Andy McSmith: Bletchley ... a national disgrace
[Andy McSmith is a senior reporter at The Independent.]
Sixty-six years ago in Block B of the old Bletchley Park, a discovery was made that saved thousands of lives. A young woman, doing the filing, noticed a lot of coded messages, all concerning fuel deliveries to a small village in northern Germany called Peenemünde.
She didn't think much of them at the time. But she reported the information upwards – and the Allies stumbled on the concealed factory site where the Germans were constructing the V1 and V2 flying bombs. An air strike later and the factory was destroyed. Proof, if ever it was needed, that a well-run filing system can help win a war.
Today moss, weeds and wild flowers have taken over in Block B, a place where the course of history was changed. Nature has reclaimed its ceiling and its floor, and unless something is done soon it will either collapse or be pulled down.
Bletchley Park is one of the world's greatest and most neglected wartime monuments. But large parts of it are being left to rot. The north wall of the main building, a 19th-century country house, is now covered in scaffolding, and part of the roof is missing. The Bletchley Park Trust scraped together £100,000 to repair a quarter of the roof. The rest of the building also needs attention, but the money is not there.
In the grounds nearby, a blue tarpaulin covers a whole wall of Hut 6. The windows are boarded; the white paint is so cracked that you could remove it with you thumbnail. It is so unsightly that it would have been broken up for firewood long ago, were it not for its incredible past.
This was where some of the world's cleverest mathematicians pored over passages of gobbledygook trying to find the formula that would convert it into intelligible German – and save Allied servicemen.
Having worked out the key to the code, they passed it through a connecting hatch to the adjacent, Hut 3. That, too, is now an unsightly morass of peeling paint, rotting planks, and boarded windows.
Everywhere around the site there are the same signs of decay. Even on the brick buildings, constructed to be shrapnel-proof, there is chipped masonry, rotting window ledges, chimneys in an unsafe condition, and guttering needing repairs. Weeds are everywhere.
For Block F, where Colossus, the world's first computer, was set to work in December 1943 reading the private messages between Hitler and the top command, it is already too late. It has been flattened to make way for a housing estate and grass pitch.
Bletchley's history since the war has been chequered to say the least. Originally it was the private property of the director of naval intelligence, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, who liked its handy location half way along the railway line that ran from Oxford to Cambridge.
In utmost secrecy it was taken over by the Government during the war where it became home to Britain's code-breakers in a story that would not be told until nearly 30 years later...
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
Sixty-six years ago in Block B of the old Bletchley Park, a discovery was made that saved thousands of lives. A young woman, doing the filing, noticed a lot of coded messages, all concerning fuel deliveries to a small village in northern Germany called Peenemünde.
She didn't think much of them at the time. But she reported the information upwards – and the Allies stumbled on the concealed factory site where the Germans were constructing the V1 and V2 flying bombs. An air strike later and the factory was destroyed. Proof, if ever it was needed, that a well-run filing system can help win a war.
Today moss, weeds and wild flowers have taken over in Block B, a place where the course of history was changed. Nature has reclaimed its ceiling and its floor, and unless something is done soon it will either collapse or be pulled down.
Bletchley Park is one of the world's greatest and most neglected wartime monuments. But large parts of it are being left to rot. The north wall of the main building, a 19th-century country house, is now covered in scaffolding, and part of the roof is missing. The Bletchley Park Trust scraped together £100,000 to repair a quarter of the roof. The rest of the building also needs attention, but the money is not there.
In the grounds nearby, a blue tarpaulin covers a whole wall of Hut 6. The windows are boarded; the white paint is so cracked that you could remove it with you thumbnail. It is so unsightly that it would have been broken up for firewood long ago, were it not for its incredible past.
This was where some of the world's cleverest mathematicians pored over passages of gobbledygook trying to find the formula that would convert it into intelligible German – and save Allied servicemen.
Having worked out the key to the code, they passed it through a connecting hatch to the adjacent, Hut 3. That, too, is now an unsightly morass of peeling paint, rotting planks, and boarded windows.
Everywhere around the site there are the same signs of decay. Even on the brick buildings, constructed to be shrapnel-proof, there is chipped masonry, rotting window ledges, chimneys in an unsafe condition, and guttering needing repairs. Weeds are everywhere.
For Block F, where Colossus, the world's first computer, was set to work in December 1943 reading the private messages between Hitler and the top command, it is already too late. It has been flattened to make way for a housing estate and grass pitch.
Bletchley's history since the war has been chequered to say the least. Originally it was the private property of the director of naval intelligence, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, who liked its handy location half way along the railway line that ran from Oxford to Cambridge.
In utmost secrecy it was taken over by the Government during the war where it became home to Britain's code-breakers in a story that would not be told until nearly 30 years later...