Black Ops and Beaver Bombing by Fiona Mathews and Tim Kendall

Author:Fiona Mathews and Tim Kendall [Mathews, Fiona and Kendall, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780861545575
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2023-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

It’s startling what you can discover in these underground time-capsules. Names are inscribed on the walls, next to tallies of the stone that’s been removed and the payments owing. Drawings mock and caricature the bosses. Patches on the ceiling are blackened by soot from the candles that children once ferried to the quarrymen. There are discarded bottles of ginger beer, cigarette boxes, saws and wobbly wooden haulage cranes; in the larger systems, you can see the furrows made by countless horse-drawn wagons. At Monkton Farleigh, you pass by ‘Bugger Hall’ and ‘King Pillar’ through ‘Bat Woman’s Hole’ (named after Fiona – no joke) into ‘Gravestone Falls’, and find a quarry left very much as it would have looked in the mid-1800s if the workers had just that second downed tools and gone to eat their lunch. Blocks hang half-cut from the walls, and ashlars are piled up ready for loading. This part of the mine was suddenly abandoned after a massive earthquake brought down a large section of the roof, and it hasn’t been worked since.

Here’s an inventory of other things that we’ve come across underground: Victorian prams; a rocking horse; the seats from a prototype Mini Cooper; thousands of glass and earthenware bottles; a porcelain-faced doll staring eerily out of a crevice; a metal frog that croaks as you walk by; a Christmas tree complete with baubles, at least two miles from the nearest exit; a shopping trolley (at the end of a crawl about 100 metres long); goalposts from a five-a-side football pitch; golf flags; a century-old lewd drawing of a ‘Bathford Flapper’; a large and rather accomplished wall-painting of Satan, wearing what appears to be a white nappy; and an upside-down cross from prank devil-worshipping – at least we assume it’s a prank – in a space cheerfully marked on maps as ‘Death Chamber’.

During the Second World War, many of the mines were commandeered for producing and stocking munitions, building aircraft, and even storing the Crown Jewels and the pictures from the National Gallery. To explain away the sudden influx of thousands of men into rural Wiltshire, the government announced that a major food distribution centre had been established. The mines continued to be used and extended long after the war: the Royal Enfield Works manufactured parts for motorbikes, and the Burlington bunker – a 35-acre government site that runs adjacent to the stone quarries – was dug out in the 1950s to house 4,000 personnel during a national emergency. In the event of nuclear war, the Down-from-Londoners would have poured into their troglodytic new homes, leaving the locals to get cremated above ground. There are cafés, laundries, kitchens, offices, even a television studio for broadcasting morale-boosting messages to the obliterated nation.

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