Museums & Attractions

Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms
Until Aug 31 2010
Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms, King Charles Street, London, SW1A 2AQ
© Imperial War Museum
By Lisa Mullen

Posted: Mon Jan 14
The romper suit stands in a glass display case, lit moodily from above. It’s a deep wine red, it’s made of velvet, and it has a brass zip up the front. The legs taper towards the ankles while the shoulders are broad and look slightly padded. Two vaguely military breast pockets are the only adornment, and it’s easy to imagine Churchill’s Savile Row tailor – for this is Winston Churchill’s bespoke romper suit we are looking at – sneaking those pockets into the design in a desperate attempt to add a bit of authority to an outfit which otherwise comes halfway between a clown suit and a babygro. ‘How about some nice epaulettes, sir?’ we can imagine him saying wistfully, as he contemplates the possible demise of his career. And Churchill harrumphing that epaulettes are the kind of thing up with which he will not put.

The Churchill Museum is full of wonderfully suggestive exhibits like this, and as well as glorying in the oratory and leadership that have made the man an icon, the displays show great fondness for the eccentricity and weaknesses that made the icon a man.

‘The romper suit is great isn’t it?’ says Sarah Clarke, the museum’s exhibitions manager. ‘Who would wear that? But then, Churchill once met Roosevelt and Eisenhower wearing his dragon dressing gown and his pyjamas. Only he could get away that, and that’s why everyone loves him.’

Of course, not everyone loved him during his lifetime – famously, the British people got shot of him as soon as the war was over. But Clarke believes that it’s Churchill’s failures – such as the disastrous Gallipoli landing which he masterminded during WWI – that make people warm to him. ‘The fact that he was sacked from the Admiralty gives him a human aspect,’ she says. ‘And then there’s his drinking – that always comes up.’

The copious personal touches are counterpointed by award-winning high-tech interactivity. The centrepiece is the 15-metre ‘interactive lifeline’ – a long, low horizontal screen which operates as a digital filing cabinet containing archived information for every year, month, week and sometimes day of Churchill’s life. ‘There’s a massive archive of material, which Churchill himself started during his lifetime,’ says Clarke. ‘He basically kept everything, down to the last receipt. I was fortunate enough to go through the Churchill papers and it took me two and a half years.’

With so much material, there is scope for an endless array of temporary exhibitions; a new one, ‘Churchill and the Press’, opens on February 8. Although radio was the medium most associated with his wartime presence, Churchill had a lifelong relationship with newsprint, starting with his birth, which made front-page news in the Times, and continuing throughout his youth as he supplemented his humble army income with a cheeky sideline in war reporting. ‘Money was always his motivating factor because he was notoriously in and out of debt all his life,’ says Clarke. ‘He served as a war correspondent in India, in Sudan and in the Boer War. He was captured and held in a prisoner-of-war camp which he escaped from, so that made a great story. He was then taken on by the Morning Post as its correspondent, specifically because he was already a celebrity. The contract he negotiated was one of the biggest there ever was, and it served to raise the salaries of other journalists at the time.’

Later, Churchill used his writing skills in a series of articles warning the world of the ‘gathering storm’ in 1930s Europe, and then, of course, his deep understanding of what made a story morphed into his unerring instinct for a radio-friendly soundbite. And despite the fact that he seemed rather stilted on television, he understood perfectly that a strong visual image – the cigar, the V-sign – was an essential part of politics in the era of mass media.

‘It’s amazing when you think that Churchill was born in the Victorian age and experienced the last ever cavalry charge, but he saw so many changes,’ says Clarke. ‘He was all for technology – he loved new inventions, and that was what led us to use lots of technology in the museum.’

So does she feel the ghost of Churchill sometimes stalking the place, pressing all the buttons and marvelling at the lifeline?

‘Oh, I wish! The ghost of Churchill would be great! That would get the tourists in…’