Buried four meters deep inside the white cliffs of Dover, a secret second world war command bunker opens to the public on Friday.
The Fan Bay plotting room housed a pioneering electromechanical computer-aided targeting system that acted as a brain for a gun battery defending the Kent coast. The Guardian reported that Winston Churchill ordered the defences in July 1940 after observing enemy ships passing through the strait of Dover unchallenged.
Jon Stewart Led the Excavation of the Rediscovered Bunker
Jon Stewart led the excavation project for the National Trust and was the first person to enter the bunker when it was rediscovered in 2017. Military authorities mothballed the installation in 1957, and it remained classified until 1981 owing to its strategic importance.
“It was a Tutankhamun moment for a conflict archaeologist,” Stewart told the Guardian.
“We had done all this research on the people who had served there, and then suddenly you're standing in their office. It was an exciting moment,” Jon Stewart, who led the excavation project for the National Trust, told the Guardian.
Churchill demanded weekly progress updates on the new fortifications after writing a memo insisting on artillery command in the straits. Workers completed the guns within 100 days and finished the plotting room bunker 64 days later. Crews affectionately referred to the artillery pieces as Churchill’s pets.
The Fire Direction Table
The subterranean chamber housed a 1.8-meter-long electromechanical computer known as a fire direction table. Operators used the device to calculate the position of moving ships when shells hit and transmit firing instructions directly to gun crews.
“We tend to think of plotting tables as glamorous Wrens pushing around markers on a map as they do in war films. But it’s not a map – it’s a really cutting edge electromechanical computer, and it is completely unique,” Stewart told the Guardian.
Military personnel deliberately destroyed the computer in 1957 to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. Up to 10 people at a time worked within the cramped confines of the plotting room.
Preserved History
Few records survive detailing the exact identities of everyone who served in the bunker. Confirmed personnel include Wallas Eaton, an actor who later appeared as Senator Ludicrus Sextus in the TV comedy series Up Pompeii, alongside Frankie Howerd, and a lance bombardier named WP Bryant who worked previously as a tailor.
National Trust guides will lead visitors into the bunker through a hatch in a field starting on Friday. Conservators left the plotting room largely as teams found it, complete with old shoes, newspapers, and chalked service tunnel graffiti left by workers named Dodds and Petitt.
“Rather than recreate the past, we’ve carefully conserved the plotting room so visitors can experience it much as we found it, with all the marks of its history still visible,” Stewart told the Guardian.
