Bletchley in financial trouble

[Kyt]

Bletchley Park faces bleak future - at ZDNet.co.uk

Historians have postulated that, without Bletchley Park, the Allies may never have won the war.

But, despite an impressive contribution to the war effort, the Bletchley Park site, now a museum, faces a bleak future unless it can secure funding to keep its doors open and its numerous exhibits from rotting away.

The Bletchley Park Trust receives no external funding. It has been deemed ineligible for funding by the National Lottery, and turned down by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation because the Microsoft founder will only fund internet-based technology projects.

"We are just about surviving. Money — or lack of it — is our big problem here. I think we have two to three more years of survival, but we need this time to find a solution to this," said Simon Greenish, the Trust's director.

As a result of lack of funds, the Trust is unable to rebuild the site's rotting infrastructure and faces an uncertain future. "The Trust is the hardest-up museum I know," said Greenish. "We have this huge estate to run and it's one of the most important World War II stories there is."

Bletchley Park — code-named Station X to keep its location from the Germans — and its outstations were responsible for intercepting German radio signals intended for broadcast to the army, navy and air force, and decoding them into meaningful messages. The job was thought to be next to impossible: German encryption was so secure that the chances of decoding it with random guesses were 150 quintillion to one.

Nine thousand staff worked around the clock at the Buckinghamshire site to break the German codes, eventually gleaning enough information to head off critical enemy manoeuvres.

The operation all started in the mansion pictured above in 1939, when it became the home of the Government Code and Cipher School (GCCS), the forerunner of today's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

The government had intervened to prevent a local property tycoon from developing the site for housing, hoping to provide a safer location for the GCCS, away from the obvious dangers of its previous home in central London. At the intersection of major road, rail and telecommunications connections and en route between the top two universities, Cambridge and Oxford, Bletchley Park was ideal.

Check out the great photos via the link above

[CTNana]

What an absolute travesty!

It is surely very important not only in terms of its contribution to WW2 but also for its role in technological advancement.

I suspect Mr Gates might have had a slightly different view if it were in the States!

[spidge]

Mr Gates.

Bletchley Park was not Information Technology?

[Roxy]

On a recent visit, I was also convinced that, had this been in America, it would be given the financial assistance worthy of its place in history.

Roxy

[Kyt]

Scientists send clear message: save Bletchley Park - Times Online

Bletchley Park, the codebreaking centre that helped to win the Second World War and launch the modern computer, is in danger of irreparable decay unless the Government steps in to save it, some of the country’s leading computer scientists caution today.

In a letter to The Times, 97 senior experts, mostly professors and heads of department, say that “the ravages of age and a lack of investment” have left the historic site under threat.

One of the unheated wooden huts where the codebreakers worked day and night to turn the tide of the war now looks “like a garden shed that’s been left for 60 years”, according to Sue Black, head of the Department of Information and Software Systems at the University of Westminster and one of the organisers of the letter.

A dirty tarpaulin keeps out the rain, and several of the eight surviving huts have peeling paint and boarded-up windows.

Time was running out, she said. “If we don’t do something now we’re going to lose what’s left. If we leave it ten years it might be too late.”

The signatories call for Bletchley Park to be made the home of a national museum of computing. Bletchley is open to the public as a museum but receives no public funds and the signatories say that many of the huts where the codebreaking occurred are in a terrible state of repair.

“As a nation we cannot allow this crucial and unique piece of both British and world heritage to be neglected in this way. The future of the site, buildings, resources and equipment at Bletchley Park must be preserved for future generations,” they say. Dr Black said yesterday that the site “is fundamental for the history of computing because we wouldn’t have the computers we’ve got now without it, and fundamental for our history because we might not have won the war without it”. Bletchley, a Victorian mansion in what was then the Buckinghamshire countryside, was an unlikely place for such an achievement. But it was there that the Government Code and Cipher School arrived in 1939, masquerading as Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party.

Its mathematicians, led by the erratically brilliant Alan Turing, managed to crack the brain-achingly complex Engima codes, which the Germans thought were unbreakable. The intelligence that this generated saved countless Allied lives and may have shortened the war significantly.As the German ciphers became ever more elaborate, the codebreakers fought back, and their efforts culminated in the Colossus, one of the world’s first programmable electronic computers. It was an advance that kick-started modern British computing.

After the war Churchill destroyed all evidence of the codebreaking programme, desperate that the Soviet Union should not discover it. He called the workers of Bletchley “the geese that laid the golden egg and never cackled”. Everyone who worked there, from codebreaker to tea-maker, was forbidden to talk about the work. Many never told their families.

The secrecy meant that few realised Bletchley’s importance. For the next 40 years the site became a government training school and in 1991 it was decided to raze the ramshackle buildings and put up a housing development.

The next year the Bletchley Park Trust was formed to save the site, bringing together historians and ex-codebreakers, and eventually succeeded in opening it to the public.

As the codebreaking programme was gradually declassified, the Bletchley story became much better known, helped by Robert Harris’s bestselling book Enigma, which was made into a film with Kate Winslet. Yet a lack of funds has left the site in crumbling disrepair.

“I don’t think people realise what a state it’s in, despite the best efforts of the people looking after it,” Dr Black said.

Secret services

— Bletchley Park was also known as Station X, because it was the tenth such station to be opened

— It is a museum open to the public. The manor house is licensed for weddings

— The estate was formerly part of the Manor of Eaton, included in the Domesday Book

— It was on the “Varsity Line” railway between Oxford and Cambridge universities, which supplied many codebreakers

— The Government Code and Cipher School began moving to Bletchley on August 15, 1939

— Listening stations (the Y-stations) gathered signals for processing at Bletchley, but it was only in the 1970s that the work was revealed to the public

— GCHQ ended training courses at Bletchley in 1987

[spidge]

I still cannot believe that the managers of the Bill Gates Foundation can find no criteria to support Bletchley Park with funding.

[Brian S]

It was some years ago that the Lottery funded the National Opera House to the tune of 83 million. Since that time many other minority interests have had such funding.
I feel we should Lobby our M.Ps. on the issue. I will write to mine today!

[Brian S]

Originally Posted by spidge

I still cannot believe that the managers of the Bill Gates Foundation can find no criteria to support Bletchley Park with funding.

Perhaps the Bill Gates Foundation don't realise where their Country's Computer Industry has it's roots.

"Colossus"

[Ferhilt]

I read about this as well. Living in Seattle I would be happy to go over to Bill's house and talk it up, but I don't think they would allow me through security.

Gates & Bloomberg are however spending $375m to fight smoking. I'm sure there were a lot of cig's burnt trying to break the codes, maybe it would qualify under that! (Gates, Bloomberg pool riches to fight smoking | Health Link | KING5.com | News for Seattle, Washington)

[Kyt]

Bletchley Park: a fitting memorial to our enigmatic nature | Ben Macintyre - Times Online

The campaign to save Bletchley Park, the wartime codebreaking centre, is gathering pace. Last month 97 academics and scientists wrote to this newspaper calling for the site to become a national museum of computing, in recognition of the pioneering work carried out there in the Second World War. Thousands have signed a petition urging the Government to restore the building and rotting wooden huts where Hitler's supposedly unbreakable codes were unravelled.

The campaign has tended to focus on the scientific advances, the cracking of the Enigma Code and the role of the codebreakers in hastening the end of the war. Yet Bletchley Park also stands as a monument to two often undervalued aspects of the British character - secrecy and eccentricity.

The intelligence gathered there was, simply, the best-kept secret in history, and it was created and preserved by some remarkable, and remarkably unconventional, people. The Park should be preserved as a memorial to scientific and military ingenuity, but also to the triumph of discretion and human oddity, two vital British traits that have decayed along with Bletchley Park over the past half century.

Sigmund Freud wrote: “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret.” Britain's wartime codebreakers proved him wrong. Some 10,000 people worked at Bletchley Park, codenamed “Station X”. Several thousand more were privy to the intelligence gleaned from breaking the Enigma Code, codenamed “Ultra”.

For 30 years after the war, those achievements remained a secret protected by an almost sacred vow of silence. Many who worked at Bletchley Park, from senior cryptanalysts to teamakers, went to the grave without telling friends or family what they had done. Even today, when most of the documentary evidence has been declassified, some of the surviving codebreakers remain reticent, uncomfortable with discussing matters so long held in deepest trust.

The Bletchley Park cryptanalysts were, in Churchill's words, “the geese that laid the golden eggs, and never cackled”. Churchill knew from personal experience the dangers of cackling: in 1923, he was a member of the Cabinet that authorised revealing the coded contents of intercepted Soviet messages, thus compromising Britain's most important intelligence source. Moscow, alerted to the breach, switched to a new cipher system; for 20 years Britain was unable to read any secret Soviet communications.

To protect the Enigma secret in wartime was challenging enough; to preserve it for three decades after was little short of miraculous. An MI6 report immediately after the war, recently declassified, was adamant: “It will be hard for those who worked on Ultra to avoid hinting at what they did in the war. But avoid it they must.” And avoid it they did. Even after the Government finally gave them leave to cackle, many preferred silence.

In an age when a “secret” is something told to one person at a time, when bean-spilling represents a pension plan for almost anyone connected to government, from the Prime Minister's wife to the head of MI5, that seems almost unthinkable. Today's culture is confessional and immodest: nothing remains hidden for long, least of all success. But for the wartime generation, schooled in the belief that careless talk cost lives, there was nothing strange in keeping secrets, even from the closest friends and family.

The British are a naturally clubby race, and for many who worked in Bletchley Park, membership of the most exclusive elite was satisfaction enough. That is why the British make such good spies, but also such effective double agents and moles.

If secrecy was one key to success, eccentricity was another. There might have been no secret to keep had not intelligence chiefs understood the military value of the inspired misfit. The mathematicians, linguists, technicians, classicists, crossword buffs, cryptanalysts, chess champions and other boffins were, collectively, quite brilliant, the brightest and the best; many were also quite peculiar.

Even in an age when eccentricity was more tolerated, two stand out. Dilwyn “Dilly” Knox was a classical papyrus expert from Cambridge who pioneered the Enigma analysis. He often worked in his pyjamas, smoking a large pipe, into which he occasionally stuffed his sandwiches by mistake. He recruited only women to help, and only tall ones. A keen and spectacularly dangerous driver, he invented a pseudo-mathematical equation to defend his speeding. After one excursion in the lanes around Bletchley Park he remarked happily: “It's amazing how people smile and apologise to you when you knock them over.”

Still more remarkable was Alan Turing, the mathematician and logician who developed the electromagnetic bombe used to decipher Enigma messages. Shabbily dressed, notoriously absent-minded, Turing was a homosexual, a marathon runner, a loner and a genius. He cycled around in a gas mask because of his allergies, and chained his teacup to a radiator to deter thieves.

When this unlikely assortment of code-breakers arrived at Bletchley Park, locals were told they were “Colonel Ridley's shooting party”.

It is impossible to imagine any government department employing such a strange collection today, yet the rampant individualism at Bletchley Park was part of its success. Like the façade of the building itself, the codebreaking team was an idiosyncratic mixture, but left alone they experimented in directions that more conventional thinkers would never have taken.

Bletchley Park should be saved for the nation, not just in recognition of its wartime role, but also as a wider memorial to a sort of Britishness that would also benefit from restoration - discreet, modest, intellectually indomitable and heroically different.