A top-secret communications system used by Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt to discuss Allied strategy during the Second World War will be the subject of a free talk in Worcester this month.
The Communications Museum Trust will present The Leak in Churchill’s Lavatory at The Hive 2-3.15pm on Wednesday 30 September.
The title comes from a wartime story that Churchill once had a telephone hidden in a lavatory in the Cabinet War Rooms to reduce the risk of their conversations being overheard.
As the war progressed, Allied leaders faced the challenge of holding confidential conversations with people around the world, when radio transmissions could potentially be intercepted.
The answer was Project X, one of the most closely guarded communication secrets of the war, which enabled the Allies to discuss the war without fear that their plans would fall into enemy hands.
Lynn Turner from the Communications Museum Trust will be delivering the talk. She said: “The idea of a secret telephone hidden in Churchill’s lavatory sounds almost like something from a spy novel, but it highlights a very real problem: in wartime, even the most important conversations could be vulnerable to interception.”
Lynn continued: “The leak in Churchill’s lavatory was not just a quirky wartime anecdote, it represented a fundamental problem of the age: how do you make a telephone conversation secure when the technology itself was vulnerable to interception?”
The talk joins a current exhibition at The Hive by the Communication Museum Trust showcasing 150 years of the Telephone, where visitors were able to explore the earliest telephone designs alongside some more familiar models.
Lynn said the talk will be easily accessible and will also include the opportunity for members of the audience to ask questions of various members of the Communications Museum Trust who’ll be able to offer their own unique insights.
“This is aimed at anyone who has an interest in telecommunications or history, or both,” she said. “It won’t be overly technical, and you don’t need prior knowledge of how phones worked in those days to understand it.”
Andrew Wood, also from the Communications Museum Trust, said: “The work that went into Project X was groundbreaking at the time, it really pushed the limits of what was possible and we’re talking about technology that would be very basic by today’s standards; the space and energy it took up back then was huge.”
Tickets to the event are free but should be booked in advance to avoid disappointment.