International Tuna Day

The Albatross

Saturday 08 June 2019

Today is Tuna’s birthday, and what would a lovely young lass enjoy more than a trip to a cold war nuclear bunker and a steam train. However, before that I should mention our delightful stay in Harlow Essex. I don’t like bitching too much, just to say if your thinking of a dream vacation in Harlow, may want to explore broader horizons. It wasn’t terrible but the highlights were a tad sparse.

Anyway, this morning we headed off to Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker (the secret bit isn’t really appropriate now). It was built in 1952 when the cold war was really kicking off and everybody was working on nukes like maniacs. So, the British government compulsorily acquired the land, built a huge screen around it with armed guards, took a hill away, built a 3 story, massively reinforced, faraday cage protected bunker with enough resources to keep 600 people going for 3 months. They then put the hill back on top and told everyone to shut up. This was linked by hard wired cables to every other bunker around the country.

Initially it was going to be for directing planes if the Russians decided to drop a bomb, but with the advent of missiles and supersonic bombers, they converted it to being where the government was going to be run out of. What they were going to govern was a tad confusing? But there was a BBC broadcast room where the prime-minister could give a stirring message to the corpses.

In 1992, realising that it was pretty much pointless anyway, and costing millions in up keep per year they sold it back to the initial land owners family for a pound. It was epic, disturbing, bleak and hilarious all at the same time.

We were meeting mates, but went early as neither of us had any desire to stay in Harlow any longer, so had time to really explore the place, and had it pretty much to ourselves, we were down there for hours. Brilliantly it’s all self-guided and run completely on an honour system, so pick up a handset and go. Ground floor were the entry, communications (including Maggie T inspiring the nation), air conditioning (600 people in a very small space for 3 months), air filtration, plant rooms and military operations.

Next floor was government departments and administration, with the final floor some bunks, medical and other unimportant things. Interspersed were little videos showing things like the ads they were planning on soothing the populace with (wear some gloves, how to make a toilet seat out of a chair, lean some doors against the wall or hide under your table), and 1950’s explanations of what the effects would be, etc.

The really fascinating thing was the commentary coming out of the handsets. It starts of very factual, commenting on technical details (although the opening line when entering the fake cottage was that the thick walls weren’t designed to keep Russian out, but the general populace), and slowly descends into the realisation that the entire exercise is pointless, and does turn very bleak (in the morgue where there is a carboard coffin on display the commentary was something like “I guess they’d store the body until the radiation dropped enough so they could shove it out the back door with the other 30 million corpses”). Remember the guy is the local farmer, so he grew up with technicians arriving every day, groups running drills monthly, government locking itself down there for 15 days straight to practice, so I do get his point of view.

Anyway, it was awesome but confronting and well worth doing. A few minutes after we finished, our mates caught up, so it was off to the local village for lunch. Cubes and Johnny (Waldorf and Stadler) decided that we are all passionately interested in steam trains, and just by accident there happens to be steam train gathering in town that day. Who would have guessed? Anyway, we all admired the Toot Toot, and then drove an hour up to Mistley, where we did our standard thing of talking garbage and solving the worlds problem, whilst consuming wine and stuffing ourselves on fantastic food, before retiring to luxury accommodation.

Happy Birthday Tuna, you’ll remember this one.