Monday's weather was awful, so I spent the day at the Imperial War Museum. As usual, I was skeptical about how much time I'd spend here, among the tanks, biplanes and replica of "little boy" the Hiroshima bomb, but it's another great show. First the building, which was (until 1930) the lunatic asylum Bethlehem Royal Hospital, AKA Bedlam. Now it's another of London's free museums, actually one of several museums that make up the IWM. Another is the HMS Belfast, which is permanently moored off Southwark. I queued up to experience the re-creation of the London Blitz [sit in a musty air-raid shelter and listen to sirens, explosions, and human voices], walk through a WW1 trench on the Somme, another good bit of stagecraft. Also toured the Children's War gallery, which interprets the experience of children in WW2, and includes the recreation of a 1940s house, complete with a Morrison bomb shelter [a cage basically] in the dining room, and the Holocaust Exhibition, which is dreadfully sad. I also paid £4.95 to attend one of the special exhibitions: Ministry of Food, which covered victory gardens and rationing both during WW2 and in the post-war period. It was very well curated. And no wonder so many British people emigrated to Australia in the 1950s. They were totally fed up with scrimping and rationing. I had no idea how bad it was back then.
The photos include the tie-in from the IWM's cafe, which was serving food from the 1940s. This is a piece of ginger cake. The placemat reprints recipes for making dishes during these lean times and explains ways to stretch your sugar ration, or make a dessert out of carrots and not much else.
The last photo is Gassed by John Singer Sargent, a very different subject from his normal portaits of elegant society ladies. The IWM has a large collection of paintings covering various wars, and it's quite strange to see artists interpreting things like the battlefields of Flanders, and Dunkirk and the Blitz.
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