Cash Lifeline For Bletchley Park

Smivs writes "Bletchley Park, the home to the allied codebreakers during WWII, and a major computing heritage centre, has been given a financial lifeline, reports the BBC. The grant of £330,000 will be used to undertake urgent roof works as the rooms of the Grade II-listed mansion, replete with painted ceilings, timber panelling, and ornate plasterwork, are at risk because the roof has been patched rather than renovated so many times during the 130 years of the mansion's history. The donation follows efforts to highlight the dilapidated state of the huts and other buildings at Bletchley. Discussions are also in progress on a further three-year, £600,000 funding programme for the historic site. 'Bletchley Park played a fundamental role in the Allies winning the Second World War and is of great importance to the history of Europe,' said Dr Simon Thurley, chief executive of English Heritage."

Comments

So where do we send our bucks?

[David Gerard]

Where do Slashdotters send their $5/10/20 or £5/10/20 then?

Re:So where do we send our bucks?

[Anonymous Coward]

I second that. When I made it there after a business trip, I really wished I had more time. There is so much to browse it's hard to fit into an afternoon. The volunteers that give the tour are great...highly recommend it. They, however, wouldn't answer my question about if they used the enigma to insert messages, orders, or replies to any of the Germans in order to confuse them (-:

They didn't have the Bombe replica running when I was there, really wanted to see that.

The best thing they did have was a complete working replica of the Colossus Mark 2 up and running. This thing was build by volunteers that reconstructed it purely from pictures and from the memories of women who ran it during the war. It filled a room and kept it at 80+ degrees in there. It was built to decipher messages from the Lorenz machine, and it did it faster than optimized decryption software running on a Pentium II. There's definitely something to be said for optimized hardware.

They were in the process of re-opening a national computing museum or something of the like, so hopefully that's an exhibit there now as well.

And not that the walk around town wasn't nice, but take a right on the street in front of the station you get off at if you ride the rail to get there (-:

Re:So where do we send our bucks?

[N. Criss]

Maybe not individually, but if you could turn even a tiny fraction of the typical Slashdot effect into a donation effect then as a community we could make a very big difference. I just gave 5GBP, which PayPal calculated as just over $8 US. Any other nerds willing to help out?

It's funny, isn't it?

[smooth wombat]

You would never suspect that everyone at this school is a professional dancer.

*ba dum bump*! TING!

Seriously though, it's funny how the British government (among others), can find tens of billions, if not trillions, of dollars to bail out private businesses who are failing due to the incompetence of those running those businesses yet, it can't find a few meager thousands of dollars to repair one building who helped save its own hide.

Just goes to show where priorities lie.

Re:It's funny, isn't it?

[iamapizza]

No it isn't funny, it makes sense.

A government's priorities lie with immediate issues, not with entities that won't have an immediate effect. Saving Bletchley park is a matter of sentimentality and history and a government or corporation has every right to choose to ignore it - I'd rather they spent their efforts at least talking about the current economic crisis than helping a WW relic. When things are better, that'd be the time to look at anything else.

Conversely, if the government decided to give it, say GBP/USD40 million, others would complain about the government wasting their tax money.

So yes, it goes to show where the priorities lie and I'm glad its attention isn't wandering away.

Re:Lame.

[macthulhu]

Wow. Not that I owe your condescending ass an explanation, but allow me to elaborate. I build, repair, and support computers for a non-profit organization. I'm also on their board of directors, and partially responsible for advising the tech needs of the arts programs of every school in my county. In what would normally be billable hours for me, I probably contribute an amount equal to about 40% of my income each year. My field is less related to the actual general birth of computing, so my contribution is geared toward my particular expertise. My suggestion that people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs would be good contributors was related to their A) role in the early stages of personal computing, and B) their high profiles as entrepreneurs... which would be good publicity for the cause. Your veiled implication that I'm hoping to redistribute the wealth of others, and not my own, is a lame, reactionary jumping of the gun that was completely uncalled for. If your level of discourse is the "future of the world", I will join you in lamenting our future. So wag your finger at somebody else jackass.

There's not really that much there

[Animats]

I've visited Bletchley Park. It's a nice day trip out from London. The actual exhibits aren't that extensive. They have a few Enigmas, a fancier version with twelve rotors and a teletype machine interface, some replica bombes (some from a movie), the replica Colossus, and a collection of minor crypto-related items. The whole collection would fit in a corner of the Imperial War Museum.

It's a big country estate that needs to be maintained. There's a manor house, a lake with swans, some outbuildings, and the remainder of the famous "huts". There's far too much real estate for the exhibits. The technical exhibits aren't in the manor house at all. The manor house is used for conferences and such. The upkeep on all that real estate is the problem.

It's nice that it's being maintained, but there's not that much to see there.

Re:Love for old crypto

[Patchw0rk F0g]

Actually, I just re-read that recently. Not only does it add to the appreciation of what our fore-fathers were doing, but brings it up to date (at the time, at least) with what was/is current in cryptonography.

I'm glad that Bletchley's getting a new lease on life. There is/was a museum in Oshawa, Ontario that was dedicated to the Canadian war effort, and had at one time information as to the efforts that we gave to similar code-breaking endeavours. As of time of writing, I think that's been over-grown by an airport expansion. Sad. I hope they kept those logs and diaries for future generations.

That was my first foray into crypto. I hope someone saved it so that it's someone else's first exposure to it, too.

GCHQ showing itself for what it is

[Anonymous Coward]

Bletchley Park (I have some VAXen that went through you at one point, and we'll both pretend you crushed the media... ;-) is the father of GCHQ, the British sorta-NSA. It would not, of course, dream of allocating any part of its budget to the memory of its intellectual founders, because it differs from Bletchley in one important respect: Bletchley fought a real war against a real threat to the nation.

On the off-chance that the guys that jumped into the Service from the same crappy minor public school I went to are reading this: sorry to hear you weren't good enough to get into the City, and let Ulbricht serve as your modest guide to the new century. No matter what you achieve, your old schoolchums will always know that you did it because you weren't bright enough to do anything more creative.

Bletchley staff

[Kittenman]

Back in the '80s, my Dad and stepmother were watching a TV show on Bletchley here in NZ. During the adverts, My Dad mentioned that he'd been there (minor capacity - probably a clerk, but lord knows). Turns out that my stepmother was there too, different dates.

What I thought interesting was that they didn't talk about it for at least 40 years after the work there. The security aspect, and war reticence, I guess.