The Churchill Series – Feb. 19, 2007

(One of a series of weekday posts on the life of Winston S. Churchill.)

As August 1939 drew to a close, it was obvious that Britain would soon be at war with Germany.

TIME magazine’s September 4, 1939 edition, prepared, of course, some days before that date, gave TIME readers some sense of what was happening in London and the rest of Britain on the eve of war:

Joseph Patrick Kennedy, 50, father of nine and normally cheerful, flew from Cannes to London one day last week brimming over with gloom which had been gathering inside him for more than a year.

As the official eyes, ears, head and heart of the U. S. in Great Britain, it seemed that he was at last about to behold that unspeakable spectacle which he had dreaded: totalitarian war in which women & children, the aged and the ill, civilians as well as military, orders sacred and orders profane, would all be devastated regardless.

Ambassador Joe Kennedy returned to a Britain preparing for death on a scale it believed impossible to exaggerate. Yet Britain was calm, methodical, at moments almost whimsical—completely different from last September.

London expected 100,000 air-bombing casualties per week. Some 250 big suburban busses were transformed into ambulances. Hospitals ringed the city, first-aid stations honeycombed it.

But these preparations were only for a London that was to be relatively empty 48 hours after hell should erupt. Evacuation plans for all nonessential workers, for mothers & children, old people, invalids, were set and published. Beauty parlors were crammed with women seeking one last hairdo before fleeing to safety or reporting for emergency jobs.

King George returned, hurried and hatless, from Scotland to attend Privy Council, become a quasi-dictator and stay at Buckingham Palace, beneath whose gardens were built prodigious bombproof quarters for King, retinue, servants. Queen Elizabeth and the two Princesses stayed on at Balmoral Castle, where gas masks were issued to all.

Later they would go to Windsor Castle, whose rock, looming above the fabled cricket fields of Eton, was tunneled and chambered invulnerably for them and for art treasures from Buckingham Palace as well as the Castle.

Queen Mary obdurately insisted on staying at Sandringham on the dangerous east coast.

Their Majesties' friend and Great Britain's U. S. banker, John P. Morgan, called off the grouse shooting at his Scottish moor, offered his Gannochy Lodge to the nation for a hospital.

To Ambassador Kennedy, retired U. S. Banker George Weeks (National City) offered his "Headley Park" on the downs near Epsom as a refugee embassy. […]

You can read the rest of the article here.

On September 3, 1939 at 11 A.M. GMT Prime Minister Neville Chamberlein announced to the nation that Britain was now at war with Germany.

In the next few posts we’ll look at what Churchill was doing during those final days preceding a war he’d seen coming for 20 years; and done more than perhaps any statesman in Europe to avoid.