The Museum welcomed a high number of visitors over the half term holiday. As part of their look round the galleries, many people visited the new exhibition ‘The Cold War in the Shadow of the Bomb.’
The photographs here show several shots of the exhibition. The TV screens set into the wall feature some veteran stories including a reminiscence from Lt Col (Retd) Jim Ross on the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“The 9th November 1989, it’s emblazoned into my mind. My wife and I were sitting watching the evening news around 10 o’clock. My 18 year-old daughter was living with us in Berlin at the time and she’d gone out a few hours earlier with her friends, down town Berlin to have some fun.
All the news channels started breaking out the Berlin wall had been breached and that East Germans were pouring in to West Berlin. So we quickly got our coats on, jumped in the car, got as close to the Brandenberg Gate as we could, and walked the last half mile together. What a wonderful, wonderful sight. There were thousands of people, all having a party at the Brandenberg Gate, there were people all over the wall. And the strange thing to me was, I couldn’t believe that everyone seemed to have a bottle of champagne with them and it was being readily shared. So we stayed there till about 1 o’clock ish, took in as much as we could, and just before we were leaving, my wife said, “I’ve got to get a piece of the wall.”
So she pushed herself forward to the wall, shouted to the chap on the wall, “Get me a piece of the wall” and he had a hammer and chisel so he hit the wall and a small piece of wall dropped into her hand. So we went back home; when she got home she looked at this little piece of wall and said, “Look Jim it’s in the shape of a heart.” Well I couldn’t see it was the shape of the heart but she was convinced that’s what it was. So off we went to bed. Next morning at breakfast, my wife and I and my daughter comes down to join us for breakfast and I started to her what she had missed last night because there was a wonderful party at the Brandenberg Gate, and she took away all my steam just by saying “ Dad, I was on the wall and had been down there with friends and the people on the wall had pulled them all up on to the wall. So I was totally deflated about that.
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But thereafter Berlin became very busy and East Germans poured in to West Berlin every day. Eight months later I was surprised to be told that I was going to be on the public address system at the time when Checkpoint Charlie was going to be removed from its place and Checkpoint Charlie had been there since 1961. And appearing were the Foreign Ministers for Britain, France, America, Germany, Russia, and an ex-Mayor of Berlin, a chap called Willy Brandt was there as well, so lots of famous people there and I was announcing that they were coming out to make speeches about what was happening, this great moment. The part that really sticks in my mind is when Douglas Hurd, the British Foreign Minister, made his speech. He ended with a very small sentence, “Charlie has finally come in from the cold.”
