In 1962, during the
Cuban Missile Crisis, the
British government drew up
Operation Methodical, a plan designed to save the nation's art treasures in case
of
nuclear war. Under the plan, twelve
pantechnicons -
trucks or
removal
vans to you and me - would be loaded with prize exhibits from the
National
Gallery, the
Tate Gallery, the
Victoria and Albert Museum and the Queen's
collection, and driven to remote parts of the
UK. The plan was
initially drafted four days after
John F Kennedy placed
Cuba under '
naval
quarantine' in an effort to persuade
Nikita Krushchev to take his nuclear
missiles back. From
London, the trucks would have taken the works of art to
bunkers at
Manod quarry, north
Wales, and
Westwood quarry,
Corsham,
Wiltshire. Failing that, works could have been deposited in country houses in
Gloucestershire and
Henley-on-Thames. Civil servants who learned of the
plan were skeptical about its chances of success:
"A great many treasures of high value would have to be left behind to take
their chance, which would obviously be slim."
"Whether {the plan} will have the faintest chance of succeeding ... is
another question."
The plan could be put into action in six hours, and it was expected that, in
order not to induce premature panic among Londoners, it would not be enacted
unless Ministers were actively considering a nuclear war scenario. Unfortunately
for the ministers, what they didn't know was that any nuclear missiles within
range of London would take a maximum of five hours to prepare, arm and fire
(some details
here), so the plan would have
been even more useless than it superficially appeared. Moreover, one person who
was involved in the plan and who might have been better informed than most was
Sir Anthony Blunt, the
Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, who shortly after
the end of the Missile Crisis confessed to being a
Soviet spy. It is not known
whether Blunt passed the details of Methodical to the
Russians, or what they
made of it if he did.
Works to be saved included
Sunflowers by
van Gogh,
Waterlilies by
Claude Monet,
The Hay Wain by
John
Constable, the fourteenth-century
Wilton Diptych, various works by
Turner,
Gainsborough, and
Dutch and
Italian old
masters from the Queen's Collection.