Bletchley Park Life

I was shuffling through some paperwork in my office yesterday and came upon this.

Back in 2014 I was involved in writing a book with my good friend Professor Sue Black OBE. The book was Saving Bletchley Park, which told not only the story of the campaign to save the site, but also what was achieved there. 

Station X, as it was known, was the code-breaking hothouse that shortened the war by at least two years and saved tens of thousands of allied lives. And it was the birthplace of modern computing. This invite came via Sue whose tireless campaign to save the place from falling into disrepair and ruin had finally borne fruit. It was time for the official opening of the new visitor centre and, to mark the occasion, Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, was in attendance to perform the grand opening and to plant a new tree in the park. The day also marked the end of Phase 1 of the project to save and restore the site.

It was wonderful to walk around the grounds, to chat to veterans and trustees and to see how wonderfully and sensitively they've restored several of the code-breakers' huts. 

I should explain that this isn't some Disney-esque theme park attraction; it's a living museum. Everything has been reconstructed as authentically as possible - even down to the half-full ashtrays and grime around the light switches. The huts look as if the staff have simply stepped outside for a break and left the place feeling a little like the Marie Celeste. To see the dingy, narrow corridors, the gas masks and scarves hanging on coat-hooks, the rolled-up maps, and the chalkboards scribbled over with arcane codes is to get a sense of what life was really like there during the War. Even in Alan Turing's office, with its iconic tin mug chained to the radiator, it feels like the great man is somehow still in residence but has just popped out to visit the loo. 

And I must mention the Duchess of Cambridge who was charming and sweet and who stoically stood smiling through all of the sandwiches and speeches before performing her royal duties. Her connection with the site is her grandmother who worked there during the war.

What's happened at Bletchley Park is testament to Sue and the others who ran this campaign. It's proof that the ordinary man or woman - no disrespect intended - can make a huge difference ... just as the thousands of ordinary people at Bletchley Park did during WW2, despite knowing that no one would ever learn about the extraordinary work they did for a least four decades.

Similarly, the National Museum of Computing - which is next door on a separate site - is now allowing people like Tommy Flowers to get the recognition they deserve. Flowers was a Post Office engineer who worked on the complex telephone exchanges of the 1930s and 1940s. He also liked tinkering and one day realised that, because a valve - the forerunner of transistors and modern microchips - exists in two states (on and off) it could, theoretically be used to express a 1 or a 0. Therefore, by switching valves on and off in series, you could process binary information. He built what we now recognise as the world's first programmable electronic computer in his garage and, when the War Office heard about it, he was sent to Bletchley Park to develop the idea. What resulted was a series of machines culminating in Colossus - a room-sized computer that could process coded messages hundreds of thousands of times faster than a human. It was a total game-changer.

For decades the Americans believed that they had created the first computers in the late 1950s because everything to do with the work of Bletchley Park was kept a state secret until the 1970s. The truth did  finally emerge and, as the result, Tommy Flowers, Alan Turing, and all of the brilliant men and women who worked at Station X are now getting the credit they so richly deserve.

I hope that the book Sue and I wrote goes some small way towards celebrating their achievements too.  

Go visit both sites - it's a fascinating day out.

Bletchley Park website.

The National Museum of Computing website.