WHEN the Queen opens an important museum devoted to the life of Winston Churchill next week, she may not be aware that its creation required almost Churchillian determination from its deviser.

When Phil Reed, director of the Cabinet War Rooms (CWR) for the Imperial War Museum since 1993, conceived the idea seven years ago, he had no idea where the required £15 million would come from — nor even if the space was going to be available. The site owners, the Treasury, wanted an underground car park on the site. “We worked it out with the developer, Stanhope, and devised a kind of public-private partnership scheme,” Reed says, “but we all knew that we had a tiny window in the calendar for the start and if we’d missed it we would probably never have the opportunity again.”

The opportunity arose when the Treasury, the building above the Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall, was undergoing big alterations by Stanhope and Bovis. The extra space had been closed off since the end of the Second World War, and Reed had been pressing for more of the subterranean areas to be released to the museum since 1995. In the vacuum of no response, he started to plan hopefully, but it was only in 2000 that he got permission.

His scheme had two phases. The first was to open out the parts of the secret seat of government that had been the “Churchill Suite”, including Mrs C’s bedroom, the family dining room and tiny kitchen. The second phase was to be the Churchill Museum. Even then, with no encouragement from the landlords or money in the bank, Reed had set his sights on the 40th anniversary of Churchill’s death in 1965 for the opening.

“We couldn’t really let ourselves think about whether it was going to happen or not; we had to plough on with the assumption it would all come right,” Reeds says.

The trick was to have the money in place and the work poised to start just as the Treasury building work was at the right point. The Treasury agreed to put its car park plans aside if the CWR came up with a financed scheme. The first £7.5 million was raised through an inventive business plan involving the Treasury’s commercial arm, Exchequer Partnership, with Stanhope and Bovis Lend Lease. Even then, Reed had to negotiate down the Treasury’s rent by almost half to make it affordable.

But as the deadline for the start of Phase 1 neared, Reed was still £2 million short. At the eleventh hour the National Heritage Memorial Fund stepped forward, and the Churchill Suite opened to the public in April 2003.

The Churchill Museum, though, has come about entirely by fundraising, with most of the £6.5 million from Britain, despite a vigorous campaign in the US (Churchill was, of course, half-American), which realised £1.5 million.

Essentially, this is not the story of the war leader, but the flip side of the Churchill coin. The display shows some of the items close to Churchill, such as his famous spotted bow tie and the siren suit he had made by his Jermyn Street shirtmaker. Thanks to loans from the Churchill Archive in Cambridge, acquired for the nation from the family in 1995, important private documents are being made public for the first time.

They include what amounts to a blueprint for the welfare state, The People’s Rights, put together in 1910 when Churchill was president of the Board of Trade and then Home Secretary in the Liberal administration. It outlines his thoughts on labour exchanges, pensions, prison reform, mine safety and national insurance, all brought to the statute book by Lloyd George’s Government.

There are also items from the correspondence between Churchill and his wife, Clementine. In 1940, the Prime Minister was driving his staff so hard that they complained to Mrs Churchill, who sent him a reproving note saying: “You are not so kind as you used to be.”

The museum features an interactive life line tracing Churchill’s 90 years, which provides access to 3,000 photographs and documents.

Reed would have made the deadline for opening the museum on the anniversary of Churchill’s death — January 24 — but for outside influences: February 10 was the nearest Her Majesty’s diary could get.