Slashdot Mirror
No Museum Status For UK Home of Enigma Machine
hardsix writes "Despite the numerous films, books and plays, celebrating the brilliant achievements of the code-breakers at Bletchley Park, the UK government is still dragging its feet over providing proper support for the site. There has just been a debate in the House of Lords over whether the site should be given similar status to the UK's main WWII museum — the Imperial War Museum. But the government has brushed off the request, claiming that the site has received enough funding recently.
However, as was shown by a visit to the site by UK actor, and Twitter-lover Stephen Fry, although devices such as Enigma have been restored many of the huts where the code-breaking work went on are in a bad state and more investment is needed."
There is also a petition to the government to help save Bletchley Park on the number 10 web site.
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/BletchleyPark/
IT was the home of the Colossus, which could decode messages encoded by the Enigma machines:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bletchley_park#Cryptanalysis
Please try and get the simple stuff right. It's what being a geek is about.
No-one will ever disregard the machine itself- you don't even have to RTFA to see that "devices such as Enigma have been restored". The government are dragging their collective feet over whether to provide funding to restore the *site*, a collection of 70 year old ramshackle huts. The Enigma will live on, in some machine or other. Maybe it'd even be better in another museum- I imagine that the environment of the Science Museum (for instance) is better suited to keeping it in good tradition than a leaky hut in Bletchley.
Uh, what? Bletchley Park is an estate. The buildings would be the museum, not the grass.
FWIW, the actual text of what was said in the Lords can be found ont he Parliament website: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200809/ldhansrd/text/90519-0001.htm#09051975000669
If it's something worthwhile or absolutely necessary, then sure. If it's going to be a fucking McDonald's, then it shouldn't, there are enough of those.
The site is in the middle of a housing estate with not enough passing trade for a McDonalds, and there are lots of malls & shopping centres not far away, so it would most likely be houses that they'd build.
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Nearly correct. The machine wasn't saved (Colossus was destroyed after the war in the name of secrecy). Much of the documentation wasn't saved (it was burned, see above). However, Colossus has been painstakingly rebuilt and a number of other artifacts have been collected, so yes, there is a collection.
There is some rational behind saving at least some of the huts. They provide a historical context that informs about the conditions under which the work was carried out. There are many fascinating pieces of history that are lost because they were originally designed to be "thrown away". For example, the gliders built to silently drop troops into France the night before D-Day are a fascinating footnote in aviation and military history, yet none of them survive today (other than replicas and various pieces). That is because every one that was built was deployed and they were designed to crash land and spring apart so the Jeep inside could be driven out.