About five miles into the journey, Peter Bellerby fixed the sat nav to his windscreen and tapped in the postcode. It was the usual procedure: you set off in the car from a familiar place, and only when you get a little nervous do the satellites take your hand. Bellerby, a forty-five-year-old maker of globes, was on his way to Chartwell in Kent, once the country home of Winston Churchill. The journey would take a little over an hour from his house in Stoke Newington, out of London on the M11 and then the M25, completing the journey on the A21 – not that one really had to know any of this anymore.
It was a clear, cold November day. Because he no longer had to concentrate on his route, Bellerby could concentrate on his story. He was going to Chartwell to see an exceptionally large globe. He had seen it for the first time a few weeks earlier, but on that occasion his trip had been cloaked in mystery. ‘I had read about the globe,’ he explained. ‘And so I called Chartwell, and asked, “do you have the globe there?” And they said, “No, there’s no globe here.”’
Bellerby explained that the globe was given to both Churchill and Roosevelt during the war, and he understood that although it had been delivered to Downing Street, Churchill had taken it to Chartwell. ‘No, there’s no globe here whatsoever.’ Bellerby described the dimensions: fifty inches in diameter. ‘No, it wouldn’t fit. We couldn’t get anything like that in Chartwell.’
Bellerby then spoke to a woman at the Cabinet War Rooms who also denied having the globe. Then he tried the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich and drew a blank there too. He wrote to Downing Street just after David Cameron’s election. ‘Two days later I got a letter back. A man in the Prime Minister’s office said he had also spoken to Chartwell, and they told him “absolutely not”.’ He also made enquiries at Chequers and other places, but nothing came of it. He then wrote to the Royal Collection and they also replied with a shrug.
‘I was thinking of going to Washington to see Roosevelt’s copy of the globe. Then I spoke to a woman from IMCoS, [the International Map Collectors’ Society] and she said “It’s definitely at Chartwell. I know it’s there, because I saw it last month. So unless they’ve moved it …” But it’s not the sort of thing you’d move, it would just fall apart.’
Roosevelt contemplates his globe – identical to Churchill’s.
So Bellerby went down to Chartwell during normal tourist opening hours, and there it was. ‘I spoke to a man at the grand entrance who said, “Oh, the Churchill globe…”. He went on about it for ten minutes, and when I introduced myself he got a little bit sheepish. But he did give me free entry, and then said, “I think we’re a bit coy about it because we’re worried someone else might claim it. We certainly don’t want any of the other museums to pinch it off us.” But then on my way out he said, “Oh, we’ve established we own it so it’s not a problem.”’
Bellerby was keen to see the globe again because he wanted to copy it. Or at least he wanted to copy the idea of it – its size and impact, its in-your-face geometry – while updating its surface with a more modern map, rather than the one made in the 1930s, before Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and Hitler turned the globe on its axis.
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Bellerby has the air of a down-at-heel toff. He looks very like the actor Steven Mackintosh. Before he turned to globemaking, he worked in globe rolling, running a London bowling alley called Bloomsbury Bowl. Bellerby arrived initially only to install the wooden lanes, but he then agreed to manage the place. It was full every night, a big party hit, but after three years the novelty had long worn off.
At about the time that he was getting bored with it all, the need to buy his father, a retired naval architect, an eightieth birthday present threw up a new opportunity. ‘I just thought it would be nice to get him a globe. But I went to some shops and looked online, and the range was either expensive antiques that would go for tens of thousands, or new ones that were made in a factory and looked like it; many of them had lights inside them. There didn’t seem to be anyone making really good hand-made globes in the whole country.’
So in 2008 Bellerby thought he would try his hand at a new profession, hoping that at last he had found his true calling. When he was growing up, he learnt that he was possibly related to the great missionary explorer David Livingstone. His great-great-grandmother was called Marion Carswell Livingstone, and she presumed that the man who had opened up the African interior was a cousin. Bellerby never felt any desire to verify the claim, but only now did the true value of not doing so become professionally useful.
When Bellerby embarked on his mission for his father, the market for globes seemed largely untapped. It was a tiny fraction of the market that existed in Livingstone’s day, when there was a globe in every classroom and Great Britain governed half of it. But Bellerby believed – incorrectly as it turned out – that every self-respecting company director would want one in the boardroom. Globes would also make ideal retirement presents, or impressive pieces of furniture for the country home.
The closer the day got to his father’s birthday, the more the possibility of making a globe in time for it receded. But his father’s globe was now just one of hundreds in his head, the perceived demand growing each day. Why not globes in airline departure lounges? Or corporate globes with branding tastefully placed amidst the oceans? But how to make such a thing? That would be harder than he imagined, and would cost him his rather nice Aston Martin DB6.
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We had a mile to go, and Bellerby’s eyes had switched from the sat nav to the road signs. ‘When sat navs first came out I thought, “Why would anyone want one?”, he observed. ‘But then my girlfriend started map reading for me and I thought, ‘no, that’s not the way forward …” So I bought one when we went to Greece, and short of taking us on a 150 mile detour through France it was absolutely fantastic.’
‘Making anything round is just a nightmare’: Peter Bellerby, modern-day globemaker.
At Chartwell we looked for the tradesman’s entrance. The house had recently closed to the public for the winter, and although the gardens remained open there was hardly anyone else around. We were met by Nicole Day, one of Chartwell’s stewards. She escorted us past the laden apple trees and magnificent views, and led us into a small painting studio that Churchill had converted from a garden summer house.
It was pretty much as he had left it. There was an easel and pots of paint, and the walls were decorated with his handiwork in oils. There was the obligatory half-smoked, half-chewed cigar on an ashtray on the table, as if its owner had just popped out for a bathroom break (you’ll find these half-cigars at practically every Churchill shrine). And there, in one corner, roped off, was the fifty-inch globe.
We moved the ropes and a red leather easy chair by the globe’s side, and a sign that stood on top of it (on top of the North Pole in fact) that read Please Do Not Touch. We could touch it very tentatively, Nicole said, if we really had to, and we could feel the areas that had been worn away, including northern France and New York, and the area around the equator that appeared to have suffered some sort of damage from the glue that joined the two hemispheres. But on no account were we allowed to try to turn it. If we tried, the whole sphere might disintegrate.
It was extraordinary to think that we were breathing over something that had played a small part in the outcome of the war. There are photographs of Churchill with his hand on the globe, and there are worn areas over strategic theatres of war. Here, perhaps, was the first tactile impression of a new offensive on Guadalcanal, the British victory in the Barents Sea above Norway and Roosevelt’s plans to block Rommel’s supply lines in North Africa.
Some of the globe’s history may be divined from a framed letter hanging on the studio wall. It was sent from Washington on 12 December 1942 by General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the US Army.
My dear Mr. Churchill:
We approach Christmas with much to be thankful for. The skies have cleared considerably since those dark weeks when you and your Chiefs of Staff first met with us a year ago. Today the enemy faces our powerful companionship which dooms his hopes and guarantees our victory.
In order that the great leaders of this crusade may better follow the road to victory, the War Department has had two 50-inch globes specially made for presentation on Christmas Day to the Prime Minister and the President of the United States. I hope that you will find a place at 10 Downing Street for this globe, so that you may accurately chart the progress of the global struggle of 1943 to free the world of terror and bondage.
With great respect,
Faithfully yours.
‘It clearly hasn’t been restored, and quite right too,’ Bellerby observed as he examined it. ‘It’s a bit like I’d just blown up a much smaller map and put that on a ball. You’ll see how few cities there are on it, and I get the impression that it was a bit of a rushed job.’ Nicole Day had her own observation: ‘Why put that much detail into a map when you know you’re soon going to be playing with the boundaries?’
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In fact, the globe had been restored in 1989, after years of neglect. It was driven to the British Museum, where it came under the care of Dr David Baynes-Cope, the man who had fixed the mould on the Mappa Mundi with pyjama cord. But there was only so much he could do: the colours had faded, the varnish had worn away and there were dents, maybe from the globe being moved around Churchill’s various residences.
Its scale is 1:10,000,000, which resulted in a thirteen-foot equator. It was based on a standard map readily available before the war, and contained no special consideration of disputed wartime borders. There were approximately 17,000 names, and if a few of the towns in the United States were small and unfamiliar, that is because everyone who worked on the map at the OSS made sure to include their home town.
How to transform the map into a globe? By the time-honoured tradition going back to the sixteenth century. The printed map was divided into gores, the acutely tapered triangular sections that had become a staple of globe production for centuries. These would be 3ft-long, with a width tapering from 4.5 inches to zero; had they been steel, these spears would have been lethal. Each hemisphere consisted of thirty-six 10°-wide gores, and mounting them required great precision. This task fell to the Chicago-based company Weber Costello, rivals to the other great Chicago map-makers Rand McNally. The first choice for the spheres was aluminium, but this was practically unobtainable during wartime. So they settled on hoops of laminated cherrywood. The halves were dowelled every six inches to limit expansion and contraction from changing temperatures. They were bolted together within themselves to maintain rigidity, and then, when the southern hemisphere was mounted on the northern, screwed together with rods from pole to pole.
The globe weighed about 750 lbs, and had it been made a decade earlier would likely have rotated on a pool of mercury. But mercury had become regarded as a health hazard, so a platform of three hard rubber balls was chosen instead, with this contraption concealed in a steel base that held the globe like an eggcup. At Chartwell, the base of Churchill’s globe was painted black, and was in good shape. But it was believed that the rubber balls within had started to rot; certainly the ‘easy action’ had long gone.
Shipping a globe of this size is an arduous task in the best of circumstances. But with a war on, the most direct channels were restricted. And then there was the winter. The initial idea was to transfer the globe on a special flight from Maine, and then to Greenland and England in time for Christmas. But the weather was so bad at Maine that an alternative route was planned through South America, St Helena Island, Accra and then Gibraltar, which would mean that the globe would have seen almost half the area it covered. It had an escort throughout, a US army captain named B. Warwick Davenport. When the globe finally arrived at 10 Downing Street on 23 December, it was no longer a surprise. ‘Where the hell have you been, Davenport?’ Churchill snorted as it came through the door (according to a published account by Davenport, who seemed thrilled to be insulted by such a famous man). Churchill posed for a photo with the globe on Christmas day, with a cigar in one hand and the other on the northern hemisphere somewhere near Japan, and on the following day he sent General Marshall a telegram: ‘We have marched resolutely through this past difficult year, and it will be of deep interest to me to follow on the Globe the great operation all over the world which will bring us final victory.’
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The globe’s attractions today – historical, ornamental, educational, monumental – may not be that removed from its value to Churchill at the end of 1942, nor even the earliest German examples from the end of the fifteenth century, when a globe was seen as God’s molecule, a repository of knowledge and discovery, and status. And, of course, it was once a significant navigational tool, and before that a scientific one, designed to explain the rotation of the earth around its axis.
To Peter Bellerby, the globe at Chartwell was merely a stopping off point. He was hoping to make something with the same arresting visual impact, for he knew that even in a savvy and jaundiced world the wonder one feels when encountering a huge globe for the first time remains. His own version, which he naturally intended to call The Churchill, would have the latest gores, and include far more political and demographic information than the original. And it would be made from fibreglass, with a base cast from aluminium that would resemble an aerodynamically shaped housing nacelle of the type found on a Rolls Royce aircraft engine.
Some of these updates were Bellerby’s ideas, and some came from his client, a man he would only initially refer to as David The Wealthy Texan, who was willing to pay him £25,000 to have one in his home. The two were developing a firm friendship, though it was not without its trials. The first globe that Bellerby had sold the Texan – the regular 50cm Perano – had not fully satisfied. ‘He opened up the packaging,’ Bellerby explained, ‘and he said “it’s the most beautiful globe I’ve ever seem, but unfortunately there’s some damage”.’ One of the internal strengthening struts had snapped, and some internal cladding used to dampen the sound inside the globe (should any plaster flake off) had gone missing. The globe also had some holes drilled into it, and what may have been knife marks.
‘It could have happened in two ways,’ Bellerby believed. ‘It could have exploded in the air due to the pressure, which I think is unlikely. Or they could have hacked into it with an instrument.’ By ‘they’ he means US customs officials.
As we drove back from Chartwell to London, Bellerby observed that he now had to stop talking about Churchill’s globe and start building it. In the three years since he had first imagined himself a globemaker, Bellerby had learnt that it was a tricky task. ‘You know what?’ he asked. ‘Making anything round is just a nightmare.’
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Making things round – and maps in particular – has been a problem since at least 1492, the year that Martin Behaim of Nuremberg made, or at least commissioned, the oldest terrestrial globe still in existence. Behaim, an ambitious merchant, had learnt of the new trade routes being opened up by the Portuguese, and his globe was an attempt to demonstrate to his German sponsors the potential value of establishing a new route westwards towards China. It shows the world at the precise time that Christopher Columbus got out his compass to look for Japan, making it an invaluable historical and scientific bridge between medieval map-making and the golden age of exploration. The biggest gap in the land surface on the globe was the very one to be ‘filled’ by Columbus.
The Behaim is twenty inches in diameter and spins on its correct axis within an elegant metal frame. It is slightly blistered in places but otherwise beautifully preserved, possibly because it has hardly been outside Nuremberg since it was made. When it was constructed, the real globe had not yet been circumnavigated (that was still thirty years away), but the amount of cartographical learning displayed by Behaim was staggering: the Americas are absent, but the Arctic and Antarctic circles are there, and between them lie the discoveries of Marco Polo, Henry the Navigator and other Italian and Portuguese explorers making their way around Asia and Africa.
And the detail is compelling. The globe contains some 1,100 place names, eleven ships being rocked by mermen, sea-serpents and seahorses, more than fifty flags and coats of arms, and almost as many intricate representations of kings upon thrones. Four saints are honoured with full-length portraits, while among them parade leopards, elephants, ostriches, bears and our old friend the sun-shielding sciapod. Behaim called his globe the Erdapfel, the Earth Apple.
Inevitably, Behaim and his chief draughtsman Georg Glockendon made mistakes, the errors as intriguing to us now as the many things they got right. Western Africa is mis-shaped; Cape Verde is in the wrong place; many place names appear twice. There are also curious omissions: no mention of Antwerp, Frankfurt or Hamburg for instance, crucial centres of trade and shipping. This is all the stranger given the globe’s fascination with contemporary narrative discoveries. ‘In Iceland are handsome white people,’ one piece of text begins, ‘and they are Christians. It is the custom there to sell dogs at a high price but to give away the children to merchants, for the sake of God, so that those remaining may have bread.’ This information likely had a political slant, attempting to justify the piratical actions of kidnapping Icelandic children to be used as slaves.
Behaim’s Erdapfel globe.
The Icelandic text also features an early dietary pointer towards longevity: there were men ‘eighty years of age who have never eaten bread, for corn does not grow there, and instead of bread they eat dried fish.’
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Globes became something of a craze in the sixteenth century, an easy symbol of power. Miniature versions were particularly popular, with a round earth option often encased in a celestial shell. The fashion for engraved copper and hand-painted manuscript editions continued well into the eighteenth century, even though by then the method of stretching printed gores over a sphere was already established as a far cheaper technique (and would eventually ensure there was a globe in almost every European classroom).
The maps and style of the globes varied according to country of manufacture – the late-seventeenth century Italian globes of Vincenzo Coronelli, for example, were particularly decorative, while the German globes produced a few decades later by the likes of Homann and Doppelmayr tended increasingly towards the exact and scientific. But the biggest difference was in the choice of meridians. A globe’s most functional use beyond the classroom was navigational, with measurements of longitude calculated from a ship’s home port or capital city. So Cassini’s French globes had their meridian through Paris, while the first American globes chose Washington. London’s choice of Greenwich only became the global standard at the end of the nineteenth century.
Three gores from Cassini’s classic Globo Terrestre, 1790.
In 1850, Charles Dickens’ Household Words contained an article in its ‘Illustrated Cheapness’ column about the popularity and construction of globes. The article explained the straightforward method upon which all globes were now made – as systematic, it claimed, as the process of making a Lucifer match. It estimated that about one thousand pairs of globes were sold each year (terrestrial and celestial), with sizes ranging from 2-inch pocket spheres to 36-inch giants, with prices from six shillings to fifty pounds. ‘The number of globes annually sold represents to a certain extent the advance of Education,’ the article reasoned, although unlike maps, globes – both more durable and costly – tended to be replaced infrequently, thus rendering them a far less accurate teaching tool at a time when the extent of the British Empire seemed to be broadening monthly.
Dickens’ detailed description of globe manufacture – the many layers of paper required to be glued and dried, how to locate the correct axis – was evidently not lost on Ellen Eliza Fitz, the prominent American globemaker from New Brunswick who had an unlikely bestseller in 1876 with her Hand-book of the Terrestrial Globe. Much of this followed the Dickens template. ‘A globe is made of pasted paper,’ she explained, ‘eight or ten layers of this being applied successfully to a mould prepared for this purpose. A turned stick of right length, with a short wire in each end for poles, is now introduced, one end in each hemisphere …’
Globes attracted other successful women to the craft, not least Elizabeth Mount from Long Island, whose ‘All States in the Union’ sphere from about 1820 is now regarded as a key cartographical landmark. But the first successful commercial American globemaker was James Wilson, who built up a hugely popular business in Vermont and Albany in the early 1800s. Prior to Wilson the majority of globes in America had been imported from England (including models favoured by Thomas Jefferson during his presidency). Wilson was a self-taught, self-made man. In his youth he had admired an English globe made by Samuel Lane, and believed that a process of trial and error would enable him to make his own. His story has at least one modern parallel.
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In mid-winter, Peter Bellerby’s workshop in Stoke Newington, north London, feels like Iceland, or perhaps Greenland. The workshop doubles as a shop to catch the passing trade, with the front almost all glass, so that pedestrians can observe the archaic practices within. But people do not generally buy boutique globes on a whim, so Bellerby and his small team are seldom distracted from their task.
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!’
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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 …’
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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 provided 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.
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 advantage 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.
