In July next year the Olympic torch will be passed through Bletchley Park, with a special audience of young schoolchildren and I couldn’t be happier. Only in 2008, volunteers and companies such as IBM were working to save the park from running into the ground, so long had its work and significance been overlooked. A campaign spread rapidly with academics writing to national papers in outcry over Bletchley’s neglect. After admirable work, the site was eventually saved in October this year with a lump sum from the Heritage Lottery Fund, enabling the park to be fully restored and brought up to the ‘highest modern standards’. It is time the public took advantage of seeing them.
Bletchley is a place we all know of: famed as the main decryption centre for enemy cyphers during World War Two. It was a place enshrouded in secrecy and that secrecy has been fictionalised and re-imagined several times since its information became public. Films such as Enigma glamourise the park’s history and are surely responsible for a certain amount of popular interest; but the real story of the Park I fear still remains largely secret.
On a recent visit to Bletchley, I couldn’t help but notice I was one of the few people under sixty, or just above the age of five. It seemed to have become a place of nostalgia rather than learning, and through no fault of its own. With its preserved huts- the places where Bletchley workers lived and worked- interactive equipment and real life accounts that are far more interesting that those in the fiction, Bletchley offers one of the few places in the country where history can be experienced rather than learned dryly in a classroom.
Now this may come from a lack of personal mathematic genius, but I believe that perhaps an off-putting feature of the site is that its filled with codes, numbers and theories we assume we’ll never understand, and a day of failing at maths doesn’t sound very fun. It is true, everywhere around the site are the legendary code-breaking machines, accompanied by signs explaining the history of their invention and how they worked. Indeed, some still are working and look rather fascinating whirring around- who would have thought a computing device ever used belts? So people saunter over transfixed by the complex machines, glance at their history, marvel at their construction, look at the buttons and the explanation some very kind person has tried to simplify for us; then sheepishly move on to the next part.
But, contrastingly, these machines epitomise the magic of the place (yes, magic). A spell binding quality comes from the stories of the real people who did understand these clever machines and for the first time. Channel Four recently recognised this with its docu-drama ‘Britain’s Greatest Codebreaker’ about the life of Alan Turing, the radical mathematician who was responsible for the foundation of computer technology and the intelligence instrumental in breaking the German naval Enigma code. Yes, to try and summarise his work is a mouthful, he did a lot. Turing is a figure who seems to embody much of Bletchley; an eccentric personality whose genius was allowed to breathe at the park. Yet, only a few years later he would commit suicide after facing chemical castration for the ‘gross indecency’ of his homosexuality. The history of Bletchley Park, for me, comes alive at this point. Whilst I already had some understanding of the great things achieved here, I couldn’t believe that the man whom our country owed such huge debt to was prejudiced against so disgustingly. History became personal as I measured Turing’s treatment against our modern principles.
For a long time Turing’s work received no thanks or recognition, but both his work and his personal life are commemorated at Bletchley and the Channel Four documentary is made in similar spirit. What is more, ‘Britain’s Greatest Codebreaker’ has the potential to reach a younger audience through Channel Four, particularly whilst still playing on 40D next to shows such as Misfits. This will hopefully encourage a new audience to visit the place where such an interesting character lived and worked for a crucial period of his life. The program’s patchwork of interviews, dramatisation and archive footage could easily be seen as a bit of a mishmash, but in fact recreates a fittingly eclectic portrait of the tragic genius.
In this vein, it should be also noted that Bletchley too has a somewhat eclectic mix of things to see, aside from it’s straightforward wartime history. I had no idea, for instance, that our National Museum of Computing is currently housed there (and I had no idea I would find that remotely interesting). But compared to the likes of the National Science Museum, this little exhibit is housed in a rather ramshackle hut that is almost comically quaint. Not only did it feature a fully operating Colossus machine, but also a tiny room with Wallace and Gromit figures- hardly the modern idea of technology. An old postcard shop selling arrays of stamps, a retro toy museum and a room dedicated entirely to Winston Churchill memorabilia also left me wondering why there wasn’t at least a younger generation of thick framed glasses, skinny jeans wearing vintage seekers. It is a national treasure, packed full of secrets to explore.
It’s also cheaper