Big Burly Wartime Builders Drunk Tea Amid the Chinese Collection at the V&A

I read Mollie Panter-Downes’s wonderful London War Notes over the Christmas break. They are essentially her diary of the war years from London which she wrote for Harold Ross, the editor of the New Yorker and that became her regular “Letter from London”. One small, fun China anecdote….

Towards the end of 1944, as the war, was starting to draw to a close and the German bombing raids on London slowed, the city was flooded with builders brought in from all over southern England to help get bomb damaged housing habitable again and ease London’s chronic housing shortage. Of course these builders needed to be housed somewhere themselves while they were working in the capital. One designated rest centre for the workers was the rooms of the Chinese collection at the V&A in South Kensington.

Now while you may like to imagine a bunch of burly patriotic builders sitting amid the Ming Vases and Qing urns having a cup of tea and a bacon butty after a hard day putting roofs back on houses they probably didn’t. During World War II most of the V&A’s collections were evacuated, to the Aldwych Underground tunnel, to Montacute House in Somerset and to Westwood Quarry near Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire.

However, the builders in the Chinese rooms may not have been lonely. The RAF had a canteen in the V&A up and running for tired fliers in town and other galleries were home to children evacuated for the duration from Gibraltar. So instead of sitting with a pipe at day’s end ruminating on the dynasties of China the poor blokes were probably kept awake by screaming children running up and down the empty corridors.

And perhaps the V&A was always so safe….