On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does

by Garfield, Simon

The three main work areas (front room, store room and courtyard lean-to) suggest that the modern globemaking process is very far from the state-of-the-art industry it was in Victorian times. As well as globes in various stages of completion, there are half-finished support legs, packing materials, sacks of plaster powder, metal rods, old globes from other manufacturers, chisels and other tools. Maps and sketches are pinned to the walls, and wet painted gores swing on pegs. Almost everything is covered in a layer of white dust.

  Being neither geographer, historian nor cartographer, Bellerby learnt about making globes through trial and error. In 2008, two years before he embarked on the Churchill, he had more modest ambitions: the Britannia. This was his first globe, a 50-cm diameter model, which would cost £2,390. He began by buying the copyright to a multi-coloured political map with light blue seas, and he stripped this down on a computer to its coast lines, leaving only its most important rivers and place names. He then paid someone to write a computer program that would transform the rectangle into gores. ‘That was a nightmare,’ he remembers, but it wasn’t just the goring that sounded like a trial. ‘At the beginning I was having real trouble making the balls. Ours were just not round. We had this huge bulge all around the equator. And I had to learn how to manipulate paper to a much higher degree than you can imagine. The whole map was trying to change direction. That was about £60,000 or £70,000 pounds in, and I was, “Oh my God, we can’t even do this basic thing.”’

  He says he tried ‘about two hundred’ methods of goring before he found one that stuck. ‘I’ll tell you one of the secrets,’ he says. ‘Not all paper stretches. The paper that does stretch will only stretch in one plane. I have a sheet of paper where the gores are printed horizontally across the paper, and if they’re printed the other way round, they’ll rip.’ He uses modern inks, believing they will last for two centuries beneath UV varnish and acid-free glue.

  The Britannia was named after the font designed by the typographer James Mosley, who happened to pass Bellerby’s workshop one day and suggested – after much discussion and a visit to the National Maritime Museum – that his lettering would suit the look Bellerby was aiming for. The first edition (globes are ‘published’ in the manner of books) looked rather too modern, as if a schoolroom map had been removed from a wall and made spherical. It did not look like the sort of globe that would appeal to the market Bellerby was targeting – the boardroom, the retirement market. This globe required the patina of the antique, the appearance of an heirloom. The map would still be contemporary – with Belarus and Uzbekistan and a united Germany – but it would be painted in such a way as to look as if there was still all to play for in the Crimea.

  The bigger the globe, the bigger the blank space in the Pacific. Painter Mary Owen touches up the Churchill at Peter Bellerby’s workshop.

  Bellerby then turned his attention back to the Churchill, and the amount of oceanic space he wanted to fill with information. The larger the globe, the vaster the Pacific, so the plan was to fill the sea with all sorts of information, including data on the most popular religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism), the most practised languages (Mandarin, English, Hindu, Spanish, Arabic) and a table of cities by size of population, starting with Mumbai and Shanghai. He also wanted to include an extensive list of world leaders and heads of state, and possibly members of the European Community and UN Security Council. At the beginning of 2011 there were many changes to consider in Egypt, Tunisia and Syria. Beyond this, there was the particular problem of printing all this information on a curved surface, with every second or third letter requiring bespoke spacing.

  ‘I’m doing loads of editing every day,’ Bellerby explained. ‘I need to change Sudan, and I’ll check any border changes. When we bought our map in 2008 there were so many absurd errors, and now I just don’t trust companies selling maps. Dar es Salaam was down as the capital of Tanzania; Tel Aviv as the capital of Israel. We’re talking a hundred and fifty quite major errors. They had Tasmania as a country!’

  r

  I first met Peter Bellerby at Stanfords, the traveller’s shop in Covent Garden. He had brought along a couple of his globes to display, but they looked out of place next to the cheaper, mass-produced models. It was a busy Saturday afternoon, and people were more concerned with buying maps and travel guides. But he did have a conversation with a man called James Bissell- Thomas, who was over in London from the Isle of Wight. Bissell-Thomas had the air of a man in authority, and he was not overly pleased to see Bellerby’s globes. This was because he was a globemaker himself (of the company Greaves & Thomas). He began berating Bellerby for several things, not least the size of the paper caps or ‘calottes’ that served to hide and secure the tips of the twelve gores as they met at the North and South Poles (and inevitably obscured the poles themselves).

  Bellerby was clearly taken aback with the force of the attack, and in his defence he said that he believed his own globes were of superior quality and represented better value for money. This spat, I discovered later, had a bit of previous. Two globemakers in the same spot on English soil was a rarity, and they were both battling for a small and specialised market. It wasn’t like the nineteenth century, when several British manufacturers led the world in the production of globes for offices and schools. Now the schools and offices weren’t interested because they had Google Maps instead, and there were only two proper bespoke British globemakers battling for the shrinking market during a recession, and they were within fist-throwing distance.

  A few weeks after they met at Stanfords, I emailed James Bissell-Thomas suggesting a chat and a visit to his own workshop in the Isle of Wight, and he replied that he was ‘a little wary’ of my association with Bellerby. He claimed that Bellerby had broken open one of his globes and copied his method of construction, a method that previously hadn’t been employed for four hundred years. ‘Despite the above,’ Bissell-Thomas reasoned, ‘I welcome him to the world of globemaking …’

  r

  On one visit to Bellerby’s workshop, he told me that business was good and he would soon be moving to larger premises. He looked around him, ticking off his inventory. ‘This one’s going to Dorset, this one is potentially going to Taiwan. For the fourth Churchill I’m thinking of putting in ocean currents, because the person who ordered it, who is German, has just done a big sailing trip. He wants to have it in his house and talk to his grandchildren as he spins it round and tells them, “This is where we were and this is the route, and these were our tradewinds.”’

  Bellerby then considered the role he enjoyed least – selling. He believed he needed just one piece of good editorial to gain the momentum he was looking for, which would then lead to the elixir of all successful bespoke businesses, the waiting list. The Financial Times’ ‘How To Spend It’ magazine was interested in running a piece on him and had again made Bellerby wonder how big the market for globes really was.

  Bellerby thought he had the answer. It depended on how low you were prepared to go. Not necessarily in price, but in design. Would he feel he was compromising his desire to be the best globemaker in the world if he agreed for them to be hinged at the equator and used as drinks cabinets? Would he be prepared to take advertising in the Pacific region? If he could get into first-class airline departure lounges, would he be happy layering his work with a web of route maps? (The answer to the last dilemma was: definitely yes, if only the right people at the airlines would return his calls.)

  Earlier in the day he had finally commissioned the first Churchill ball at a cost of £2,800. He had considered aluminium, but when he learnt that it might degrade after a century he had plumped for the increased tolerance of fibreglass. It was being made by a man who did most of his moulding for Formula 1, while the base was being made by a man who worked for Aston Martin near Birmingham. Bellerby, who loves cars, had enjoyed these recent visits, but he was most excited about a visit that week to a company called Omnitrack. Omnitrack specialised in highly calibrated glorified castors, and pro
vided the answer to one of his biggest dilemmas – how best to spin the Churchill without ruining the globe or getting a hernia.

  He demonstrated how these castors would work by spinning a small globe he had made for the artist Yinka Shonibare. The globe was placed on three small triangular shaped struts, each with a small plastic ball at its centre. When Bellerby spun it with his fingers he did so with the sort of delight shown by a child snapping the string from a gyroscope. The globe made a gritty sound and it kept on spinning for much longer than expected. The phrase ‘executive toy’ sprung to mind, and Bellerby decided that small globes barely 20cm in diameter would be his next big enterprise.

  His excitement soon manifested itself into tangible success. By June 2011, Bellerby had a waiting list of twenty-five for each of his globe sizes, the first Churchill had begun goring, and so he had moved into a new building, a warehouse in a nearby mews. The place was perhaps ten times as large as his old workshop, and was most recently a supply depot for hardware shops. It was leaky in the rain, but this was the price of success; within four years, Bellerby had gone a long way to realise his dream of building a bespoke globe factory, something that re-established a five-hundred-year tradition.

  Pocket Map

  Churchill’s Map Room

  Churchill’s globe didn’t win the Second World War – but his Map Room made sure he didn’t lose it. The Map Room was at the heart of a fortified subterranean office complex near the back of Downing Street known officially as the Cabinet War Room and then the Churchill War Rooms, and if any single space could lay claim to being the leader’s command post, this was it.

  It was about as low-tech as you could get. Previously an Office of Works warren, where civil servants ordered administrative supplies, the bunker was converted for wartime use at great speed after the Munich crisis of September 1938. By the time it opened less than a year later it had proper bedrooms and bunks in the corridors, a BBC unit, a cabinet room and a map room, all beneath reinforced beams.

  Between thirty and forty people were engaged here in the plotting of the war, with the Map Room issuing daily bulletins to Churchill, his heads of staff and the King. It had four things going for it: the brains of its staff, a bank of coloured phones known as ‘the beauty chorus’, a huge array of maps glued to the wall and laid in drawers, and, in compartmentalised trays, what may have been the most concentrated supply of coloured map pins in the world. These plotted every movement of every British and Allied warship, merchant ship and convoy, and with their specific codes – Red for British, Brown for French, Yellow for Dutch, Yellow with a cross for Swiss, White for German – they made the wall into a literal game of Risk.

  There were other symbols too: cardboard ships and dolphins, the latter pinned to the oceans when a gale was due. ‘When a heavy attack developed I found nothing so heartrending as the constant reduction in the number of ships in a convoy,’ remembered one Map Room officer. ‘One had to take down the cardboard symbol from the chart, erase the scribbled total on it and substitute a lower figure, perhaps only to repeat the process within a short while.’

  The maps were not confined to a single room; the main one in Churchill’s bedroom concentrated on coastal defence, marked with felt-tip symbols demonstrating permanent and temporary look-outs and barricades, areas suitable for tanks and areas susceptible to sea swell. A large curtain covered the whole map from visitors, and when Churchill pulled it aside it resembled a window from which he must have once feared the sight of invasion.

  Commander ‘Tommy’ Thompson, Churchill’s personal assistant, reported that there wasn’t one day in London when Churchill didn’t spend time in the Map Room or its annexe, frequently calling in at 4 or 5 in the morning to receive information ahead of his generals. Churchill keenly demonstrated how little Englanders should pronounce the names of foreign locations on the map. When the Map Room chief, Commander Richard Pim, pronounced Walshavn as Valsharvern, Churchill was quick to correct him: ‘Don’t be so BBC,’ he said. ‘The place is WALLS-HAVEN.’

  Pim was an experienced naval man who hardly left Churchill’s side for the duration of the war, except in May 1940, when he took charge of several motor boats to bring back some 3,500 troops from Dunkirk. He had set up his first map tables in a library at the Admiralty before Churchill became Prime Minister, and afterwards established portable map rooms during Churchill’s travels abroad. Apart from the intelligence displayed upon them, the maps themselves were unremarkable, many dating to the First World War. We are accustomed to hearing Churchill break news of the end of the war to us, but it was Pim who broke the news to him. In reply, the Prime Minister told him, ‘For five years you’ve brought me bad news, sometimes worse than others. Now you’ve redeemed yourself.’

  Churchill and his map chief, Commander Richard Pim.

  By the time Commander Pim set up his map room aboard ship en route to the Tehran Conference at the end of 1943 (a meeting between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin to discuss the opening of a second front in Europe), he estimated that Churchill had already covered 111,000 miles on his wartime travels. In four years he had spent 792 hours at sea and 339 in the air. When the war was over, the British geographer Frank A. de Vine Hunt constructed a unique map showing the journeys undertaken by Churchill between 1941 and 1945 – nineteen of them in all – and it is one of the most compelling and descriptive charts of the war. It works as a map, a story and a puzzle, the viewer being encouraged not only to follow the various numbered arrows detailing Churchill’s journeys, but also to wonder why they were undertaken.

  Today, the war rooms are open to visitors, and the Map Room is arguably the highlight. It retains a solemn air, as if the liberty of the west still hung in the balance, and is very much as Churchill and his commanders left it in August 1945. One man’s rationed sugar cubes remain in their packet, boxes of map pins sit unopened in a cupboard, a ‘Confidential’ map of the Balkans from July 1944 is spread out on the table.

  At the centre of one desk is an atlas that Churchill and his staff are likely to have consulted frequently in the final year, and it is noteworthy for providing an American view of the campaign. Look at the World: The Fortune Atlas for World Strategy was published in New York by Knopf in June 1944. The world it presented in its pages attempted, its editor declared, to show not just ‘the strange places in which Americans are fighting and the distant islands and promontories that the trade routes pass’ but specifically why the Americans are fighting in such strange places – an explanation, for instance, of troops in Greenland, Iceland and Alaska.

  The maps were modelled on the ‘complete azimuthal equidistant projection’ centred on the Poles. The northern hemisphere thus featured North America near its centre, with Asia above it and Africa on its side on the upper right. The design of the double-page spreads highlighted the curvature of the earth, with its chief cartographer Richard Edes Harrison explaining in his introduction that the design reflects the new key instrument of the war, the aeroplane; it made perfect sense to construct a series of aerial war maps that amplified the complexities and vulnerability of troop movements on the ground. Harrison begged indulgence from readers who might find his unconventional projection disturbing, in the same way Mercator did some four hundred years before.

  The commentary on each spread serves as a unique snapshot of the way the US viewed not only its role in the war, but its position on the globe. This was not an impartial atlas (if there ever was such a thing), but a judicious bit of geopolitical propaganda. ‘The Mediterranean world, into which the Americans erupted with startling suddenness on November 7 1942, is the birthplace of Western civilisation,’ the text proclaims at the foot of an arched map of Europe. The Alps ‘may have figured largely in German ideas of a European fortress,’ but an aeroplane ‘makes light of Mediterranean mountains.’

  One of Harrison’s wartime maps, showing the movements of tankers belonging to Standard Oil.

  Harrison hoped that his flat-map/globe combination gave the allies an ad
vantage not available to its enemies. ‘The Germans, in spite of excellence of execution, are notoriously traditional about maps,’ he wrote. ‘If they have “the geographical sense” neither their maps nor their strategy shows it’. No wonder Churchill found the atlas indispensable.

  Chapter 19

  The Biggest Map Dealer, the Biggest Map Thief

  ‘Make me an offer!’ W. Graham Arader III tells me after I had asked him about buying some of his most treasured possessions. ‘Everything’s for sale!’

  This came as little surprise. W. Graham Arader III is the biggest map dealer in the world (the wealthiest, the most famous, the most combative and bombastic, the most feared, the most loathed) and I am in his bedroom, looking at the maps on his walls and getting the impression that in Arader III’s world everything has really been for sale for ever, with the possible exception of his wife and seven children (one of whom is called W. Graham Arader IV). Every inch of Arader III’s six-storey townhouse on the edge of Central Park is covered in maps – above his bed, above the fireplace, over and across his desk and over the doors. I think the walls are papered rather than painted, but it is not always possible to tell. The only places that haven’t got maps on them are those covered with his other passion, rare natural history prints.

  What sort of maps does he have? Every type of map! Or at least every type of map that has value, beauty and rarity, which means a concentration on nineteenth-century America and sixteenth-century Europe, all the great names. This is his Madison Avenue home and his showcase, but he also has four other galleries around the country. Between them they display a classic, framed history of cartography – Ortelius, Mercator, Blaeu, Visscher, Speed, Hondius, Ogilby, Cassini, John Senex, Carlton Osgood, Herman Moll and Lewis Evans – and the stories they portray serve as a neat summation of five centuries of trade and power. Here, etched large, is the Venetian silk route, the growth of the Dutch empire, the reigns of Suleiman the Magnificent and Philip II of Spain, the birth of America, the naval highpoint and subsequent decline of Great Britain.