Saving Bletchley Park Read online

  Money was still a problem however. Or, more accurately, a complete lack of money. But the campaigners refused to give up. Roger Bristow even put his own money – including a substantial injury award he’d received – into saving Bletchley Park. He did so knowing that he’d never see a return on it, but, had he not done so, it’s doubtful the site would have avoided development. By this time, BT owned the site in its entirety. When the Trust approached them about a sale price, Wescombe recalls that, “BT said we could have the site for about three million quid. Between us we had about £3.50.”

  The Bletchley Park site opened to visitors in 1993. To begin with, it was a very humble affair and it was open for just one weekend every fortnight. At this time, the Trust was operating from a single office with a single primitive computer and around ten people vying for space to work. There was no electricity across most of the estate and so old hand-cranked field telephones were used for communication. GCHQ kindly loaned the fledgling museum some exhibits, including Enigma machines, and the London Science Museum donated its old display cases when they installed new ones. One of the BP volunteers, a man called Clive Wallace, was part of a group that had amassed a collection of old military vehicles which they left on the BP site to help attract visitors, and it was one of these vehicles – a 1941 articulated lorry – that was used to collect the display cases. A few years later the Tower of London made a similar offer, and these too were collected in the vintage lorry. The Motor Vehicle Group was responsible for leading many expeditions to collect such things for the new museum. A small army of volunteers and passionate supporters of the estate gave freely of their time and energy in all weathers. Some even stood at the gate offering £2 raffle tickets to anyone they met; anything to raise much-needed cash.

  1994 was a landmark year. Firstly, the museum was formally inaugurated by HRH The Duke of Kent, as Chief Patron. Then Chris Smith, the finance director for Milton Keynes council, was asked to bring his expertise to the Trust. Despite royal patronage and a now steady stream of visitors, the park was still not raising anywhere near the amount it needed. Things were still so bad that, at Smith’s first trustees’ meeting, the finance report was a printout from a cashpoint. Smith substantially improved financial management and developed several income generating streams, including the setting up of a shop and small café. Charity nights were organised and, in 1996, The Andrews Sisters showed their support by giving a fundraising concert (with their daughters as backing singers). Smith even organised a licence to have weddings conducted on site, and he and his wife Lindsey became the first couple to be married there. By 1998 the Trust had built a £25k operating surplus and a reserve of £59k. Consequently, the Trust was able to strike a deal with the landowners in 1999, obtaining a 250 year leasehold of the core historic areas of the Park with an option to purchase it for a nominal sum 25 years later.

  For the next decade, the Trust worked hard to raise funds and develop the site. There were disagreements and some infighting between strong-minded individuals; some wanted to preserve the park as a living museum, in as original a form as possible, while others wanted to develop it into a more lucrative business venture, like a conference and conventions centre. But still the renovation work went on, mostly carried out by keen enthusiasts for no pay. Some, like Tony Sale who was working on rebuilding the Colossus computer, even used some of their own money. He was boundlessly enthusiastic about the rebuild and gave talks and lectures about the earliest days of programmable computing which kept public interest high in what they were trying to achieve at BP.

  In 2002, the Trust’s new leader, Christine Large began talks to nego-tiate a controversial but necessary sale of land to raise funds. It was not a popular decision; the Motor Vehicle Group left the Park when told that their area – the transport depot and H Block land – was being sold. And there was one moment of high drama around this time when one of the estate’s Enigma machines went missing. To this day, no one knows if it was a genuine thief or someone disgruntled by the sale of the land. The good news, however, is that the machine was safely returned to Jeremy Paxman and the BBC Newsnight show.

  The proposed sale also proved to be an issue for Tony Sale and his colleagues. By 2004, they had finished the rebuild of Colossus. The computer had recently been officially switched on by the Duke of Kent in the presence of Tommy Flowers, its original designer, and many wartime veterans. When told that the huge machine would have to be moved from H Block as the buildings were likely to be part of the land sale, the team began looking at various venues for relocation but none were appropriate. Therefore Tony and his colleagues set about forming a separate charity. In March 2005, The Codes and Ciphers Heritage Trust, which now trades as The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC), was formed. The land sale went ahead but H Block itself could remain on site if the TNMOC leased it from the Bletchley Park Trust. It meant that Colossus could stay in its rightful home in H Block, a building originally erected in 1944 to house six Colossus machines.

  But despite any resentment, the sale of land generated much-needed cash. It meant that the estate shrunk to something like 21 acres, but this became a more manageable size; more than 70 buildings still needed renovation work. The iconic code breaking huts were damp and derelict, the Mansion had major leaks in its roof and issues with asbestos, and the annual heating bills alone were costing the estate half a million.

  But even the land sale didn’t guarantee the preservation of the site. When Christine Large left, Simon Greenish took over. He joined BP on a Monday and, at his first board meeting, the first question asked was, “Are we still open for the rest of the week?” Greenish began letting out buildings to companies and organising conferencing events. Gradually, the Trust built up the name of Bletchley Park and got visitor numbers increasing. Tim Reynolds became a leading light at this time, helping to create a successful Innovation Centre on site. The centre provided, and still provides, much needed revenue whilst ensuring that Bletchley Park’s reputation as a centre of innovation is maintained. Greenish was forced to make some unpopular but necessary changes including cutting wages, losing some paid staff, encouraging more conferencing, organising professional catering and paying for good marketing, but it paid off and income improved. All of which meant that, now that finances were stable, if precarious, the real work of renovating the buildings could begin; Tim Reynolds had already renovated two, but many more needed attention. Plus there was a great deal more work to be done to ensure that Bletchley Park was saved.

  It was, more or less, at this point that Dr Sue Black entered the story. But I won’t steal her thunder – the remainder of this book is the story of what happened next.

  During WWII the staff of Bletchley Park managed to overcome difficulties that we today, with all of our computers and instant access to knowledge, would still find problematic. Much of what was achieved there is now public knowledge thanks to various documentaries and dramatisations (although, thanks to dramatic licence, the accuracy of some dramas has to be taken with a pinch of salt). We will tell that story in this book too. Throughout Sue’s narrative you’ll find accompanying text that will explain the historical significance of some of the people, projects and places she mentions. Every effort has been made to make the historical account as accurate as possible; unfortunately, what went on at BP was so shrouded in secrecy that almost no documentation exists and we are reliant on the memories of people who were there at the time. Much of the content is culled from interviews with surviving veterans.

  An army of inspiring, wonderful people has spent the past 25 years working hard to save Bletchley Park for us and for the generations to come; the list of enthusiasts, experts, volunteers, funders, donors and visitors is simply too long to include them all here, and some of them, sadly, are no longer with us. In this 70th anniversary year of the end of World War II, all we can do is thank them and dedicate this introduction to them for performing such a selfless, noble service for the benefit of us all.


  I now hand you over to Dr Sue Black who will take up the story of how Bletchley Park was saved.

  Stevyn Colgan

  * Not all of the veterans were quite so enthusiastic. Peter Wescombe recalls hearing one veteran codebreaker telling a TV reporter that BP was finished and should be knocked down. This is an understandable reaction; many of the staff had quite unhappy lives during their time at Bletchley Park. “Broken marriages, unhappy love affairs, their husbands being killed in the war. One of the saddest things, they used to say, was young ladies sitting sniffing into their hankies down by the lake because their boyfriend or husband had been killed,” explains Wescombe. “You can quite understand why some didn’t want it back – it brought back some very unhappy memories.” ↩

  † I have skimmed through the post-war history of the park here for the sake of brevity. There is easily enough to fill another book. And there might well be such a book sometime in the near future. ↩

  01

  My first visit to Bletchley Park

  My first visit to Bletchley Park was on 9th April 2003. I was attending the British Computer Society’s Specialist Groups Assembly representing BCSWomen, the online network for women in computing that I set up in 2001. In 1998, I had set up a similar network called London BCSWomen, and it had been a massive success – so much so that we had appeared in a two-page spread about women and computing in the Daily Mirror. National publicity for London BCSWomen led to requests from women all over the country who wanted to join. I set up a national version and it quickly garnered a few hundred members. The idea behind BCSWomen was to support and encourage women in computing. I had found doing my PhD in software engineering on the whole enjoyable but sometimes lonely, with few women around, and I had often wished for a group of friendly women to talk to. I set up BCSWomen to bring together such a group and found many friends there.

  April 2003

  7thMentorSET training day (Institute of Physics)

  8thReception to commemorate birthday of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (Institution of Civil Engineers, Westminster)

  8thPresentation of Oxfam parliamentary briefing paper: “Hands up for girls’ education” (Portcullis House, Westminster)

  9thBCS Specialist Groups Assembly representing BCSWomen (Bletchley Park, Herts.)

  22ndSQUFOL European project in software metrics

  (South Bank University)

  I’d heard of Bletchley Park but didn’t have a very well-formed idea of what it was, and I had no idea what it looked like. I knew that it was something to do with code breaking and World War II. In my mind’s eye was a picture of 50 or so middle-aged blokes sitting around in tweed jackets, smoking pipes and doing The Times crossword. I’ve since learnt that that view is not uncommon. In fact, I shared my image of the tweed-clad blokes with the wonderful Stephen Fry when he came to visit Bletchley Park in May 2009; he then used almost exactly the same words to describe his own preconception of Bletchley on QI – I wasn’t alone in my thinking!

  On the morning of 9th April, I got the train from Euston Station to Bletchley. I had no idea yet what a momentous visit it would prove to be.

  I spent the day there, mainly in the mansion house ballroom, listening to BCS specialist group talks and chatting to colleagues in the break. At the end of the day, I decided to go and explore the grounds. Bletchley Park now occupies a 26-acre site, with many huts, blocks and various outbuildings, plus a lovely lake, so there was plenty to look at. I entered one of the blocks and started looking at the exhibits on display; moving from one room to the next, I saw a group of middle-aged men working on what looked like the most amazing contraption at the end of the building. It was probably seven feet high and six feet across, a wonderful vision of engineering, with wires and what looked like cogs of some sort. I walked over to take a closer look.

  I started chatting to a man who told me that he and his team were rebuilding something called the Bombe machine. I first heard this as “Bomb” machine, which sounded almost too exciting, but I soon learned all about it.

  That man was John Harper, who, with a team of enthusiasts, was rebuilding Alan Turing’s Bombe machine, which was used during WWII to mechanise the breaking of Enigma codes. John told me that it was taking years to rebuild because they didn’t have a complete set of instructions or information to help them reconstruct it. Most of the details of the construction of the Bombe had been destroyed at the end of the war, so they had the task of working with incomplete information to put together a plan and then rebuild the Bombe from scratch. They had a couple of photos and an incomplete plan that had been found on a window ledge in a toilet. But that wasn’t the only difficulty. The parts for the Bombe were, of course, no longer manufactured, so they had to be scavenged, sometimes from old telephone switching equipment which had been thrown away, or sourced from various manufacturers, or especially designed and manufactured. It sounded like a very long, complicated and difficult task; I was completely in awe of this labour of love.

  After John had told me all about the Bombe and what it was used for, he asked me why I was at Bletchley Park. I told him about the British Computer Society meeting and said that I was there representing the network for women in computing that I had started in 2001 and now chaired.

  “Did you know that more than half of the people that worked at Bletchley Park during the war were women?” said John.

  “No, I had no idea. How many people worked here during the war?” I replied.

  “About 10,000.”

  I was astonished. For many years, I had been interested in women in computing, women in science and women’s contribution to the world of work, but I’d never heard anything like this before. It was amazing to find out that more than 5,000 women had worked at Bletchley Park during the war, and more amazing still, considering their massive contribution to the war effort and my interest in women, that I had never read or heard about it before.

  John then showed me a plaque on the wall listing all the names of the generous people who had donated their time and money to making sure that the Bombe was faithfully rebuilt. Some of them were women, and John said that they had worked with the Bombes during the war and that some of them were still around, working as volunteers at Bletchley Park. At the end of our chat, I thanked John and we said our goodbyes. As I exited the block, I bumped into a group of my colleagues, including Professor Jonathan Bowen and Conrad Taylor who had also been walking around having a look at the site and taking photographs.

  We decided to head back to London together. On the way, I told them about the Bombe machine and repeated what John had said about the people that had worked at Bletchley Park and that how more than 5,000 of them were women. I wanted to find out more about the work that the women had done at Bletchley Park and asked everyone who I thought would be interested in funding a project which focused on researching and promoting this amazing story. By the time we arrived at Euston, I was resolved to find some funding to run an oral history project which would capture the memories of women who worked at Bletchley Park and bring them to a wider audience. The women that had worked at Bletchley Park deserved recognition, and I was determined to make sure that they got it.

  Looking for funding

  I started talking to everyone I knew about my trip to Bletchley, recounting my conversation with John Harper about the Bombe and the women who worked there. I was sure that if I talked to everyone who might be even the slightest bit interested, I would, at some point, come across someone who wanted to help – or at least someone who knew someone who would want to help.

  Between 2003 and 2006, I talked to countless people about the women who worked at Bletchley Park, how many of them there were, how amazing their achievements had been and how we needed to record their experiences and raise the profile of their contribution. In those days, I had no idea who to talk to about funding and I also didn’t know very many people who were actually in a positi
on to help. Talking to lots of people, asking for help, and getting lots of (kind) rejections gave me some really good experience and taught me not to be put off by rejection. It was, looking back, very good training for what was to come.

  Eventually, in late 2006, someone suggested that I apply for money from the special fund set up to support projects related to the British Computer Society’s 50th anniversary. I applied for £5,000. At around the same time, I was encouraged to apply for matched funding from the UK Resource Centre for Women (UKRC) in Science, Engineering and Technology, so I did. I was delighted when both applications were approved, and I was granted £10,000 in total, £5,000 from each organisation. I quietly filed away what I’d learned: that it’s usually easier to get matched funding than initial funding. No one wants to be the first one to jump in, but once one person or organisation has taken the leap, others will follow.