Britain’s nuclear hotline: the AA, a telephone box, and four pennies
Mountbatten had ‘bizarre’ Cold War plan to alert Macmillan to four-minute warning when out of town
DURING the Sixties, fears of a nuclear war ran high. Little did the population know that Britain’s fate might depend on the Automobile Association, a phone box and a prime minister making a reverse-charge call.
Lord Mountbatten, then chief of the defence staff, faced the problem of what to do in the event of a four-minute warning if Harold Macmillan was away from his desk.
The answer lies in documents at the National Archives described by Peter Hennessy, the historian, as “the most bizarre file I have ever discovered”. Covering the years 1961-62, the file detailed Lord Mountbatten’s Cold War concerns.
“The real worry in the face of this increased Soviet menace was that the prime minister might be out of town in his Rolls-royce, and what they would do, as he would have to authorise the retaliation,” Hennessy told the Cheltenham Literature Festival.
“The Treasury didn’t want to spend any money; Macmillan didn’t want to have any fuss at all. The answer was to use the Automobile Association.”
Whitehall arranged for the prime minister’s car to have a radio link – with which the AA used to communicate with its mechanics – that would tell the driver that he needed to reach a public phone box, from which Macmillan would call Whitehall. It was suggested that government drivers carried four pennies, as that was the minimum sum needed in a GPO phone box.
Bryan Saunders, the private secretary to the minister of works, whose responsibilities included the government car pool, wrote to Sir Tim Bligh, Macmillan’s principal private secretary: “I understand that if an emergency arose while the prime minister was on the road, the proposal is to use the radio to get him to a telephone.
“Perhaps we should see that our drivers are provided with four pennies – I should hate to think of you trying to get change for sixpence from a bus conductor while those four minutes were ticking by.”
Sir Timothy came up with an alternative plan if the driver found himself without change. He wrote to the Ministry of Works – responsible for the government car pool: “In such cases, it is a simple matter to have the cost of any telephone call transferred by dialling 100 and requesting reversal of the charge, and this does not take any appreciable time.”
The AA link was installed in time for the Cuban missile crisis, and was active until early 1970. “If it had been relayed to the KGB chief, he would have regarded it as a complete plant and a spoof,” he added.
Hennessy adds in his book, Winds of Change, that the plan “was so English – and so bizarre – that had it appeared in an Ealing comedy it would have not been believed”. The call from Macmillan would authorise the use of RAF Vbombers. In the event of his death, two senior ministers – code-named “First Gravedigger” and “Second Gravedigger” – would have the power to deploy the aircraft.