by Sue Black
Sure enough, after a couple of minutes David walked past me, and I was asked to go over and sit on the sofa. Over I went. I could feel my heart pounding away strongly in my chest. I was trying to keep calm and not to feel scared, but it wasn’t easy. The presenters were really friendly and obviously used to putting people at ease quickly. I relaxed a bit. A minute or two later the video finished and the cameras turned on. I had the sudden urge to run out of the studio and wondered why on earth I had agreed to go on live national television, especially considering I’d drunk so much beer the night before.
Joy at PM’s codebreaker apology
11 September 2009
BBC News
Gordon Brown has said he was sorry for the “appalling” way World War II codebreaker Alan Turing was treated for being gay.
In 1952 Turing was prosecuted for gross indecency after admitting a sexual relationship with a man. Two years later he killed himself.
Dr Sue Black, from the Saving Bletchley Park campaign, said she was delighted at the prime minister’s apology.
I was asked questions, and I answered them, but because of my lack of sleep and my panic at being on national TV talking about a subject I didn’t know in great depth, I found it quite hard. Nevertheless, I just tried to do my best. I spoke about how, when Turing was faced with a choice between prison and chemical castration, he chose chemical castration, which caused him to grow breasts. What an awful choice to have to make. Soon it was all over; someone came over and got me and took me back to the green room. Phew! I sat down and looked at my notes. Oh dear, I had got a fact wrong. How embarrassing. Ah well – I would get it right at 8.30am, when there would probably be more people watching.
I had a call from BBC Radio London on my phone, so I went out of the room to be somewhere quieter while I was interviewed by them. The interview went well and I went back to the green room, and soon enough it was time to do it all over again: I went through to the studio and, after a short wait like last time, went over to the sofa again. I apologised to the female presenter for getting my facts wrong the previous time. She was very kind and said it was fine. The interview went more smoothly the second time and I think I answered all the questions correctly.
After my second appearance on Breakfast Time, I was taken over to the BBC Today programme studio. I sat in the anteroom and was then taken through and shown a chair opposite John Humphrys. After a minute or two he said something about Gordon Brown and Turing and the apology and then said: “So, Mrs Black, what is the significance of this apology, does it really matter?”
I was so surprised at being called Mrs Black that for a few milliseconds I didn’t know what to say. But then the adrenaline kicked in and I replied, feeling a bit more relaxed than I had an hour or two previously. As with the interview on the sofa, just a minute later it was all over. I was shown out of the studio and to the front desk where I sat watching Breakfast Time on the large TV screen while I waited for a car to take me into London to start my work day.
I sat there thinking, remembering the night before at Twestival. The text from Bletchley Park, the exchange with Stephen Fry, the call from Bletchley and then the BBC. Going to bed late and then getting up early and trying to absorb as much information as possible from Alan Turing’s Wikipedia page. So much had happened in the last 12 hours.
I looked down at my boots. I’d not taken my boot off since the previous morning. One boot was properly zipped up and the other just had the zip stuck halfway down with the top gaping open. Luckily it was hidden under my trouser leg, so I’m sure no one had noticed. Well, it was just going to have to stay on for another eight hours at least, as I had a day’s work ahead of me.
Sue Black
@Dr_Black
Phew. That was all a little bit stressful. But actually I seem to be getting used to it now :) I hope I’ve done some good 4 #bpark
9:02 AM – 11 Sep 09
My car arrived to take me to a meeting with the civil society group that my friend Lucian Hudson was setting up. We were participating in a half-day workshop run by the Tavistock Centre that I was really looking forward to. I got into the car, and we had just driven through the gates of TV Centre out and down the road towards Shepherds Bush when my phone rang. It was the BBC asking where I was and if I could go and film a piece with them for the lunchtime news. I asked the driver to take me back to TV Centre.
When we got there, there was a cameraman and an interviewer waiting for me. They wanted to film me standing in front of the TV Centre in the small garden area near the front gates. We walked over to the space and I started having flashbacks to what had been my favourite TV programme in the 1970s: Blue Peter. I was now standing being interviewed in a place that I remembered seeing Valerie Singleton, John Noakes and Peter Purves standing all those years ago. It was a bit surreal.
It took about 15 minutes to get a reasonable take for the news, as every time we started speaking there would be a loud noise, either from the nearby traffic or from a helicopter overhead. But eventually we managed to record without a major interruption, and then I was back in the car to head into central London. The work day was just beginning.
HLF is gonna fund you
After all the excitement of the apology from the Prime Minister and the BBC interviews, life settled back into a more normal pace. I was invited to view an exhibition called “Gay Icons” at the National Portrait Gallery in London, which included a picture of Alan Turing.
It was so great to see that the public were really embracing Alan Turing as a significant figure. What should have happened in Alan’s lifetime was happening more than 50 years after his death. Better late than never, I suppose. But I did, and still do, feel upset when I think of what he did for this country and juxtapose that with the barbaric way that he was treated.
So things carried on as usual. I spent a lot of my spare time tweeting and conversing with people about Bletchley Park, encouraging them to spread the word, and of course to also visit. The number of people involved with the campaign had been gradually increasing and I now felt that every time I went online there were quite a few friends and supporters that I could chat to about how things were going.
And then, on the 28th September, I got a call from Kelsey asking me if I could be at Bletchley Park the next morning as the Heritage Lottery Fund were going to announce that the recent Bletchley Park application had been successful. How amazing! Some substantial funding from an established UK institution. This, to me, was the first real sign that everything was going to be OK. Up until now things had been going well and we had got quite a lot of coverage in the press and through social media. But this funding meant that the British establishment were now finally seeing a future for Bletchley Park. Simon Greenish had told me that he had turned Bletchley Park from an organisation that was losing money to one that was just about breaking even, and that was crucial because no one with any sense would invest in an organisation that was losing money. The funding from Heritage Lottery was £450,000. This was a substantial sum of money, but more importantly it demonstrated that Bletchley Park was now seen as worthy of investment.
Unfortunately I couldn’t be at Bletchley the next morning to meet the people from Heritage Lottery and the media, but that didn’t matter. Bletchley Park was on the way up. My Twitter stream went crazy, with everyone excited that Bletchley Park had received its first substantial amount of funding. Stephen Fry tweeted that it was the Heritage Lottery Fund’s purpose to support exactly this type of organisation. He had tweeted after the Turing apology that getting funding for Bletchley Park was the next goal. Maybe he had had a quiet word with the people involved with Heritage Lottery. Who knows? The main thing was that this was another major turning point.
Hannah Nicklin
@hannahnicklin
@Dr_Black the @stephenfry quote is right, this is the HLF’s purpose. Well done for your tireless efforts. Big buckets of WIN ^_^
12:40 AM –
29 Sep 09
Sue Black
@Dr_Black
@hannahnicklin thx hon, and thx so much for ur help xxxxxxx
12:45 AM – 29 Sep 09
Sue Black
@Dr_Black
Thk gdness 4 #bpark HLF success :) It means that
@bletchleypark and I don’t have 2 chain ourselves 2 House of Commons railings tmoz! ;)
12:47 AM – 29 Sep 09
I blogged about the amazing news from the Heritage Lottery Fund, thanking everyone for their support, saying that this was not the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning. It was great news and a step forward, but I really didn’t want everyone to think that it was all OK now and that they could forget about Bletchley Park. I reminded everyone that Bletchley needed £250,000 per year in operating costs for at least the next five years and another £6 million in funding for renovation work, and that without that money it could still close. The Early Day Motion that had been set up in July by Phil Willis MP had gained quite a few signatures; that had perhaps helped persuade the Heritage Lottery panel that there was a groundswell of support for Bletchley, adding to its future viability. But there was still plenty of work to be done.
Paper trip funder
One of the things that I was really keen to do as part of the campaign was to connect Bletchley Park with the international museum network so that they could make contacts with other museums that might be able to offer advice and support. I also wanted to make the international museum community aware of Bletchley Park, its significance and its struggle to survive. I was convinced that getting a paper accepted at the Museums and the Web conference was the best way to do this. A few years earlier I had written a paper on women and museum websites with Professor Jonathan Bowen, a colleague at London South Bank University. We had presented the paper at Museums and the Web in Vancouver in 2005. I had really enjoyed the conference. It had been very diverse in terms of gender and background of participants. It was very relaxed and friendly, yet it was clear that everyone really cared about what they did and felt passionately about getting museums online and finding innovative ways of making that happen. My experience in 2005 led me to believe that this was a great network to connect Bletchley Park into.
I discussed the possibility of writing a paper with Jonathan and with Kelsey at Bletchley Park. They were both interested. I wanted to focus on what we were doing with social media to raise awareness and build up a supportive community around Bletchley Park; I thought it was cutting edge as I’d not seen any other museums doing anything like it at that time. We called the paper “Can Twitter save Bletchley Park?” Here is the abstract:
Bletchley Park is the historic site of secret British codebreaking activities during World War II and birthplace of the modern computer. The work carried out there is said to have shortened WWII by two years, saving possibly 22 million lives. The Park is now a museum, with a 26 acre site, many exhibitions and working rebuilds of machines such as the Colossus, a forerunner of today’s computers, invented to mechanize codebreaking. The museum is staffed by a 75% volunteer workforce and is grossly underfunded compared to its historical importance.
After a visit by Sue Black to Bletchley Park in July 2008, a campaign was launched to save it. A letter to the UK broadsheet newspaper The Times signed by 97 eminent UK computer scientists was published and highlighted in a BBC news broadcast. Following traditional media coverage, a blog was established, and then social media, (particularly Twitter), which have been used to great effect to raise awareness and support for the campaign. Other Web 2.0 technologies, including Facebook, have also been used as part of the campaign.
This paper explores the effectiveness of this approach, using statistical evidence as appropriate, highlighting how the use of social media has contributed greatly to campaign success. Since the Saving Bletchley Park campaign started, visitor numbers have increased, along with public awareness of the contribution of the site to world heritage and the history of the computer.
Campaign efforts have received national coverage on television, on radio, and in the press and have contributed to the Park recently receiving £460K funding and a potential further £4 million funding from the UK Heritage Lottery Fund.
Read more: Archives & Museum Informatics: Museums and the Web 2010: Papers: Black, S., et al., Can Twitter Save Bletchley Park? http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2010/papers/black/black.html#ixzz2ZcX5gWPZ
We put the abstract together, sent it off just before the deadline, and waited to see if it would be accepted. It wasn’t long before we found out that it had been. How exciting!
However, my excitement at finding out that our paper had been accepted turned to dismay when I realised that I had now put Bletchley Park in the position of having to pay for Kelsey and possibly me to go to Denver to present our paper. Whilst trying to do something good, I had inadvertently done something which in my eyes was very bad: I had added to Bletchley Park’s financial worries.
I was quite perturbed and spoke about my concerns on Twitter. I was really annoyed with myself for not thinking ahead and realising that this might happen. My friends on Twitter were very supportive – particularly Paul Clarke (@Paul_Clarke) and Daren Forsyth (@Daren140), who suggested that it would be a good idea to set up a JustGiving account and ask our community on Twitter for financial aid. At first I was hesitant, but they persuaded me that it was a smart thing to do, that people would want to help, and that, frankly, I would be an idiot not to try. I love my Twitter friends!
So, the upshot of our conversation was that, after clearing it with Simon and Kelsey at Bletchley Park, I set up a JustGiving account, asking for £2,500 for Kelsey and me to be able to attend Museums and the Web 2010. Here’s what we wrote:
Hi there!
Can you help us to raise awareness of Bletchley Park at Museums and the Web 2010?? Bletchley Park would like to send Kelsey Griffin and me to give our paper at the #MW2010 conference in Denver next April.
You probably know the story of how I went up to Bletchley Park, loved it, heard that it might have to shut because they were short of cash, then started a campaign to make sure that could never happen? You don’t? OK, please have a read of my blog first then. That’ll give you all the exciting details of lunch with Stephen Fry and much, much more :))))
So, Bletchley Park. The place where the codebreakers worked during WWII, shortening the war by approx. 2 years thus saving possibly 22 million lives, *and* the place the first computer was invented. It is a very important place. It’s the Geek Mecca!
So, as I was saying, in a nutshell, I went up to Bletchley Park, fell head over heels in love with the place, got upset at the financial situation it finds itself in, and decided to do something about it. I’ve been campaigning for 18 months now to ensure that Bletchley Park is there for our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren to enjoy. To help them understand what happened there and the massive contribution that it has made to the world we live in today.
Kelsey Griffin from Bletchley Park, Professor Jonathan Bowen from Museophile, and I have had a paper accepted for the Museums and the Web conference 2010 in Denver. It is entitled “Can Twitter save Bletchley Park?” Kelsey and I would really like to go to present our paper, but have no funds to do that. That’s where you come in. Could you please give a small amount towards our trip? It is not only about going and presenting the paper. It is about helping Bletchley Park get on the international map with other museums and their staff across the world. It is about helping a ridiculously underfunded museum get out there to talk to others in their field, to get ideas, create a network of contacts, be inspired.
Together we can not only save Bletchley Park, but make sure that it gets the recognition it deserves.
Thanks very much for your time
Sue – @Dr_Black
I set up the JustGiving page a couple of weeks before Christmas 2009 and started tweeting, as
king friends to help us so that we could attend the conference, deliver our paper, and connect Bletchley Park with the international museum community. I also mentioned it to everyone that I met.
I needn’t have worried about raising the money. Amazingly, in less than two weeks, we had reached our target, though we kept fundraising in the new year – one donor gave a substantial contribution directly to Bletchley Park, which wasn’t reflected on the JustGiving website, so it took us a little longer to “officially” reach our target. Sixty-eight amazing supporters gave us money just before Christmas, at a time when many people need every last penny to pay for their Christmas celebrations. The wonderful Paul Clarke even offered to go and take photos of people for free as long as they put some money towards our JustGiving campaign.
Paul Clarke
@paul_clarke
another few quid raised for http://www.justgiving.com/sueblack from some of my photography. C’mon, let’s get to 100%, people! #bpark
3:02 PM – 9 Feb 10
Paul also very kindly went and gave a talk about the campaign at a conference when I was ill and couldn’t do it myself. So many people, especially those that I met through Twitter, really went out of their way to help the campaign. It was incredible – I really couldn’t believe the generosity of the people who had supported us. It was a real lesson for me in how much so many people cared about Bletchley Park
So, we had our paper accepted and we had the money to go. All we needed to do now was actually write the paper! It took some time, and we were all still at it the night before we needed to submit. I had a moment of panic: what if we missed the submission deadline? How would I explain that to everyone who had invested their time, energy and money in making sure that we were able to go?