Britain planned its war museum while the First World War still raged
Britain decided to build a museum of the First World War while the fighting was still going on. Proposed in February 1917 and approved by the War Cabinet within days, the Imperial War Museum set out to record toil and sacrifice rather than glory, and it later moved into an old hospital in Southwark.
On 27 February 1917 the Liberal MP Sir Alfred Mond wrote to Prime Minister David Lloyd George suggesting a National War Museum. The War Cabinet agreed on 5 March, and a committee under Mond split into groups covering the Army, the Navy, munitions and women's war work. From the start its members wanted personal stories on show, so that the collection would not turn into a heap of lifeless relics.
King George V opened the museum at the Crystal Palace on 9 June 1920. Mond told him the hope was that everyone who had served, however humbly, would find their own sacrifice reflected there, and that the place honoured labour rather than military glory. A 1924 move to South Kensington's Imperial Institute left it short of room, until in 1936 it found a permanent home south of the Thames in the old Bethlem Royal Hospital, designed by James Lewis. The hospital's two long wings were pulled down, and the freed land became Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park.
When war came again in 1939, the museum began gathering material on the new conflict. In October 1945 its first post-war exhibition showed inventions of the Petroleum Warfare Department, among them the PLUTO undersea fuel pipeline and the FIDO method of dispersing fog. Bomb damage meant the galleries could only reopen piece by piece.
In 1966 the Southwark building gained storage and a cinema, and in 1967 two 15-inch naval guns from Royal Navy warships arrived. On 13 October 1968 an arsonist protesting against showing militarism to children caused about £200,000 of damage and destroyed irreplaceable books and papers. Short of space, the museum took over the former RAF Duxford airfield in Cambridgeshire, fully transferred in February 1976 as its first branch, and in April 1984 the Cabinet War Rooms opened to visitors under its care.
Source: Imperial War Museum
