London
I arrived in London on May 8th. We did a quick walk around seeing Buckingham Palace. On May 9th we began our World War II journey with Churchill’s War Rooms. Within the museum, there were multiple weird facts about the glorified man that is Churchill. He mainly would talk and answer phones from the bathrooms and he had a reddish-purple velvet boiler onesie. Even with these oddities, Churchill was very important to the People’s War. He became a symbol of strength and he frequently went out of his bomb shelter to show the people he was not afraid.
May 10th was the free day. I utilized it by going to the British museum, cartoon museum, HMS Belfast, London Tower exhibition, and All Hallows exhibition. I want to focus on the HMS Belfast because I did not know much about the ship until taking my audio tour. HMS Belfast was one of the first warships to open fire on D-Day, June 6, 1944. The Belfast fought for five weeks until July 8th, helping the allied troops to go inland against the Germans. A funny little fact was that the ship was first diverted to Portland Naval base to pick up Winston Churchill who wanted to see the bombardment first hand. King George VI and the ship’s commander convinced him not to because the stress it would put upon the sailors and the mission.
May 11th we went to Bletchley Park which was one of the main reasons why I wanted to go on this study abroad. Alan Turing is a very famous gay man who broke the enigma code with his machine. Anti-Semitism, homophobia, and xenophobia plagued the western world during and after the war. Since Turing’s achievements were hidden from the police and the general public until the 1980s, Turing was imprisoned for being a gay man. His sentence was female hormone therapy which led to him killing himself in 1954 at the age of 41. Turing’s life shows how devoted the people were to keeping war secrets and how everyone became normal after the war. Turing could have tried to tell them that he was the man who solved the enigma or contacted higher ups but he didn’t. It was heartbreaking he gave so much to Britain during the war just to be condemned later. On a happier note, I tried Indian curry for the first time because I heard London had really good Indian and Bangladeshi food. I got chicken tikka masala and it was tasty.
May 12th we went to the Imperial War Museum which was created after World Way I. The museum was hit twice by bombs in World War II. I was drawn more to the headwear sections of the exhibits. In the World War I section, I learned that the first metal helmets were made by John Brodie but they flawed because the shine gave away their positions. They changed the process by adding sand or sawdust before the paint creating a non-reflective surface. This decreased head injuries by 75 percent. Helmets in World War II were used both in battle and at home. The British men wore the metal hats as fireman, policeman, doctor, etc. The women were not left out. They bought scarves to protect their hair from machines working during the war and a lot of the scarves were printed with propaganda on them. After the museum we were free to do anything. I got fish and chips from a place called Fishcotheque. Then I went to the Fan Museum, Cutty Sark Museum, and concluded with a Jack the Ripper Tour. I really loved the Jack the Ripper tour because our tour guide had a lot of personality, was a BBC historian on the matter, and also worked at the Scotland yard museum. Unlike the other tour guides we passed, she brought photos of the different women murdered and some were ones she had just found or came from the historian committee. We saw a photo of a victim when she was alive (the only one ever found), learned that the doctor that Hollywood says did it was over 70 years old and not in England during the time, and that the name Jack the Ripper comes from a letter a news journalist sent to the police pretending to be the killer. I found it very informational and interesting.
Next: France