The new exhibition marking the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War will honour a forgotten army of typists and secretaries who served Winston Churchill in his underground offices.
The new exhibition marking the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War will honour a forgotten army of typists and secretaries who served Winston Churchill in his underground offices.
As bombs dropped overhead, the subterranean workers risked their lives to help the war-time leader run the country from London.
Video accounts of life in the bunker by War Room veterans will go on display along with personal objects, photos and letters to provide a picture of daily life beneath the streets of the capital.
Undercover: Life In Churchill's Bunker will run from August 27 for a year at the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms in central London.
It describes the smoky, tense and often humorous atmosphere in the rooms chosen as the secret war headquarters for the Prime Minister and his War Cabinet.
The Cabinet War Rooms were created in 1938, when the underground storage areas of the Office of Works Building in Whitehall were converted to house the central core of government and to become a military information centre.
Intended as a temporary site, the rooms became operational on August 27, 1939, a week before the German invasion of Poland and Britain's declaration of war.
The exhibition stretches to the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher approved the plan to open the rooms to the public.
In interviews for the exhibition, the uncelebrated members of staff described working - and sometimes sleeping - underground.
Joy Hunter, 83, who began work in the offices as a shorthand typist and personal assistant in 1944, summed up the matter-of-fact approach taken to carrying out duties during war time.
She said she got used to the lack of fresh air and daylight, as well as shifts which covered 24 hours for a salary of £2 a week.
Mrs Hunter, of Guildford, Surrey, said: "I won't say it was pleasant. There were feelings of extreme claustrophobia but you were very busy and you had to keep going."
The Staffordshire-born great-grandmother said it was a "privilege" to have been given the job straight from secretarial college.
After signing the Official Secrets Act, Mrs Hunter and her colleagues typed up documents relating to highly confidential war plans, which included the dates of the D-Day landings.
"It never occurred to me to say anything about it to anyone," she said.
If the sirens sounded to alert Londoners to raids, Mrs Hunter said she would carry on working in the bunker.
She remembered hearing 51 alarms and all-clears in a single 24-hour period, but said: "I really don't think I was ever frightened."
