On London Museums

Our students are discovering that London is, if nothing else, a city of museums. They have almost as many museums here as Starbucks or Pret A Mangers. In fact, I walked up Museum Street this afternoon. It was one of the few streets that didn’t seem to have a museum on it.

They are also discovering that not all museums are equal. Take the Clink Prison Museum at London Bridge, the city’s “oldest jailhouse.” Its brochure promises “Real History,” but the guy who handed it to me was dressed up as a pirate, so that raised suspicions on that score. It does have a “mystery coffin,” however. And for the kids, they promise rodent hunts. So there’s that.

At least one of the genuinely bona fide sites steeped in the city’s history has been a real disappointment. Since just our last visit, St. Paul’s Cathedral no longer accepts the London Pass, which otherwise is accepted virtually everywhere worthwhile. One always suspects money, or lack thereof, is behind the switch. The Cathedral now charges nearly $30 for a visit. This puts St. Paul’s in the same category, I’m obliged to point out, as the Clink Prison. Actually, the Clink only charges about $12. And they do rodent hunts.

Those students interested in how museums function have gotten a case lesson in the varied consequences of funding through visits to WWII sites. Our schedule began at the Churchill War Museum, then took us Bletchley Park, and then to the HMS Belfast. The Imperial War Museums administers both the Churchill and the Belfast; Bletchley is under the control of an independent trust.

And the difference shows.

With origins in the Great War era and the official imprimatur of a Parliamentary decree, the Imperial War Museums presently is a consortium of five sites under a single administrative umbrella. It administers the Churchill, the Belfast, sites in Manchester and Cambridgeshire, and its jewel, the world-class Imperial War Museum. Though the IWM courts private support, it is publicly-supported, and a position on the Board of Trustees comes through an appointment by the Prime Minister. It bears much the same relationship to the British state as the Smithsonian does to the American government.

With their more or less public status assured, the museums of the IWM are state-of-the-art. The Churchill War Rooms contain, among many other things, the most amazing interactive time-line I’ve seen anywhere. When the students asked me how long they should expect to spend touring the Belfast, I said: “Well it’s just a ship, but once you get inside, it’ll take about at least two hours to see most of it.” They were inside a full two hours, because the entire ship—a WWII cruiser-class—is a floating museum informative in a hundred ways.

Bletchley Park, by comparison, is the responsibility of the Bletchley Trust, which was organized only in 1992 and is entirely dependent on private support. Perhaps its very nature put it at a disadvantage. For those who don’t watch The Women of Bletchley on WOSU, Bletchley Park is where British intelligence established the vital Ultra cryptography effort that successfully broke both the Enigma and Lorenz Codes that the Nazis used for naval and strategic communications. What happened there was the greatest intelligence feat of WWII. And yet the site’s secret purpose and the rather informal way the property had been arranged for wartime use probably left it languishing for almost thirty years, when, finally, a group of interested people rescued it from developers.

I first visited Bletchley a few years ago on a scouting trip to see if it would be worth putting on the students’ schedule. I was dubious, frankly. The museum was displaying some of the important artefacts associated with Ultra: a German Enigma machine (which looks like a typewriter tricked out with extra keys and dials); one of the “Bombes” (the huge proto-computers that did the calculations necessary to deciphering the daily German codes); and a few other items. The second floor of the museum looked like someone’s attic. Period ephemera was scattered about, presumably intended to demonstrate how wartime civilians lived. An elderly fellow, aptly representative of British quirkiness, had taken over a large hall adjacent to the main building and filled it with a lifetime’s collection of everything Churchill—Churchill cigars; Churchill shot glasses; Churchill plates; Churchill magazine covers; Churchill derbies. The effect was to give the place the feel of a flea market. Misgivings aside, we put it on the schedule because of its intrinsic importance and because the train ride into the Midlands gives students a bit more of England.

I’m happy to report that the Bletchley people have done remarkable work in just a few years to turn the site into a teaching museum befitting its historical value. They have made the most of the representative machines and give demonstrations of how the Bombe worked. They now have the world’s largest collection of German Enigma machines. They’ve arranged a tribute to Alan Turing, the mathematical genius behind the proto-computers, who died—probably by suicide—after being prosecuted for homosexuality in the early 1950s. They also have an interesting exhibit on the Ultra spies, a small group of shady characters who served as double agents and who filtered back to the Germans misinformation concocted on the knowledge gained through the cypher program. And they’ve cleaned out the attic, including the world’s largest collection of Churchill junk.

All in all, the improvements made at Bletchley Park have been impressive, particularly considering that they must still be struggling to raise funds. Wise leadership, professional vision, and a committed group of volunteers—human capital, in each case—are making do. Now it’s a must-see, rather than an add-on to our student tour. ______________________________________________________________________________

One of the students, Courtney Gehres, visiting London for the first time, made the shrewd observation that here the very old and the very new seem to jostle for the same space.

Here is a good example of what she meant:

On the left is Southwark Cathedral, which is over 1000 years old.  Towering over now is The Shard, Europe’s tallest skyscraper, which opened officially only this year.

London, Old and New

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