by Sue Black
After we had chatted for a bit, Christian set up a Twitter account for Bletchley Park: @bletchleypark. He showed Kelsey how to use Twitter to its full advantage, and he set up a Flickr account and group so that everyone who was interested in Bletchley could add their own photos and find other Bletchley Park-related images. Christian also came up with the hashtag #bpark, which has been used ever since to share news and thoughts about Bletchley Park.
Once we were done with social media setup, we had a grand tour led by Kelsey. We even went to the Bletchley Park Post Office and Toy Museum (unfortunately no longer on site). In the Toy Museum, I was amazed to see a book that I had read when I was about six years old; it brought me back to my childhood, and even in this old place, with all its history, I felt momentarily rather old myself! As always the tour was fabulous, very evocative and with something for everyone. We moved on to the cottages where some of the top codebreakers worked, then to The National Museum of Computing – which is of course Mecca to a geek like me; I could spend all day in there. In fact Mike said exactly that as we were leaving the museum:
“This place is the geek Mecca.” We all agreed.
We then walked down to have a look at one of my favourite places at Bletchley Park – the furnace. It is where all of the paper used for writing down the codes/decrypts were burnt. As Christian said, it’s “like the forerunner of the modern day shredder”. It feels like a very symbolic place to me. I can just imagine people walking down there every night during the war with the paper used that day, burning it in the furnace (which was located on land that’s unfortunately no longer owned by Bletchley Park). Even as the day’s paper burned, there would probably already be messages coming through which needed to be deciphered for the next day. The position of the wheels on the Enigma or Lorenz machines was changed every day, which meant the code had to be cracked afresh every 24 hours; many of the workings, notes and messages from the previous day were therefore no longer useful and so were taken to the furnace and burnt.
L to R Christian, Mike, Kelsey, and me Next for us was the Bombe rebuild, where I’d had the very conversation that had sparked my interest in the Women of Station X almost six years previously. John Turner gave us a demonstration of the Bombe rebuild which was, as always, awe-inspiring, then we had a look at the other exhibits in the same block and finished up in the gift shop. Jamillah suggested that she interview each of us for her BBC Pods and Blogs show. As she interviewed Mike and Christian, I walked over to the lake and spent a few minutes thinking about all of the people who had worked there, most sadly no longer with us. That reflection inspired a fantasy that Bletchley Park should become a living museum. Just imagine if visitors could really get a sense of what it was like there during WWII: you arrive at the entrance and are questioned by a sentry and not allowed in until you show the correct ID; once you’ve gained entry, there are people sitting by the lake who will talk to you about their jobs running the Bombe and Colossus machines; and there’s someone playing the role of Alan Turing, walking or riding around on his bicycle, happy to answer questions about his life there . . .
Jamillah Knowles
@jemimah_knight
RT @Documentally: Ditto . . . Thanks to @bletchleypark & @Dr_Black for inviting us. @sizemore &
@documentally Wowed. #bpark
8:49 PM – 14 Jan 09
Sue Black
@Dr_Black
@sizemore @documentally @jemimah_knight thank u all so, so much 4 today it was absolutely wonderful.
I really can’t thank u enough #bpark
10:49 PM – 14 Jan 09
The thing about Bletchley Park, of course, is that history does seem to come alive there; it’s a very special site, and it had been absolutely fabulous to spend the day there with people who were equally convinced that it needed to be saved. It was very exciting to hear about the digital tools that Mike, Christian and Jamillah knew that Bletchley Park could use to help get a whole new audience involved. As I had hoped, it really seemed that Bletchley Park wasn’t properly funded not because people didn’t care, but because not enough of the people that cared knew the reality of the situation.
I left with a real sense of hope that we had taken a massive step forward with the campaign. Mike, Christian and Jamillah are wonderful people who really care about the important things in life. I felt very honoured to have met and spent a day with them. None of them had to be there at Bletchley Park that day; they had all volunteered to come along. I thought that their involvement could really help make a dramatic difference to Bletchley Park over the next few months, and I left looking forward to seeing how their influence and input would play out.
Can Twitter save Bletchley Park?
A few days later, Jamillah let us know that she had produced a podcast about our two-day Bletchley Park fest, starting with Jerry Roberts and then moving on to our visit to Bletchley Park and TNMOC. One of the students who had been at Jerry’s talk had written a blog post about the talk, in which she’d written:
“It was a true honour for me to listen to him talk and describe how they broke the code and what understanding the code meant for the war effort . . . It was an inspiring talk about what our studies can bring to us, and to see him so humble and carefully describing to us his experiences and answering our questions was very enlightening.
Thank you Captain Roberts. Not just for today, but for your work at Bletchley Park to you and the others in the team, who are often not thought about. If it weren’t for you, life as we know it may not be there!”
I completely agree.
That evening I wrote a quick blog post of my own, pointing people to Jamillah’s podcast on the BBC Pods and Blog page, linking to the blog post about Jerry Roberts’ talk, and including another plug for the online 10 Downing Street petition.
I was starting to think that Twitter could actually play a key role in the campaign and that it could be the one thing that made all the difference.
Sue Black
@Dr_Black
Hey wouldn’t it be cool if Twitter saved Bletchley Park! Ideas anyone? #bpark
12:35 PM – 24 Jan 09
An extreme programme of blogging
Back in 2006, while working as a reader at London South Bank University, I received a very nice email out of the blue. It was from a guy called Jason Gorman who was working as a consultant at Symbian, a mobile operating system producer. He had been reading my PhD thesis, was interested in my research, and suggested meeting up for a chat. After I got over the shock of finding out that someone had, of their own volition, read my PhD thesis, I felt very happy that I would have someone to talk to about my research. We met up a few days later and had a good chat about code, software systems and ripple effects. We were both interested in finding solutions to help programmers visualise the ramifications of any changes they might make to the software they were working on. We chatted about this for some time over a couple of beers and became fast friends.
Sue Black
@Dr_Black
Right! Time to get ready and go uptown for Extreme Tuesday ‘Blogging for Bletchley’ talk. Hope I do a good job . . . it’s so important #bpark
5:16 PM – 27 Jan 09
Over the next couple of years we had lots of discussions about software and coding; we both felt that a practical, problem-based approach to coding was the right way forward.
jasongorman
@jasongorman
And don’t forget Blogging for Bletchley at the Extreme Tuesday Club tonight – 7:30pm
9:56 AM – 27 Jan 09
Sue Black
@Dr_Black
And don’t forget Blogging for Bletchley at the Extreme Tuesday Club tonight – 7:30pm (via @jasongorman) #bpark
10:10 AM – 27 Jan 09
Jason was also involved with a group called Extreme Tuesday, which held regular meetings for people interested in Extreme Programming. I had spoken to Jason many times about Bletchley and how imp
ortant it was, and in January 2009, he invited me to talk to the Extreme Tuesday club about Bletchley Park. On the 27th January, I met up with Jason and the other Extremers in a pub in the City and told them all about how Bletchley Park needed saving. They were a small but lovely group of interested people. For me it was particularly memorable; it was one of the first times I spoke to a group of people about Bletchley Park; up to this point I had mostly been talking to people on an individual basis.
It was over the course of that evening, too, that Jason coined the phrase “Blogging for Bletchley”. After I had given my talk, he put a great amount of effort into mobilising people to write blog posts about Bletchley Park to raise both awareness and funds. In Jason’s words:
Blogging For Bletchley –
Meeting in London, Tues Jan 27th
From Jason Gorman’s Software People Inspiring
20 January 2009
Do you use a computer? Do you have a blog?
If the answer to both of these questions is “yes” then Bletchley Park needs you!
Bletchley Park is a country estate in the South East of England where two very important things happened:
1. Some very clever people cracked the German Enigma code, which allowed the allies to intercept vital information and even spread vital disinformation that led directly to victory in World War II.
2. The same very clever people did this by inventing the world’s first electronic computer
To my mind, this makes Bletchley Park the centre of the post-war universe. It’s a very important part of our modern heritage.
Bletchley is now a museum and tourist attraction. But years of neglect and a crippling lack of funds have left the place in a shocking state. I struggle to think of any nation worth their salt who would have let such an important part of their history end up as run down.
Bletchley needs love and attention. It also needs about 10 million quid to make necessary repairs and to restore it to its former glory.
You can help by spreading the word on your blog, and by asking other bloggers to spread the word, too. Every single one of us owes Bletchley a massive debt of gratitude for creating the very industry that feeds and clothes us (and runs our XBox 360’s). The least we could do is say a few words and alert our readers to Bletchley’s plight.
Dr Sue Black, Head of Information & Software Systems at University of Westminster, has been campaigning tirelessly to save Bletchley Park. Sue has kindly agreed to come along to the Extreme Tuesday Club at The Counting House, 50 Cornhill, London to tell us all about the campaign and to educate us on what we can do to help.
If you’re in town and are interested in blogging for Bletchley Park, please drop in. Sue’s talk will start at 7:30pm (it won’t take long, leaving plenty of time for socialising afterwards).
If you’re too far away to make it, I’ll be videotaping Sue’s talk so you’ll get to see it, too.
Coincidentally, Sue’s PhD was on the ripple effect in code (y’know, you change one bit of the code and it ripples out to dependent parts of the software). Let’s see if we can’t start our own ripple through our network of blogs and get the word about Bletchley out to as many people as possible.
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
There are lots of opportunities
Looking back through my tweets from this time, I can see that I was always searching for opportunities to connect with people who might be interested in the campaign. On the way to the pub to meet up with Jason and Extreme Tuesday, for instance, I’d had a chat on Twitter with Lewis Shepherd, who was a manager for Microsoft in the US, and had asked him if he knew about Bletchley Park and its amazing history and achievements. That evening Lewis kindly tweeted a link to my savingbletchleypark.org blog and said that he would spread the word. Excellent news!
Lewis Shepherd
@lewisshepherd
@Dr_Black Looked at your great website, will solicit help/support from friends! www.savingbletchleypark.org #bpark
5:49 PM – 27 Jan 09
Sue Black
@Dr_Black
@lewisshepherd Fabulous! Thank you so much :-) Do let me know if I can help #bpark
6:00 PM – 27 Jan 09
It’s also clear from my tweets that campaigning can be exhausting. When asked if I had seen a screening of Enigma on television, a film based on the book by Robert Harris and something that I had really been looking forward to watching, my reply was:
jonwinterbourn
@jonwinterbourn
Curious to know what @Dr_Black made of Enigma. Shame it wasn’t filmed @bletchleypark, else the cast might be asked to join the campaign.
8:40 AM – 26 Jan 09
Sue Black
@Dr_Black
@jonwinterbourn I fell asleep! :( gonna try again soon. 4 kids, working full time and campaigning on the side = tired at weekends ;)
11:18 PM – 27 Jan 09
It was tiring, constantly thinking about how to make the change that I wanted to see happen and move the campaign forward. But it was also extremely exciting, especially when some of the people that I spoke to agreed with me, and, like Jason, went off and did something themselves to make the change happen. Jason also went on to organise a comedy fundraiser for Bletchley called “Boffoonery” starring Robert Llewellyn, Maggie Philbin and Stephen Fry among others, which raised thousands of pounds. That was a great feeling; it gave me real hope. Just like when I’d found that the Heads and Professors of Computer Science across the country felt the same way that I did about Bletchley Park and signed the petition to save it, having the active support of Jason and others gave me strength and confidence. I wasn’t alone – there was an army of people out there that felt the same way as me, I was sure of it. The challenge was to find and mobilise them.
So I was always looking for opportunities to talk to new audiences about Bletchley Park, to find new groups of people that I could tell about the campaign. I had approached the organisers of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2009, which was to be held in Vancouver. I asked them if I could give a five minute talk to the conference delegates, the top software engineering academics in the world, and they very kindly agreed. I had wanted to go to ICSE since I started my PhD in 1994 but had never had the funds to attend, so I was very excited to be going. Finally, I would get to meet some of the people whose papers I had been reading and citing over the years.
Sue Black
@Dr_Black
have been accepted to give a 5 minute talk about Bletchley Park at ICSE2009 in May to raise awareness, am very excited :-) #bpark
12:59 AM – 29 Jan 09
By the end of January 2009, my brain was going into overdrive. I was tweeting so many people, sharing my and others’ ideas for how to get recognition and funds: codebreaking iPhone apps, a short film with Stephen Fry introducing celebrities and Bletchley Park veterans saying why it should be saved, a “World Geek Forum” with a team programming competition at the Park, a “Song for Bletchley” . It actually makes me feel a bit sad now to read through my tweets from that time, knowing that we still haven’t managed to do some of these things.
Sue Black
@Dr_Black
How about an iPhone app that’s codebreaking related, game possibly, where money raised goes to BP? Anyone wanna write it? #bpark
9:38 AM – 31 Jan 09
Sue Black
@Dr_Black
@sizemore how about short film w sfry intro asking celebs+BPvets etc why BP should b saved. Show it b4 films and @ CS confs. Like ur #amp08
9:35 AM – 31 Jan 09
Sue Black
@Dr_Black
@bletchleypark how about holding a team programming competition at BP? World geek forum or something?
9:05 AM – 31 Jan 09
Sue Black
@Dr_Black
Hey! Does anyone know any musicians that could put toge
ther a “Song for Bletchley”? I’m happy to play the triangle ;) #bpark
8:59 AM– 31 Jan 09
One thing that did happen, however, was that Kelsey Griffin mentioned to me that Adam Ficek from the band Babyshambles was from Bletchley and that he was interested in visiting. I started tweeting with Adam, and he visited Bletchley Park and then wrote a song called “Bletchley Park”!
One of the most amazing people I met during the campaign was a man called Brian Oakley. I had met Brian a few months previously when I’d gone to Bletchley Park with Professor Caroline Wardle and her friend Fran Allen – the first female winner of the ACM Turing award. Brian had been one of our tour guides, and he was obviously moved by the fact that Bletchley Park was getting more notice and publicity. It had been clear to me then that he cared very deeply for the place. We kept in touch after that meeting, and, after finding out that we lived only five miles from each other, Brian invited us round one afternoon for tea with him and his wife Marian. My partner Paul and my youngest daughter Leah came along and we had a lovely afternoon. I somehow hadn’t realised until then that Brian had been director of the Alvey Programme, a government-sponsored research programme, which had given some focus to software engineering and formal methods, two of the areas that I had carried out research into during my PhD.
Bletchley Park was a key in the defeat of Nazis efforts to invade this country and dominate the world, it is the least that this country can do to preserve what little remains of that invaluable establishment for future generations to see just what happened in this country during WWII