July 16 (Thursday) – Brompton Cemetery, Cabinet War Memorial, Harrods, Organ Concert at St. Paul’s

This morning we headed first to Brompton Cemetery to lay flowers on the grave of Emmeline Pankhurst, a leader of the Suffragette movement in Britain.  Phyllis and Jim had located her stone on a previous visit to London so we all trekked back for a visit. 

Phyllis and Mary at grave of Emmeline Pankhurst - Suffragist.

The cemetery is quite old and shows signs of disrepair.  Signs at the gate indicated that they are currently fundraising to raise funds to restore the cemetery.

Next we headed off to Westminster/White Hall and the Cabinet War Memorial.  The memorial is in the series of rooms under White Hall that served as the underground command center of all allied military operations during World War II.  The memorial included a very large section devoted to the life of Winston Churchill. 

Maps showing army lines.

It turned out to be a very interesting tour.  Many people lived in the underground rooms for weeks or months at a time under foul (smoky – everyone smoked back then) conditions.  However, the secrecy was so absolute that few outside of the staff realized that operation the existed.

We then headed to lunch and a trip to Harrods for a bit of shopping (chocolates for some of Jim and Phyllis’ kids and cookies [biscuits] for Paul and Mary’s neighbors).  The display cases in the food hall were enough to cause us to drool over the food.  Beautiful.

Cakes

Pies

We then all decided to crash for the afternoon before hitting the Tube and the streets again. 

Just outside the Tube station we ran into "happy hour" at one of the pubs with people spilling out into the street. 

Our destination for this evening was St. Paul’s Cathedral...

for a guest celebrity Organ Recital.  The organ has over 7000 pipes, 108 stops and 5 keyboards.  The program consisted of music from the 1300’s to today.  The last piece was written by the guest organist, Eric Lebrun of France.