Churchill’s Hidden Headquarters

LONDON — They look innocent--silent concrete rooms of iron cots and yellowing paper in a maze of tunnels sprawling beneath the streets of Whitehall. The maps, gaudy with colored pins, and lanterns waiting to flicker into light, seem like school playthings.

This is a museum called the Cabinet War Rooms, the secret headquarters of Sir Winston Churchill and his War Cabinet during World War II.

As you enter, you might hear the ghosts of another time: Churchill, padding about in his pale-blue jump suit, reciting Kipling with subtle flamboyance.

Or it might be the cry of a bagpipe played by a solitary, kilted guard; the clink of silverware and ringing of glasses in an austere mess; the brittle popping of distant anti-aircraft guns as Lord Mountbatten, perhaps, slips into St. James’s Park to watch swift, free-wheeling clouds lighten from fires blazing along both sides of the Thames.

Who could have guessed? The offices opened in 1938, 10 feet below government offices on Great George Street.

Sworn-to-secrecy workers fortified a warren of ancient tunnels only steps from Henry VIII’s wine cellar. Working at night with diverted supplies, a handful of men made the shadowy space close to bombproof.

Two years later, Churchill ducked into the dusty basement shelter to announce: “This is the room from which I’ll direct the war.” And as summer deepened into fall and the Battle of Britain burst overhead, he shared the “quiet dungeon galleries” with hundreds of weary staff members.

From these rooms, Churchill masterminded more than 100 late-night Cabinet meetings, called former President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the world’s first hotline, dozed in his suite on a silk-covered bed. Here, too, with great and arrogant style, he spoke on BBC broadcasts to his nation.

Sealed after the war, the six acres of rooms were abandoned until 1981, when 20 of the most important rooms were dusted off by the Imperial War Museum and opened to the public.

Just off the entrance lies the Cabinet Room, restored as it was on an autumn day in 1940. The cloth-wrapped table, almost filling the space, is laid for 25, pencils idle across faded blue blotters.

Churchill’s wooden chair anchors its usual spot, back-row center, near a sand-filled fire bucket for his cigar butts.

Over the door, red and green light bulbs await an air raid signal, and the ceiling, striped with steel girders, looks a bit eerie in the deep shadows.

Hidden down a hall, a soundproof cubicle housed the hotline to Roosevelt in the White House. Developed by Bell Telephone Labs in 1943, the huge device crossed the Atlantic Ocean aboard the Queen Elizabeth and was connected to this room by underground cable from the basement of Selfridge’s Oxford Street store.

Whatever the two men talked about, enough laughter and swapped stories echoed in this room for Roosevelt to declare: “It is fun to be in the same decade with you.”

Churchill pinched the “vacant” or “engaged” door lock from a public toilet on a whim, they say. “Part joke, part luck,” agrees the museum’s curator, Jon Wenzel, “but it provided good camouflage for this most secret room.”

Turn a corner and Churchill’s bedroom-office comes into view. Framed by heavy draperies ready to pull discreetly over wall maps of Britain’s defense installations, it comes close to coziness.

A bit of carpet warms the floor. There are easy chairs and, on a desk, Romeo y Julietas cigars nestled in a humidor. A reliable supply of French champagne waited (full bottles of 1928 and 1934 Pol Roger are displayed.)

Churchill, who found the rooms claustrophobic, fancied a bed upstairs or in the converted Down Street tube station a few steps off Piccadilly.

For those who had to stay, batteries of ultraviolet lamps offered the rays of sunlight. Notice boards displaying weather information helped.

So did that great English virtue of plain stubbornness. And, as Wenzel says, “Three years was the maximum for the staff during the war. Working here takes its toll even now. When we get ill, it hangs on. It’s from being underground.”

A small crowd gathers around the Map Room, a favorite of most of the 240,000 visitors who flock to these rooms each year. All the war information poured into this nerve center, which was continually manned by a staff of officers from the army, navy, and Royal Air Force.

Old soldiers up from retirement in Chelsea study the wall of maps, their hands clamped behind them. Hundreds of colored pins and threads plot Russian and German front lines, naval convoy routes, the Far East.

Most of the maps have been pinpricked so often that they threaten to crack into a jigsaw.

Nearby, there’s a recorded shriek of a siren, the booming and trembling of an air raid barrage.

As the sound dies, Churchill’s flawless prose begins. “He has kindled a fire in British hearts,” he growls. You stop and listen.

Near the center of the room, a fragile, gray-haired couple, heads cocked and lost in memories, watch the Battle of Britain all over again.

As you leave the war rooms, take a small detour toward the Thames.

It seems natural to find Churchill’s familiar, square-jawed profile looming among statues of former President Abraham Lincoln and former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in the wide-open spaces of Parliament Square.

Staring in perpetuity at the House of Commons he loved so well, Churchill’s sculptured posturing draws out photographers and painters.

Just beyond, follow the flow of the crowd into Westminster Abbey. Skirting the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, you’ll find a stone placed on the 25th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, a few months after Churchill’s death.

Read the inscription. Chiseled deep: “Remember Winston Churchill.”

The Cabinet War Rooms are open daily 10 a.m. to 5:15 p.m., and are easily reached by taking the tube to Westminster Station. Admission is about $5.

An easy-to-follow booklet (or cassette tape) is available at the entrance. It fills you in on details. There is also a well-stocked gift shop with a good collection of books and photos on the subject.