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Bletchley Park Faces Financial Rescue
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Jul 06, 2008 06:08 AM
from the admirable-work-deserves-commemoration dept.
from the admirable-work-deserves-commemoration dept.
biscuitfever11 writes "Just two months ago it seemed that Bletchley Park, the home of Station X, Britain's secret code-breaking base during the War, was doomed as the codebreakers' huts rotted and the site fell into disrepair. But today Britain's Lottery Fund is set to step in with a grant to rescue the ailing heritage site. (There was an earlier story on ZDNet.)"
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Bletchley Park Facing Financial Ruin 234 comments
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."
[+]
PGP Leads Corporate Efforts To Save Bletchley Park 83 comments
blake182 writes "CNET reports that PGP, together with IBM and other technology firms, is mounting a fundraising effort to benefit the ailing Bletchley Park, home of the Station X codebreaking efforts in World War II. 'We're calling attention (to the fact that) Bletchley is falling into disrepair, and that, probably, the world owes a debt of gratitude to that place,' said Phil Dunkelberger, chief executive of PGP."
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News: Cash Lifeline For Bletchley Park 63 comments
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."
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Faces? (Score:5, Funny)
I wish I has to face getting a lot of money from the lottery...
Ahh the lottery to the rescue (Score:1, Informative)
Britains voluntary tax on the mathematically challenged and the poor
run for profit by a US Company naturally
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Ahh, the peoples' right to choose. Last refuge of those who like to take advantage of others.
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That makes no sense at all. When people have no choice it becomes easier to take advantage of them.
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It makes complete sense.
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If you can MAKE them choose to be exploited, then you made the choice for them, effectively taking away their choice.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
No, the choice is still there. It's a psychological thing, make them think one choice is better than the other.
Kind of like making them think they're choosing whether to cross a desert or jump into a beer fountain full of hot babes and fruit. But it's a kind of environmental thing too. If there were a "smart" lottery, where only smart people could get a ticket, you'd have a different opinion of it than a "poor-tax" lottery.
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The opinion would be - why get a ticket in that lottery? It's got no prize fund.
"Smart people" don't gamble where the expectation of gain is significantly less than unity (your returns are not going to be much lower than your stake, and may be more). Fruit machines, one-armed bandits etc in the UK (the country under discussion) are required to pay out a minimum of about
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Yeah, we call that "marketing" these days.
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No, if there is no choice of action but one, then there is no way to change the chosen action, by very definition.
doesn't solve all the problems (Score:5, Interesting)
This won't solve the one big issue facing Bletchley, that of the site having very low appeal to visitors.
As much as they might wish it to be otherwise, a collection of huts (one of which is now a tea room, ah yes, nice treatment of history there guys...), a house, some vintage cars and a few cluttered rooms of junk that pass for 'exhibits' just doesn't appeal to people these days.
And yes, they really do look like rooms full of junk for the most part, sad to say, the presentation of their exhibits is not good at all.
Oh, and the reconstructed Collossus? It's just there, in the middle of a room, with barely any information top help kids or the otherwise uninformed relate to it.
Not that the site isn't ok to visit. If you're into WW2 stuff then its probably worth a look, but if you've got kids they will be bored out of their tiny minds all day.
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Re:doesn't solve all the problems (Score:5, Informative)
Are we talking about the same place? My wife and I went last week and ended up going on two consecutive days. It was absolutely brilliant - Colossus was up and running and we were given a talk through it by one of the re-build team. We also talked to them about the Tunny machine they are working on and the Heath Robinson they're also re-building despite the fact it never actually worked. There are also working bomb machines and very knowledgeable staff all other the site. I would have liked more technical detail then was easily available but I really did think it was excellent. Do a tour if you go and/or get an audio wand.
Parent
Re:doesn't solve all the problems (Score:4, Interesting)
I went last year and the Collossus was on its own, switched off, with only a small panel of text. Perhaps they've improved that part, or perhaps its not on every day.
What I did see was a lot of bored kids faces, and my son had no interest whatsoever, even though I tried to engage him.
The stuff I found interesting took less than an hour to see, after which it was try and get interested in what remained on the site to get my money's worth.
It's not that they aren't trying, its just that its not that interesting unless you already know something of the history. It most certainly isn't managing to compete as a venue for visitors, or it wouldn't have got into fiscal trouble to start with.
Parent
Re:doesn't solve all the problems (Score:4, Insightful)
(one of which is now a tea room, ah yes, nice treatment of history there guys...)
I bet one of them was a tea-room during WWII, too, although they would have called it a canteen then.
Parent
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In the US we don't seem to have much interest in our technological past. These days we seem to value museum exhibits to the extent that we can "brand" them to advertise the donor corporation. This sale to corporations of cultural artifacts and institutions for use as vehicles for advertising is everywhere. Everything from art exhibits to sports arenas are defaced with logos. Twenty years ago the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago had a really neat collection of IBM first-generation computing hardware
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In the US we don't seem to have much interest in our technological past.
Perhaps, but compared to the museums I saw in China a few years ago, the entire US is a veritable Smithsonian. For example, I was quite excited to visit the Xi'an Terra Cotta Warriors museum. It was laid out relatively well, but there were almost *no* explanations of anything you could see, in either Chinese or English. People would wander around, looking very quickly, but it was almost impossible to learn anything there. *Why* was a gold bowl of interest? It was beautiful, but did it belong to an Emperor?
A happy ending (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A happy ending (Score:4, Funny)
What, the huts were persecuted for being gay by the police until they hanged themselves?
I don't recall them saying that on the tour
Parent
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It must be a tiresome existence not being able to appreciate metaphor.
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I've always wondered where the name comes from. Now I know. Thanks Wikipedia!
Cryptonomicon (Score:4, Informative)
Alan Turing: The Enigma (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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I highly recommend Enigma: Battle for the Code. It's highly readable and informative at the same time.
http://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Battle-Code-Hugh-Sebag-Montefiore/dp/0471490350/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215385882&sr=1-1 [amazon.com]
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Or try "Station X" (Score:2)
Most Slashdotters probably don't need to be told this, but anyone interested in historical fiction about Bletchley Park shouldn't miss Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson [wikipedia.org]. It's entertaining and rich in technical detail.
I also recently (re)read "Station X" by Michael Smith, which gives first hand accounts of some of the many thousands of people who worked there. There's not a lot on the actual code breaking techniques, but it is, none the less, an interesting read (IMHO).
BTW: I visited Bletchley Park some years ago and found it quite interesting and this was before they had finished building a Bombe and Collosus.
BTW2: After the Station X TV series aired, I was amazed to find out that neighbour had actually worked there as
Visits to Bletchley Park (Score:2, Informative)
I took a class of learning disabled children to Bletchley Park a few years back - we had a great time trying on gas masks and stuff. Not a lot of money in that though, and it's not something they could easily let millions of people do. Having said that we also went to the Imperial War Museum in London - and it wasn't a patch on the Bletchley experience, and they seem to make it work.
The wooden huts surrounding a stately home are very much part of the deal - you can't really get rid of them : They really are
But who will save the UK IT industry? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sorry, but if the nest we can do is Rockstar (not knocking them, just being realistic) then will the last systems designer in the UK please turn off the server before emigrating? Fortunately, I expect to retire in a couple of years. Hopefully to somewhere where Government and other systems work.
Slightly off topic, today we discovered that the UK Government new release of the on-line tax system shows the accountant name, not the actual person for whom the form is being filled in. The guy on the help desk, when asked when it would be fixed, replied "I am not at liberty to disclose that". Not only is UK Government IT incompetent, it is secretive about it. (The Editor of Computer Weekly said that on the box last week.) So
Too bad about the lottery (Score:1)
Culture (Score:3, Interesting)
There's certainly an irony in using lottery income to fund culture.
But there's a bigger issue here: whether culture has intrinsic value, and whether it is worth raising people up. If we fund education for its effect in raising the consciousness of the population, we should also fund culture out of general taxation. All the same, given that the lottery fund is used for cultural promotion, Bletchley Park has a pretty good claim on a slice of that funding.
One almost wonders whether lottery funding is part o
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To hell with the poor! Intelligent people, not idiot slugs, got us where we are today. Enough with the tiresome worship of poor people, who by and large are poor because of personal defects. The poor, and the backwardness they wallow in, are not worthy of anything but scorn and contempt.
A memorial to the accomplishments of determined and intelligent people funded by a the stupid is fine with me.
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I agree. And in the UK specifically, that was true up to about the 1960s. Since then the poor have been getting more power, more say, more pandering, and there's more of them. Actually none of them are even genuinely, technically, poor any more. But since the late 60s the UK has been in steady decline. Now we have the fattest, drunkenest and most violent children in Europe, if not the World. That's what happens when you
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It's too bad something like this has to be paid for with a regressive tax like the lottery. There's no reason why the poor should pay a disproportionate amount of the upkeep of this place.
If money is already available as part of the lottery system, why should it not be used? Since money is already set aside, with the way the lottery system was set out, heritage should be one of the places receiving money. Nothing is stopping from other people pitching in separate to the lottery money allocation, but it does
mislead? (Score:4, Insightful)
LOTTERY!?!?! (Score:2, Insightful)
I read the comments to this article just to get a joke along the lines of:
Oh the irony! A tax on those who are bad at math funding the history of the greatest mathematicians of WWII.
I am sorely disappointed, slashdotters. Was it too easy? Surely I'm not the only one that laughed at the though?
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The actual design and build of the big machines was done by an engineer called Tommy Flowers [wikipedia.org], which introduces further semi-ironic coincidence as he was also responsible for designing and building ERNIE [wikipedia.org], the machine behind an earlier UK Government-run numbers racket
Hut 33 (Score:2, Informative)
Fun day trip from London (Score:3, Interesting)
I visited Bletchley Park a couple of years ago while on a trip to England. it was an easy day trip from London. The site is a very short walk from the train station, so no driving or bus is necessary to get there. It was a beautiful spring day when we were there and the grounds are quite lovely. They had the Colossus replica running which was very cool. The museum is quite nice as well. Later that night I met up for beers with some guys from my company's London office. They were shocked that we had made a day trip to Milton Keynes until we told them why we went. Apparently Londoners think of the area as a bit of a suburban wasteland.
I also got some cool semi-psychedelic pictures caused by a malfunctioning sensor in my digital camera.
I definitely recommend it as a place to visit if you have an afternoon in the greater London area.
Money go round (Score:2)
There's no money from the government (aka taxpayers) to pay to keep this historic place open, but somehow there is £18,000,000,000 of taxpayer cash for an Olympic games nobody wanted (except freeloaders, crooked politicians and builders).
Some nice Bletchley shots from last year (Score:2)
http://tinyurl.com/5lsa2x [tinyurl.com]
I took these in March of 2007.
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Er, here's how the Lottery funds really work (Score:2, Informative)
The summary is way off-beam. The Heritage Lottery Fund is nowhere near stepping in.
I quote: '"We are in serious discussions with the Heritage Lottery Fund. This is prime Lottery territory," said Greenish. "We haven't put in an application yet, but the rules have changed a bit which is helpful."'
Here's how HLF works. You put the application in. This is serious, serious hard work. It's not just "fill in a form and post it to PO Box Lottery". Expect to have a full-time team working on it for three months at le
How about volunteer efforts? (Score:1)
So is it possible to keep the site running on a more long-term basis by
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The "Crap-shacks" are where the Historic and important stuff happened.
The main House is very nice (I used it for a seminar a few years back - I'd recommend it as a location for anyone doing something similar) but we are not particularly short of nice old house. Its the complex which is significant and thehastily thrown up wartime buildings are worth preserving, even if they don't look pretty
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The main house is not very nice. It's an architectural mish mash and is about as ugly as a stately home could be. Were it not for its historical significance, it would have been levelled years ago and nobody would miss it.