The Secret Museum

by Molly Oldfield

  Behind the scenes, Gillian is starting to make paper files from the archives available digitally to the public. As she sorts through cupboards and drawers full of intelligence, who knows what ‘top secret’ information she will find and bring out into the light.

  [Hut 3 at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, 1942]

  The codebreaking huts worked In pairs. The decoded messages from Hut 6 were passed to Hut 3 for translation, analysis and dispatch. There was a connecting chute between the two so that information could be sent quickly between them.

  [An Enigma machine]

  Enigma was used by the Germans to encode their messages. The German authorities had no idea that British codebreakers stationed at Bletchley Park understood how it worked and, with the help of Polish mathematicians, they cracked the Enigma code.

  [Eddie Chapman]

  False identification papers issued to Eddie Chapman aka Agent Zigzag.

  [Christmas telegram]

  Fortunately, this telegram convinced the Germans and Eddie Chapman carried on his double-agent work for Britain, helping the war effort in his own way.

  [Ice skating on the lake, 1940]

  Some of the most touching things I saw in the archives were photographs, like this one, of codebreakers taking time off, skating on the lake at Bletchley Park.

  SOMETIMES I DO, EVER SINCE I found out he was the man who introduced post boxes to England. Before that, if you wanted to post a letter, you had to queue up at the post office and ask them to do it for you.

  Trollope wrote 47 novels, plus umpteen short stories and travel books. He always wrote in the morning, before setting off to work as a surveyor for the Post Office. He devoted 33 years to the Post Office, and said his greatest desire was that ‘the public in little villages should be enabled to buy postage-stamps; that they should have their letters delivered free and at an early hour; that pillar letterboxes should be put up for them’, and that letter carriers should earn their pay and that their working conditions should be improved.

  His dream for pillar letterboxes for all came true. He suggested to his boss, George Creswell, Surveyor of the Western District, in November 1851 that he try out the idea in St Helier, Jersey. He thought that was a good place to trial them, as you could buy stamps all over town, and ‘all that is wanted is a safe receptacle for letters.’

  He suggested putting a box on an iron post, or sticking it on to a wall, but in the end a freestanding letterbox was chosen. It was sage green so that it would blend into the landscape. Four prototypes were tried out in Jersey, three more in St Peter Port, Guernsey (one of which is in Union Street), and another in Sherborne, Dorset, which is still in use.

  One of these green boxes lives in the collection of the British Postal Museum and Archive (BPMA). They store it with their larger objects in a big warehouse in Debden, Essex. It is one of 50 differently designed post boxes they own – from this early, hexagonal one from Guernsey, to modern designs and prototypes. They are stored in two lines, facing each other. The green box is first in the line. Once everyone had got used to these funny green boxes, got the hang of posting letters and realized they would be delivered safely, letterboxes were rolled out across Great Britain. In 1855, the first ones were put up in London. There were five green rectangular boxes: in Fleet Street, the Strand, Pall Mall, Piccadilly and Kensington.

  Not everyone trusted them. Trollope mentioned this in his 1869 novel, He Knew He Was Right. One character, Jemima Stanbury, carried her letters to Exeter’s post office. She didn’t believe in ‘the iron pillar boxes which had been erected for the receipt of letters… she had not the faintest belief that any letter put into them would ever reach its destination … Positive orders had been given that no letter from her house should ever be put into the iron post.’

  He reassured readers that the letterboxes worked well in another novel of his, The Eustace Diamonds. The protagonist, Frank Greystock, proposes to Lucy Morris by post, putting his proposal in a letterbox in Fleet Street. Trollope wrote that it stayed there on Sunday, but appeared at the breakfast table on Monday, ‘thanks to the accuracy in the performance of its duties for which [the Post Office] is conspicuous among all offices’.

  I liked Trollope’s green letterbox: it was a little piece of history. As I walked through the corridor of boxes, I saw lots of different designs. At first it was a bit of a free-for-all: every local Post Office surveyor could design a letterbox they fancied. The Scottish Suttie letterbox was my favourite; it has a gold and red crown on top. A lot of them were exported for use in India as soon as they were made. In 1883, the round box became the norm, although since then there have been lots of variations in design as the Post Office adapted the boxes to the wants and needs of the public. The only colours that seem to have been used were chocolate brown, sage green, bright sky blue for airmail letters and, of course, pillarbox red. After 1874, all were produced in that familiar colour.

  There are some letterboxes that were tried out and rejected. I saw one of these experiments in the store: it is called K4 and is a huge, red telephone box, with a letterbox and a stamp-vending machine on the sides. The idea of K4 was that it would be a complete post office in one box. However, people using the phone found that if someone came to buy stamps, the clinking of the coins meant that they couldn’t hear the conversation they were having, so only 50 were made.

  They have shelves full of post boxes that were attached to lampposts and pigeon holes used to sort letters on board a moving train, known as Travelling Post Offices (TPOs). They also have a control panel and a driverless train (like a big green bin on wheels), remnants of the Post Office Underground Railway, latterly known as Mail Rail, which ran through a system of tunnels beneath the tube network in London. The driverless trains carried letters between the London sorting offices and railway stations.

  I’d first heard about the underground mail train when I went to the London Transport Museum Depot at Acton and saw a model of Oxford Street tube station’s ticket hall. Underneath the tube tunnels were some smaller tunnels, used by the Royal Mail until 2003. Funny to think that for so many years this network of trains carried letters and postcards I worte to friends, across London, even though I had no idea the system existed at the time.

  Over 160 years after Trollope first wrote a letter suggesting that post boxes be used in Britain, they are still in use. I wonder what he would have made of the Royal Mail’s Olympics initiative: a gold post box in the home town of every gold medallist who represented Great Britain in the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. I suspect he would have been very pleased.

  [An early British pillar box]

  Still standing, on Union Street, Guernsey.

  [Anthony Trollope (1815–82)]

  His dream of letterboxes across Great Britain came true.

  [Postboxes in the archive]

  At first it was a bit of a free-for-all: every local Post Office surveyor could design a letterbox they fancied.

  [The first British post box]

  After taking up Trollope’s suggestion, the Post Office erected the first British post box In Jersey in 1852; ail these years later they are still in use.

  THE MUSEUM OF LONDON HAS 2 million pieces of London loot which it doesn’t have space to display. If you include pieces of archaeological material dug up from layers and layers of earth beneath the city, then they have closer to 6 million things in storage. The archive collection is in three places: at the Science Museum store in Wroughton (where Piccard’s gondola lives), at the museum itself on London Wall, and at the store which I visited, on Eagle Wharf Road in Hackney.

  The Hackney warehouse is a huge space heaving with stories and swarming with archaeologists, of which the museum employs 150. Whenever they find something interesting they bring it here. Each room is filled with shelves stuffed with objects that tell the history of London. Take your pick: in the metal store, I saw a hoard of Roman copper vessels; in a general store, I saw bicycles, old televisions, washing machines and umpteen differ
ent prams. On the shelf below the prams I saw the architect’s model for the Royal Albert Hall. Some archaeologists showed me certain items as they went past: a Roman brooch of Noah’s Ark, for example, and a little bowl that Romans would fill with perfume and take to the baths.

  I loved seeing the boxes filled with bricks that had been burnt when the Great Fire of London began, in a bakery in Pudding Lane, and then raged through the city for almost five days. Four hundred and thirty six acres of London were destroyed, including buildings such as St Paul’s Cathedral, and the city smouldered for months. Plenty of objects from the Great Fire are on display in the museum, but it was all the more surreal to see these boxes of burnt bricks in storage. I picked up a few pieces and got ash from Pudding Lane all over my hands.

  We continued to explore the oodles of oddities in this Aladdin’s cave of London town across the years: water pipes made from hollowed-out logs of wood, things dug up under the supervision of Thomas Hardy when King’s Cross St Pancras station was built, even relics from a graveyard disinterred when the Eurostar rail line was built. That seemed very wrong to me.

  Then we came to one of the most cheerful things in this storage facility: a huge wooden cabinet covered in buttons and dials. It looked to me like an old mixing desk in a recording studio but, when I got closer, I saw there were names written above the buttons: Yeoman of Cellars, CHEF, Privy Purse Door, Ceremonial Office, D. of Env. Eng. Dept., Stationery Office and, in the middle, the giveaway to the origin of this strange beast – button number 65, marked ‘Queen’s Door’.

  It is a telephone switchboard made in Coventry between 1930 and 1958 and used in Buckingham Palace until the 1960s. An operator would sit at the desk transferring calls within the palace, plugging the call into what look like buttons but are actually jacks. Before 1912, the Post Office provided staff for the switchboard for free; after that, they charged for operators, until, alarmed by the increasing costs, Buckingham Palace employed its own voluntary operators.

  It can’t have worked out too well, though, as the palace went back to using Post Office personnel in 1929. They took on only male operators from then on. It was suggested that the men stay for no more than two years so that none of them became intimate with the household servants, but the king wasn’t sure about that idea, and asked the Privy Purse Office to write to the Post Office suggesting that two men be employed on an ongoing basis, with their jobs reviewed each year. At some point, the switchboard was modified, so operators must have been listening in. I’m not surprised.

  Everywhere inside the palace that had a telephone connection is listed. You could be put through to the two entrances – the swanky Ambassador’s Entrance or the more informal Privy Purse Door, the door in the north-west corner of the palace behind which the palace staff work.

  You could have got through to to Sq/Ldr Checketts, that is, Squadron Leader Sir David John Checketts, who was Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales from 1970 to 1978, and Equerry to the Duke of Edinburgh before that. Or, if you’d fancied a chat with or about any of the household staff pageboys, footmen, equerries – they are all on the switchboard, all on speed dial. In the evenings, the hotline number was the ‘Pages Night ext.’ In the run-up to an event, no doubt the bells of the Linen Room and the Silver Pantry sang throughout the palace. I’m hoping the Lift Engineers didn’t have to be called too often. No one likes being stuck in a lift.

  I can’t be sure who Mr Greenwood, Miss Fowler, Mrs de Klee and Miss Colquhoun were, but they’re on the list, and were probably friends of the Royal Family. ‘L. Rupert Nevill’ – Lord and Lady Rupert Nevill – certainly were: they threw a garden party in the autumn of 1959 at which Princess Margaret met the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, now Lord Snowdon, who was to become her husband.

  Members of the Royal Family, including Her Majesty the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, had their own line, of course, as did the prime minister, and Buckingham Palace had a direct link to other royal residences, such as Balmoral Castle and Sandringham.

  The first telephone exchange opened in London in 1879, to be followed a year later by the first telephone directory – an early Yellow Pages. It is only four pages long and contains 248 names, those of the first people to take the plunge into a newly linked-up world. There are some illustrious names in the mix, including Alexander Bell & Co. When Alexander Graham Bell invented his prototype telephone, he suggested that people answer with ‘Ahoy, hoy.’

  Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, had the number Victoria 1436 in 1910. Harry Houdini, who listed himself as Harry Houdini, Handcuff King, was at Gerrard 1312 in 1916. Buckingham Palace had four phone lines by then, at Victoria 1436. The royal residence upped the number of its lines quickly, discovering, as we all did, how handy it is to give someone a call rather than wait for a letter to arrive by post.

  If you wanted to call Winston Churchill in 1925, what would you do? Look him up in the phone book and call Paddington 1003. He might not have answered, but someone in his household, possibly his butler, would have. Sigmund Freud is in the book, too, as are Marie Stopes, Virginia Woolf and Ian Fleming – you could interrupt him writing tales of James Bond by calling Tate 2300.

  In 1931, King George V was given the 2 millionth telephone in Britain. The telephone, a model 232CB, was installed in Buckingham Palace in June. There is a replica of it in storage at the Museum of London, among the millions of hidden treasures, each one telling a fragment of the story of London.

  In 1953, the Queen allowed television cameras into Westminster Abbey for her coronation, and an extra half-million television sets were sold to people who wanted to watch it. There are some of these sets in storage in Hackney. There is an unusual one, a Pye television, with a curved screen filled with paraffin. It was sold with an image of the Queen inserted behind the screen, which is still there.

  The Queen has always kept up with the times. Today she has a mobile phone, an iPod and is set up with an email account she uses to keep in touch with her grandchildren. She dictates her messages, uses Google, has approved a royal channel on YouTube and allowed an internet café to be set up in Buckingham Palace.

  [Buckingham Palace switchboard]

  The switchboard is covered in jacks, with names beside each one – Privy Purse Door, Ceremonial Office … and, in the middle, the giveaway sign, button number 65, marked ‘Queen’s Door’.

  [Her Majesty the Queen]

  Each member of the Royal Family had their own line, and Buckingham Palace had a direct link to other royal residences.

  [An early Yellow Pages]

  The first telephone directory for London was only four pages long and contained 248 names, including Bram Stoker, Winston Churchill, Sigmund Freud, Marie Stopes, Virginia Woolf and Ian Fleming.

  [Telephone 232CB]

  To commemorate the two millionth telephone to be installed by the General Post Office in Britain, the original telephone, a model 232CB, was installed for George V in Buckingham Palace in June 1931.

  BRAZIL WAS THE SECOND COUNTRY in the world, after Great Britain, to start using national postage stamps, in 1843. Five curators led me into the storage room of the museum to see the precious leaf of stamps, printed on fine, yellowing paper and kept in a paper sleeve. It is so valuable that the museum has never exhibited it. They don’t want the light to get in the goat’s eyes.

  The first stamps issued in Brazil were called bull’s eye stamps because that’s what they looked like. Apparently, these ones look like the eyes of a goat, but I can’t say I’ve ever stared into a goat’s eye, so I wouldn’t really know. I’ll have to take Brazil’s word for it. The stamps came from Rio and, when they were printed, in 1850, each one cost 30 Reales. Today, they would cost a lot more. This entire leaf of 200 stamps is hard to put a value on, because it is the only one that survives: it would depend how much someone was willing to spend and how much competition there was to buy it.

  It’s interesting that Brazil introduced stamps before Portugal, its colonial ruler. This was thanks
to King Pedro II, known as ‘the Magnanimous’, the second and last ruler of the Brazilian empire, whose reign lasted 58 years, from 1831 to 1889. His mother died when he was very young, and his father and new stepmother left him alone in Brazil while they went to Europe to try to restore his sister to the Portuguese throne when he was only five years old. Young Pedro studied from seven in the morning until ten at night, with two hours a day off for a bit of fun. Luckily, he loved to learn.

  As he grew up, Pedro filled his palace with books: he had three libraries, containing 60,000 volumes, as well as a physics room, a telegraphic cabinet and an observatory. He took Sanskrit lessons and could speak several languages, including Tupi, which is now extinct but was once spoken by the Tupi people of Brazil.

  Pedro liked to travel, and often came across innovations he thought would go down well in Brazil. He became one of the first photographers in the country, buying a daguerreotype camera in March 1840, and was certainly the first photographer who was also a head of state. He saw telephones in Philadelphia and brought them to Brazil and also imported rail, the telegraph and, of course, stamps.

  He exchanged letters with scientists, intellectuals and artists such as Pasteur, Alexander Graham Bell, Longfellow and Wagner. He once said: ‘Were I not an emperor, I would like to be a teacher. I do not know of a task more noble than to direct young minds and prepare the men of tomorrow.’ He financed scholarships for Brazilian children to study in Europe and founded societies in Brazil for history, geography, music and opera, and the Pedro II School, upon which schools across Brazil were modelled.

  It gets better. According to history, he was a popular, democratic ruler who wanted to understand his country, so he went walking in the street without any of his staff. He eliminated corruption from government, allowed the press freedom to write what they liked about him, listened to advisors and hired the best to advise him.