Cabinet War Rooms and Guards Museum
28th January, London
I visited London with my friend Kevan Smith to visit the IWM Cabinet War Roomas and then the Guards Museum on Saint James‘s. Being members of the IWM entrance was free. They provided headsets to wear with an audio commentary. I think my overriding impression was that the actual Cabinet Ware Rooms looked as if they were set up 20 years ago and hadn’t been touched since. However they had spent a lot of time and money on the Churchill Museum. The audio commentary I found hard to follow and to keep in step with where I was, it was not intuitive. Overall the commentary was disappointing. The Churchill museum was very large and very detailed, but was of less interest to me than the actual underground The War Rooms as used in the second world war, although fascinating, I couldn’t help feel slightly letdown by their presentation.
From the Warrooms it was a few hundred yards walk through Saint James Park to the Guards Museum, which was at the Wellington Barracks. Before entering the museum, we were able to go into the Guards Chapel, where one of the guards bands were playing. We sat here for approximately 10 minutes. I thought this was absolutely fantastic. The short walk across and open square and down some stairs led to the Guards Museum. Again there was an audio commentary, but this time it was tied to the exhibits, and you touched the device against the side of the exhibit to hear the commentary relative to that area of the museum. It was simple, sensible, and effective. The Guards Museum itself was quite small and was organised by period from the founding of the Guards Regiments describing when and where they were created, and the differences in the uniforms typically in the dress uniforms the buttons and the plume positions on the Bearskins. Then they went through their campaigns, historically going through obviously the peninsula and the Waterloo campaigns all the way through to the modern era with the Falklands and most recently Afghanistan.
A small museum and fascinating, and the last exhibition case had the names of the Guardsman who fell as recently as 12 years ago in Afghanistan. Given the state of Afghanistan today it just reinforces what a waste of life this was.
