Bletchley Park Facing Financial Ruin

biscuitfever11 writes "Bletchley Park, the home of Station X, Britain's secret code-breaking base during World War II, is barely scraping by financially, as shown in these images compiled by ZDNet this week. The site has undergone major redevelopment as an act of remembrance for the Allied efforts to break the German Enigma code, but now its future is clouded — among others, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation turned them down for financial assistance (since it doesn't have to do with the Internet). Its director estimates that Bletchley Park's funds will be exhausted in three years. Hungry land developers are circling. This is an insightful look at what's happened to Bletchley Park these days and the pain it's going through."

Comments

The British did not break Enigma

[jotok]

Enigma was broken by a Polish cryptographer named Marian Rejewski. The Poles knew they were going to be overrun by the Germans and disclosed their work to the French and British.

Bletchley Park is where they automated the process of intercepting, decrypting, translating, and analyzing Axis communications. I can't think of any large-scale SIGINT operation that preceded Bletchley, and it was certainly vital to the war effort, but credit where it's due, etc.

Re:The British did not break Enigma

[maxume]

Great article on the history of Enigma:

http://www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00016.cfm

This is truly sad

[Joshua W Ferguson]

The work that the code breakers at Bletchley park did prevented a lot of Ally deaths. When the Germans instituted using the 4-wheel enigma it was impossible to tell what the U-boats were doing out in the Atlantic Ocean. Because of this, supply boats going to the U.K. were being sunk at a high rate, unable to avoid the U-boats, eventually the Brits could have been forced out of the battle (no war supplies == no war). Near the end of 1942 however, some documented daily settings on the new 4-wheel enigma were pulled off of a sunken U-boat in the Mediterranean allowing german naval deciphers to be broken. Through the man-power, knowledge, and tools available at Bletchley, they could decipher and relay german naval messages (at least in the Atlantic) to high command often within hours of obtaining them. After this, supply ships in the Atlantic were nearly invisible to German U-boats. The monthly settings booklets still had to be retrieved to continue this, but through missions and sometimes luck most of them were captured

That's the WWII side of the story (or at least a very small part of it).

The importance to /. is probably that this war was the first time machines were used to cipher messages, and thus machines had to do the deciphering. To break the regular ground enigma's daily settings scientists at Bletchley designed and manufactured the Colossus(es). If you ever see this thing run, especially the interior mechanisms, you'll know this was a great unknown leap towards multi-purpose computing machinery. Unfortunately because of U.K. laws, the work and knowledge of those at Bletchley couldn't be released until sometime in the 80's (I think)

Re:Why would they expect Gates Foundation funding?

[digitig]

The site is a lot more than the mansion (which isn't very grand by British standards). The mansion has quite extensive grounds, which are covered by ugly, squat WWII brick buildings -- I did my apprenticeship in one of them, D-Block (I don't know whether all the aircraft navigational aids that we were trained on are still on the field at the back of the estate). At that time it was on the edge of a sleepy little market town, but the planners had decreed that it become part of the new city of Milton Keynes, filling in a rural gap in Britain's axial belt, a conurbation running from London up through Birmingham and The Potteries up to Manchester and Liverpool. That means it's now an expanse of private parkland in the middle of a city, a few minutes walk from Bletchley Station. I bet it gets stung badly for rates (local taxes), and the land would be worth a fortune. The museum happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think the smart move would be to move the museum into the mansion and sell off the rest of the land -- maybe keep the lake in front of the mansion and a bit of the green, to justify the name "park". That should raise enough to keep them going for quite a while, and keep some of the historic site.