Cracking the Code
I was sorry to see that Bletchley Park is in trouble. One of the manifold fun things I've been doing in recent real life, and not writing about, was going there for a day out. Last month, after we'd come back from Paris, we had one more day of holiday, and might well have spent it loafing around the house, and doing nothing much in particular, if we hadn't been listening to Radio 4; but when The Reunion happened to have brought together a group of codebreakers who'd helped win the war, and then not mentioned it for thirty years, we listened to their reminiscences, had breakfast, and drove in the direction of Milton Keynes to look at their huts.
We did remark at the time that it felt like the sort of place which was clearly run with an enormous amount of enthusiasm and knowledge, but probably not very much money. Hopefully a larger institution (The National Trust? The Imperial War Museum? I don't know enough about museum funding to guess what might be a reasonable scenario...) will be able to absorb the site, or a benefactor will emerge with enough cash to keep it viable for a bit longer.
The trouble is that the wonder of Bletchley lies in the ideas that were conceived there, and the people who thought of them. There are, of course, real Enigma machines (including the one which was stolen and returned to Jeremy Paxman) and reconstructions of the bombes, and the rebuilt Colossus (no doubt everyone spots that the technician who monitors Colossus has a laptop, almost certainly with more processing capacity, and not taking up an entire room to do it - I suspect this is done deliberately), and these are all worth seeing; but it's the brilliance of the minds behind Bletchley which is the really impressive thing about what happened there, and the fact that you're right on the spot gives an insight into the circumstances in which they had to work. Unfortunately, I bet that sort of thing is quite fascinating enough for old men like me, but it must be a difficult sell to young people who like their 21st century museums to be interactive and shiny; and who are of a generation where even their grandparents aren't old enough to remember the war.
Personally, I liked being able to walk amongst the actual buildings where it all happened, with white_hart, who had even dressed up in appropriate period style, and feel what day-to-day life in Station X in 1942 might have been like; so I'm extra glad I did it before economics dictates that the artefacts end up in an American university, and the house is sold to be an outpost of some multinational conglomerate. Fingers crossed.
We did remark at the time that it felt like the sort of place which was clearly run with an enormous amount of enthusiasm and knowledge, but probably not very much money. Hopefully a larger institution (The National Trust? The Imperial War Museum? I don't know enough about museum funding to guess what might be a reasonable scenario...) will be able to absorb the site, or a benefactor will emerge with enough cash to keep it viable for a bit longer.
The trouble is that the wonder of Bletchley lies in the ideas that were conceived there, and the people who thought of them. There are, of course, real Enigma machines (including the one which was stolen and returned to Jeremy Paxman) and reconstructions of the bombes, and the rebuilt Colossus (no doubt everyone spots that the technician who monitors Colossus has a laptop, almost certainly with more processing capacity, and not taking up an entire room to do it - I suspect this is done deliberately), and these are all worth seeing; but it's the brilliance of the minds behind Bletchley which is the really impressive thing about what happened there, and the fact that you're right on the spot gives an insight into the circumstances in which they had to work. Unfortunately, I bet that sort of thing is quite fascinating enough for old men like me, but it must be a difficult sell to young people who like their 21st century museums to be interactive and shiny; and who are of a generation where even their grandparents aren't old enough to remember the war.
Personally, I liked being able to walk amongst the actual buildings where it all happened, with white_hart, who had even dressed up in appropriate period style, and feel what day-to-day life in Station X in 1942 might have been like; so I'm extra glad I did it before economics dictates that the artefacts end up in an American university, and the house is sold to be an outpost of some multinational conglomerate. Fingers crossed.