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.