a new exhibition at the Cabinet War Rooms. The warren of underground rooms and offices in London, where Winston Churchill and up to 500 other people worked for six years, was the cause of all the trouble.
On 13 September, Duff had to meet Churchill, who detested being forced underground - his bedroom is displayed in the museum, but he refused to sleep there. He liked to watch night time air raids from the roof of the Treasury and he had just discovered that his subterranean lair was not even bomb proof. In any direct hit, it would collapse into a tomb of Portland stone and concrete.
"I thought it would be well that I should go myself," Duff wrote to cabinet secretary Sir Edward Bridges. "I am glad I did: because on going through the plans of the War Room and explaining the stresses which they could stand up to and what they could not stand up to, the PM said that I had 'sold him a pup' in letting him think that this place is a real bomb-proof shelter whereas it is nothing of the kind. I replied with some emphasis that I had been at pain, literally for years past, when this place was originally taken for a War Room and on every occasion since, when fresh essential personnel were put down there and required further accommodation, to represent that the place is not, and cannot be made, bomb-proof in any sense ... I confess that I was a bit indignant when I was accused of representing the thing as in sense bomb-proof: and I am moved to make this scream of injured innocence to you."
Within weeks bombs fell yards away, damaging the Treasury and the kitchen at 10 Downing Street. The War Rooms were secretly strengthened with 1,000 tons of concrete and a lattice of steel - but if hit by the much larger flying bombs, engineers calculate the whole lot would still have come down, killing hundreds.
The letter will be in an exhibition on life underground for the government and the secretarial and support staff who shared the hot, stuffy, smelly lair. It opens on 27 August, the 70th anniversary of the day the rooms became operational a week before Britain declared war...
Read entire article at Observer (UK)
His shaken letter, hours after a blistering encounter with the prime minister, will go on display for the first time next month in a new exhibition at the Cabinet War Rooms. The warren of underground rooms and offices in London, where Winston Churchill and up to 500 other people worked for six years, was the cause of all the trouble.
On 13 September, Duff had to meet Churchill, who detested being forced underground - his bedroom is displayed in the museum, but he refused to sleep there. He liked to watch night time air raids from the roof of the Treasury and he had just discovered that his subterranean lair was not even bomb proof. In any direct hit, it would collapse into a tomb of Portland stone and concrete.
"I thought it would be well that I should go myself," Duff wrote to cabinet secretary Sir Edward Bridges. "I am glad I did: because on going through the plans of the War Room and explaining the stresses which they could stand up to and what they could not stand up to, the PM said that I had 'sold him a pup' in letting him think that this place is a real bomb-proof shelter whereas it is nothing of the kind. I replied with some emphasis that I had been at pain, literally for years past, when this place was originally taken for a War Room and on every occasion since, when fresh essential personnel were put down there and required further accommodation, to represent that the place is not, and cannot be made, bomb-proof in any sense ... I confess that I was a bit indignant when I was accused of representing the thing as in sense bomb-proof: and I am moved to make this scream of injured innocence to you."
Within weeks bombs fell yards away, damaging the Treasury and the kitchen at 10 Downing Street. The War Rooms were secretly strengthened with 1,000 tons of concrete and a lattice of steel - but if hit by the much larger flying bombs, engineers calculate the whole lot would still have come down, killing hundreds.
The letter will be in an exhibition on life underground for the government and the secretarial and support staff who shared the hot, stuffy, smelly lair. It opens on 27 August, the 70th anniversary of the day the rooms became operational a week before Britain declared war...