Bletchley Park Block C awarded Grade II listed status

Bletchley Park awaiting renovation © Rob Farrow

It’s nice to see the steady progress of increasing recognition and preservation for Bletchley Park (together with a steady trickle of funding) is continuing.

While the awarding of statuses such as listing are vital to protect such sites, many not involved are unaware that such things may afford legal protection to preserve the subject, but do not come with any financial awards or assistance to carry out that preservation, or maintain the site. That’s still up to the owners, who have to do whatever they can to fund an increasingly cash-hungry asset, which it really a liability, since those costs just increase if they cannot be met as and when required.

To look at, it is a distinctly undistinguished and desolate-looking piece of utilitarian 1940s architecture. There is a failed concrete roof, water seeping in, pigeons nesting and vegetation growing through the cracks in the brickwork.

But in context, the long overlooked and derelict Block C at Bletchley Park, the second world war codebreaking headquarters in Buckinghamshire, may be one of the most significant buildings of the 20th century and on Friday the government gave it Grade II listed status to preserve it for posterity.

It joins most other buildings on the site, including the famous wooden huts in which scientists, intelligence officers and civil servants, led by figures such as Alan Turing, initially worked to break the Nazis’ supposedly impenetrable Enigma code. Their success shortened the war by as much as four years, by some accounts.

via Bletchley Park’s information hub wins Grade II listing | Culture | The Guardian.

Bletchley Park still struggling to survive

Bletchley Park derelicts © Ian Petticrew

I like to mention the plight of Bletchley Park occasionally, as it continues to struggle for funding, despite the major mart it played in World War II, and the collections it has acquired in relation to the history of computing, see Shame of Bletchley Park for example.

The centre has received some sizeable sums recently, but these have either been gobbled up in repairs needed to try and arrest yet more deterioration of the decaying structures on the site, or have been sums granted to help with larger funding applications, so can’t be spent on the facility itself.

The Government has now awarded the centre £250,000 for repairs, conditional on the cash being spent this month on repairs, which the curator says will not be hard to do, given the potholed roads and car park, and urgent roof repairs currently needed. While the money is far from trivial, it still represents a less than significant impact on the current estimate of £6 million needed to repair and upgrade the centre, and stop the deterioration.

Bletchley Park, or Station X, played a vital part in the war effort, decoding secret enemy transmissions which were thought to be secure. However, the enemy codes such as Enigma and Lorenz were actually being broken routinely, and revealing their plans. So valuable was the information revealed that Churchill decreed that it could not be acted upon unless some other, false, source could be attributed as the origin, in order to hide the fact that the Allies had broken the enemy codes. Had the enemy been aware that their plans were being read almost as they were transmitted, then they could have quickly countered by changing their codes, or even introducing more secure systems. By deliberately leaking false stories about the origin of the information, the Allies were able to continue to read enemy transmissions throughout the war, without the enemy knowing the real source, plan accordingly, save tens of thousands of lives, and ultimately shorten the war, by anything up to two years according to analysts.

The centre has been open since 1994, and has recently been reported to have doubled its visitor numbers (50,000 to 100,000 in 2009), so it’s important to give it a little publicity whenever possible, and hope the number keeps on going up.

Bletchley Park gets £500,000 leg-up towards £4.1 million possibility

Bletchley Park awaiting renovation © Rob Farrow

It’s only a few days since I dropped in a reminder about the sad plight of the museum at Bletchley Park, which is trying to raise £10 million for restoration before the site rots to the point where it is becomes beyond recovery even for that sum. It is also looking for ways to make up the £250,000 annual operating costs over the next five years.

There was some good news today, as the Bletchley Park Trust learnt that it had been awarded £500,000 to help in the preparation of an application for a £4.1 million grant from HLF (Heritage Lottery Fund).

However Sue Black, a campaigner who has sought to gain heritage status – and funding – for the site, said that the award was “the end of the beginning for Save Bletchley Park, not the beginning of the end”.

Simon Greenish, director of the Bletchley Park Trust, said: “The support offered by HLF is a landmark event for the trust in our quest to provide a permanent solution for Bletchley Park in that we are now able to work up detailed plans to help ensure that it is developed and preserved for the education and enjoyment of future generations.”

The site is also home to the National Museum of Computing.

Take a guided Virtual Tour of Bletchley Park.

No support for computing heritage

Only a few days after I noted that there is no real financial support for the National Museum of Computing (NMOC) at Bletchley Park in The Shame of Bletchley Park, a situation also mentioned by The Guardian, the same issue has been featured by New Scientist, which also highlights the fact that what museums and collections do exist today, do so largely thanks to the efforts of volunteers who staff and maintain them, and donations from the public.

This may be fine (although in reality it isn’t) for day to day running and maintenance costs, but provides little or nothing for acquisition, restoration, or research, and pales into insignificance when both of these activities are combined, and the bills start rolling in.

If you’ve never stopped for a moment and thought about the cost of establishing even a small museum, dealing only one specialised subject, then I humbly suggest you do. After you’ve totalled costs arising from premises and the need to deal with the public and the various legal responsibilities that follow, unless you have independently deep pockets that can support the idea financially, and can attract unpaid volunteers to assist, and donations, the last thing you will have time to care about is the collection. I wonder at how some of the very small museums around the country manage to survive, and it is also notable that the past decade has seen a number of them disappear, some of the not so small either.

New Scientist took a slightly different route, and after mentioning the UK’s National Museum of Computing (NMOC) at Bletchley Park, it selected two different comparison examples: the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley; and the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum (HNF) in Padaborn, Germany. However, two of these museums struggle to keep their doors open to visitors. The American Computer History Museum is closed two days each week, and opens for half-days the rest of the time. The NMOC can promise to open for just two half-days a week. Only the HNF, which funded by a foundation started by Heinz Nixdorf, a company which was once a major computer business, but was absorbed by Siemens, to become Siemens Nixdorf in the 1990s, and then lost in further splits.

New Scientist also put together a gallery featuring images of some the more recent items which are at risk: Computer Museums of the world

While much of the more recent content relates to subsequent developments, the basis of the museum and its collections rests in World War II, and the developments arising from the work of the codebreakers. This highly significant material is at the same risk of being lost, damaged, deteriorating, or being broken up, as are the contents of the newer collections.

There’s a warning as to how careless even the industry itself is with its own heritage, as the director of the Nixdorf museum tells of how she has lent Apple computers to the Apple company, as it has no examples of its own products. I wonder if they would have been more careful with the old hardware, had it carried an iApple badge?

Shame of Bletchley Park

Bletchley Park awaiting renovation © Rob Farrow

I’ve highlighted the plight of The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park on more than one occasion, and given that it receives no proper government funding to support it – the odd bag of cash is thrown towards it from the Lottery – and depends on volunteers and contributions to keep it from collapsing altogether, maybe they should drop the National bit from their name.

As the Guardian’s computing correspondent puts it:

Bletchley Park is home to our digital heritage – it is a crying shame that the government won’t fund it

He’s just returned from a visit there, combined with a visit to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, which he describes as being housed in a magnificent, award-winning modern building, with a 370-seat auditorium and rooms for classes and corporate events. By way of comparison, he describes Bletchley Park as being housed in dilapidated huts left over from the second world war.

He continues:

The Computer History Museum has a fairly substantial staff that includes a “vice president of capital campaign and principal giving” and a “senior director of corporate business development”. Its fundraising efforts try to exploit its proximity to local tech companies such as Google and Cisco, and local universities such as Stanford and the University of California’s campus at Berkeley.

TNMOC is run by volunteers, and there are no local computer giants. While Bletchley Park is close to the Open University HQ, OU’s students are rarely on campus.

As noted before, Bletchley is in need of at least £10 million to catch the decay and restore it to reasonable condition. A Save Bletchley petition attracted almost 22,000 signatures, but as the correspondent notes,”the polite government reply to that more or less decodes to ‘get stuffed’. Downing Street says English Heritage gave Bletchley £330,000 for roof repairs, and Milton Keynes council will provide ‘a further £600,000 for critical restoration work’.” This might sound like a fair amount of cash, but in reality is only enough to do patching, such is the age of the site, and the lack of funding it has suffered.

A valid point it made that the clock is ticking, and if the rot is not stopped, then it may be too late, and decaying parts of the site may pass the point where renovation is possible, and demolition becomes the only viable alternative – maybe someone is just waiting for that to happen.

This is coupled with an even more pressing need to do something before much more time passes. Many of the items on display are dependent on parts and components that are rapidly becoming obsolete and unavailable, either no longer manufacturer, or worse, being dumped from stores as they are of no practical value to the owners.

Yet more pressing is his observation that we are approaching a time where the pioneers that created many of the earliest computers will no longer be with is, and their knowledge needs to be preserved while it can still be gleaned from them.

Read the full article California dreamin’: a tale of two computer museums | Technology | The Guardian

I’ve lost count of the number of computers stored away in my back room. They date back to the dawn of practical home computing, and include microprocessor boards that wanted to be programmed in assembler and machine code – something I ran away from after the first few lost weekends – and some early Commodore and Amstrad offerings. There’s even a genuine Novell branded file server, notable in that it is a two-man lift, yet is little more than an 80286 based PC. In order to win back some space, I used 28 of the base units to support some shelving, and those shelves have more of the same tacked on them.

One of things that makes me smile nowadays is the all the fuss being made over the silly netbooks with their tiny screens, as if they were something new. I’m guessing I had the same capability on a laptop (and I acknowledge that it did not have wireless connectivity – but since there was no internet to connect to, that’s not really relevant). I had word-processing, spreadsheet, and database software running, and at an acceptable speed since there was none of today’s software bloat built into the code or operating system. Colour screens cost a fortune back them, so the grey-scale display meant that even with old-tech batteries, I still had about two hours operation without needing to find a mains socket.

Bletchley Park gets more funding

Hut 1, Bletchley Park - © Dr Richard Murray

Bletchley Park gets funding lifeline.

Following some earlier items where we noted the neglect of somewhere as important and significant as Bletchley Park in regard to the lack of support it receives, it’s nice to see that some recognition is being made, and funds put in place to stop the place being bulldozed and turned into another housing development.

Also interesting to note that the current so-called recession has apparently thrown Bill Gates (Microsoft) back into the number one position of the richest man in the world, as his nearest competition saw billions vanish from his net worth as the list was drawn up, and he plummeted down the ranks.

I don’t usually join in the baying crowds seeking to kick Bill Gate’s shins, but I’ll pop along the next time they are passing, as it seem the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – a company with more than a passing knowledge of the history of computing – turned down an application for funding which Bletchley Park made to it.

Bletchley Park reprieve

Hut 1, Bletchley Park - © Dr Richard Murray

Although the home of Britain’s codebreakers was deep in England at Bletchley Park during World War II, the centre was supported by numerous outstations around the country, vital to operations at the centre because radio reception was less than ideal. Scotland was home to a number of such outstations, Y-Stations, used to intercept enemy transmissions, and also to receive signals from agents working secretly behind enemy lines.

The Scottish stations worked in conjunction with their English counterparts, with operators working in shifts to monitor signals 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Propagation effects meant that signals could fade and be lost, possibly losing vital sections of messages which could, or would, not be repeated. By having numerous stations listening around the country, missing sections could be pieced together when reception failed as another station, many miles away, would be unaffected.

As noted a few months ago, Bletchley Park has suffered years of neglect with many parts now suffering decay and in danger of being lost. Now, the centre has won a lifeline in the form of a donation from English Heritage. A grant of £330,000 will be used to undertake urgent roof works at Bletchley Park, on the buildings where Allied codebreakers worked during World War II.

Discussions are also in progress on a further three year, £600,000 funding programme for the historic site.

Neglect of Bletchely Park museum

Hut 1, Bletchley Park - © Dr Richard Murray

Regular readers will probably have spotted the odd reference to Bletchley Park in some of our articles, well known as the place where the Enigma codes were broken but it is also the place where Colossus was created – a machine that was the forerunner of many modern computers – and used to break the more advanced Lorenz code.

Thanks to the propagation effects of the radio signals being used during World War II, listening stations (Y-stations) based in England were not ideally suited to monitoring enemy signals from Europe, and Scottish outstations were established in places such as Montreathmont and Kingask, providing valuable information when the main centre was unable to pick up the signal.

Following a visit to the National Codes Centre at Bletchely Park, the state of decay and lack of funding moved one visitor to raise a letter to The Times, signed by 100 academics saying the code-cracking centre and crucible of the UK computer industry deserves better. Describing the state of disrepair, and blue tarpaulins used in an attempt to prevent further damage, Dr Sue Black, head of the computer science department at the University of Westminster, noted that the centre had been ineligible for Lottery assistance until recently, but also that even a successful application would mean at least another year before any monies were made available.

Bletchely has not fared well in the preservation stakes, and even as the war ended, its most famous resident, the Colossus computer which gave the British so much valuable information known as ULTRA – Ultra Top Secret – was subject to a total destruction order by Churchill, presumably to stop the technology being picked up later by enemies. Only a few scraps of the original machine survived, and are now on display. In order to show the machine itself, those involved had to fund a reconstruction of the original.

There are many places vying for all sorts of funding, but it just doesn’t seem right that somewhere such as Bletchely, with what must number amongst some of the most historically significant events of the war having taken place there, does not have its future secured by national funding, and has to sell the tiles from its roof ro raise funds to make that roof watertight.