by Sue Black
Finally, at five minutes to midnight, we clicked “submit”. Phew! The pressure was off, at least until the time came to actually travel to Denver and present the paper . . .
In November 2009 I sent 2125 tweets
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Can Twitter save Bletchley?
In March 2010 I got a call from Simon Greenish. He was excited because Bletchley had just had a call from the UK Government Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) asking them if they could spend £250,000 in the next week, before the end of the financial year. If they could, then the money was theirs.
How wonderful! Simon said that they could easily spend that and was really happy that it could be used for operational costs that were not very sexy, such as getting the drains and roofs fixed and resurfacing the car park and some of the internal roads. The announcement appeared in the press with Simon saying that the funding was hugely significant:
“This enormously appreciated funding boost will not only enable vital repair and maintenance of this WWII site for the benefit of our rapidly growing number of visitors, but it also represents endorsement by the DCMS that Bletchley Park is a place of national importance which deserves Government support.”
Ben Bradshaw MP, the head of DCMS, commended the work of the Bletchley Park Trust, saying:
“The work carried out at Bletchley Park had a huge impact on the course of the war, and the museum does a brilliant job in bringing this alive for people of all ages. But, having doubled its visitor numbers over the last three years, it urgently needs funds to keep it in good condition. I am delighted to announce this grant which will help renovate the buildings and ensure that future visitors enjoy a really high quality experience when they come here.”
It was great to see a key government figure talking about “future visitors” in the national press and stating that Bletchley Park had a “huge impact on the course of the war” and was doing a “brilliant job” – three extremely key messages. If I’d had to bet on the viability of Bletchley Park after this announcement, I would have staked my life on it being saved. I realised that up until now, I hadn’t really been certain of Bletchley Park’s future. Now that the government was recognizing the importance of the site, I had a strong feeling that Bletchley was probably going to be OK.
Things to do in Denver when you’re alive
In April 2010 Kelsey and I flew to Denver to present our paper at the Museums and the Web conference. We were funded by the generous Bletchley Park Twitter community, who’d supported us through our JustGiving page. Professor Jonathan Bowen, our co-author, managed to get funding from the Royal Society so that he could also attend. The prospect of taking Kelsey out to Denver to present the paper was exciting – I was so looking forward to introducing her to my friends in the museum community, particularly friends like Sarah Winmill, who is a massive Bletchley Park fan, an ambassador and committee member for the network that I started, BCSWomen, and Director of Information Systems at the Victoria and Albert museum in London.
I had wanted Kelsey to present our paper so that everyone got to know her name and face, but she thought that it would be better if I presented. We were part of a session of about ten speakers. There were about 300 people in the audience – I’d presented to about 400 people with Simon when we talked about Bletchley Park at EuroPython a few months earlier so I wasn’t fazed by the size of the audience. I was mainly worried about conveying the importance and historical significance of Bletchley Park as well as its financial situation in the few minutes that we had available.
The audience was fabulous. They obviously really appreciated and enjoyed the talk, and at the end of the session many people came over to discuss what they had heard. Kelsey and I probably spoke to about fifteen or twenty people at the end of the session as well as others throughout the rest of the conference who approached us asking for more information or offering help of some sort. It was great, just what I wanted to happen. One of the funny things was that many, though not all, of the people who came over to talk to us were from the UK. It’s rather ironic that we had flown thousands of miles to meet up with and chat to a bunch of museum people who were also from the UK! But I guess that is what happens at international conferences – you meet like-minded people from all over the world, including the place where you yourself have come from.
Anyway, it was wonderful. There was so much love and support for Bletchley Park and lots of new friends were made, including from the big London museums, the National Trust, the Royal Palaces and The Other Media, a digital agency based in London. We also met people from the Smithsonian and from museums around the world.
But there were other things going on in the world at the same time as the conference, one of which was about to affect us. The Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland had erupted, sending massive clouds of ash into the atmosphere and presenting a safety hazard for airlines. All planes were grounded in the UK – no planes were allowed in or out. We were due to fly home from the conference in the next day or so, along with many other people at the conference, and we were not sure what to do. How were we going to get home?
The conference organisers were amazing. They set up an information point and put out requests for people at the conference to host other delegates that couldn’t fly home. We decided in the end that we would be better off going to Washington, DC, to talk to people there about Bletchley Park; it was one step closer to home, and both Kelsey and I had friends there. While we were in Denver a friend of a friend of mine, Lisa Crispin (@lisacrispin), had got in touch with me via Twitter. She was based near Denver and coincidentally had been halfway to the UK to give a talk at Bletchley Park, but her plane had been forced to turn back because of the volcanic disruption. She had seen that I was in Denver, tweeted me and suggested meeting up.
Kelsey and I met Lisa for breakfast at the conference hotel on the day before we were now due to fly to DC. We had a great chat about agile testing – Lisa is an expert on the subject, and it relates to my PhD and other research – and we also know quite a few of the same people. She is also a big fan of Bletchley Park. Then Lisa said, “So what are you guys planning on doing today?” We told her we were thinking of trying to get out of the city for the day to see a bit of countryside. Lisa, being the wonderful person that she is, invited us to spend the day with her at her friend Anna’s ranch up in the mountains. We accepted straight away. What a wonderful opportunity.
Lisa drove us to Anna’s ranch and we had a wonderful day meeting all of Anna’s animals, including several llamas. Anna gave me a horse riding lesson, and we also had a go at driving the donkey cart. It was a real day to remember. After a day of fabulous hospitality from people we had only just met, Kelsey and I said goodbye to all our new Denver Museums and the Web friends and flew to Washington, DC.
We spent a great couple of days there visiting Capitol Hill and some of the fantastic DC museums. We also met up with one of Kelsey’s friends, who looked after us wonderfully well, and my friend Mike Hinchey, who at that time was working for NASA. After we had spent couple of days in DC the volcano stopped erupting and flights home resumed. Just a couple
of days later than expected, we returned to the UK after having had quite an adventure.
Matt Ball, the UK editor of MSN, is a great supporter of Bletchley Park. He captured the feeling from the community and the spirit behind our use of Twitter well in his blog post about our Denver trip:
Can Twitter save Bletchley Park?
From MSN Tech & Gadget BlogUK
17 April 2010
Guest post by Matt Ball, MSN UK editor-in-chief
(follow on twitter @thisismattball)
Today is the closing day of the Museums and the Web 2010 conference in Denver, Colorado.
I would not normally be overly excited by this event but today, for me and quite a few people I’ve met through social networking site Twitter, is different.
One o
f the presentations on the final day is entitled Can Twitter Save Bletchley Park? In case you didn’t know, Bletchley Park is where Britain’s codebreakers cracked enemy codes such as Engima during World War II, thereby helping to shorten the war by about two years and save millions of lives. It is also the birthplace of modern computing and shares its location with The National Museum of Computing. In short, it’s geek and historian heaven rolled into one.
I visited it in 2006 and had a great time but was surprised at the dilapidated condition of some of the buildings.
As you can see from the photo of one of the huts where the codebreakers worked (taken on a second visit in late 2009) the problem – due to a lack of funding – remains. The Bletchley Park Trust aims to raise £10 million to secure the venue’s long-term viability and transform it into a world class heritage and educational centre. It is a big target but the future is looking increasingly bright for a place that played such an important role in the war and that is so inspiring when you visit.
Last month the Department for Culture Media and Sport announced a grant of £250,000 for urgent repairs at Bletchley Park. That announcement came after the Heritage Lottery Fund announced a first round pass for the Trust’s application for museum development funding and awarded £460,000 to work up detailed plans. These will be submitted early to mid 2011 in a bid to secure the £4.1 million needed and subject to the Trust raising the £1 million needed for match-funding the bid. The Trust will then work on raising a further £5 million to complete the development.
I am certain that it would have been far less likely for the Trust to have attracted these two awards without the significant publicity that Bletchley Park has achieved in the past 18 months which has raised its profile, spread the word about its cause and helped to attract record numbers of visitors.
The Twitter campaign
A campaign on Twitter has played an important role in this success. The two key pages have been the official twitter.com/bletchleypark page run by Bletchley Park’s director of operations Kelsey Griffin and twitter.com/dr_black run by Dr Sue Black, head of computer science at the University of Westminster, who began campaigning for Bletchley Park in 2008.
Their use of Twitter highlights the various ways the platform can, and should, be used by those seeking to achieve worthy aims:
1. They establish credibility and trust by participating in the social networking aspects of Twitter. They follow almost everyone who follows them, they join in other discussions, share personal anecdotes, retweet etc.
2. They use it as a medium for broadcasting their campaign and corporate messages.
3. They use it to contact influential people (celebrity Stephen Fry’s well-publicised visit to Bletchley Park last year is one such example of success here).
4. They willingly meet offline the people they have first met through Twitter (including me).
Their success in building a community of interested followers is best demonstrated by how they have funded the costs of travelling to Denver to present their paper at the conference today. Encouraged by some of her Twitter followers, Dr Black set up a page on the Just Giving website (http://www.justgiving.com/sueblack) seeking donations. More than 60 people chipped in, raising more than £2,300 which has covered the majority of the trip’s costs. Looking at the names of the donors, I could find almost every one of them on Twitter.
Their work also proves that you do not need a million followers on Twitter before you can achieve meaningful, ongoing influence. They each have fewer than 4,000 followers and some of those are common to both.
To learn more about their campaign and their use of Twitter you can read their paper Can Twitter save Bletchley Park? on the Museums and the Web 2010 conference website.
Enigma Reunion Day 2010
The Enigma Reunion 2010 was another fabulous day full of interesting conversations. Kate Arkless Gray and Benjamin Ellis came along again to interview veterans as part of the Amplified social media crew, this time along with Britt Warg, A L Ranson, Drew Buddie, Gordon Tant and Graham Johnson.
There were around 2,000 people there that day – I think it was probably a record turnout. We interviewed veterans and sometimes their relatives as well. Kate interviewed Christopher Hughes Reece, who was there looking for anyone that remembered his mum, Joan Dodderidge, also known as “Fougie” – she had worked at Bletchley and then gone to work in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). He really wanted to know more about what his mum had done there. She hadn’t talked much about her experience at Bletchley, and unfortunately she died before Christopher was able to find out much about her role during the war.
Kate also interviewed Sir Arthur Bonsall, who had been a veteran at Bletchley Park and had gone on to be Director of GCHQ. Sir Arthur was recruited from Cambridge University, where he had just finished a degree in languages. Having been turned down due to a heart murmur by the army doctor when he tried to enlist, Sir Arthur was delighted to be asked by Martin Charlesworth, proctor of St Martin’s College, Cambridge who recruited many of the now-famous people to Bletchley Park, if he was interested in confidential war work. He was recruited alongside another man, Harry Hinsley, who went on to become well known in naval intelligence and later as a war historian.
Sir Arthur Bonsall Shortly after the meeting Sir Arthur was sent a letter asking him to report to Euston railway station, take a particular train and get off at Bletchley Junction where he would be met by someone. He was told: “Don’t tell your parents or anyone else where you are going!”
Sir Arthur did just that. He was met, taken to Bletchley Park, asked to sign the Official Secrets Act, given an address of a place to stay and told to report back the next morning at 8am. When he came back the next day as requested, he was taken to Hut 4, now the Bletchley Park canteen, where he met Josh Cooper, Head of Section, who explained that he would be working on the radio communications of the German Air Force. He worked in radio telephony, on the voice messages of German aircraft pilots intercepted by WAAFs. The information gleaned from the pilots was used to put together reconstructions of the battles afterwards and was very useful in understanding how the pilots worked.
L to R: Me, Gordon Tant, Kate Arkless Gray and Benjamin Ellis Chatting to Daisy Bailey, wonderful Bletchley veteran “Within minutes I was seated at a trestle table copying out coded messages on to large sheets of paper,” he said. Sir Arthur worked his way up until he was in charge of German code breaking in Bletchley Park’s Air Section. He played an important role in the breaking of Luftwaffe codes and ciphers during the Battle of Britain and the strategic bombing of Nazi Germany from 1942 until the end of the war. Unfortunately, Sir Arthur died in 2014 at the great age of 97.
Other veterans interviewed that day included Joan Farmery, who was 23 when she worked at Bletchley. Her work included plotting the waters around Nagasaki in Japan and producing and looking after a box of cards containing information about Japanese Navy movements gleaned from the code breaking effort. Joan was billeted out at Woburn Abbey and ended up having her morning wash in the room that Queen Victoria had stayed in many years before.
Another story with a royal connection was told by Audrey Wind, who was one of the many Bombe operators working at Bletchley. Audrey remembered going into London on a day off with one of the other WRNS. They were standing in uniform on a traffic island in the middle of the road in Central London when the Royal Family came past. They were amazed and delighted when King George VI of England saw them standing there and waved at them. What a story to tell your grandchildren!
Bletchley Park veterans at the annual Enigma Reunion 2010 It wasn’t all fun, of course. There were many stories told to us of how hard it was keeping everything secret all of the time. Most of the people working there were very young and away from home for the first time. Some people unsurprisingly found that they were unable to cope and went off the rails.
On Enigma Reunion Day 2010 there was an awesome fl
ypast by a Lancaster bomber, a marching band and much more. Sir Arthur unveiled Churchill’s stone, a stone which Churchill had stood on outside of the Mansion House at Bletchley and from where he addressed the entire workforce to let them know that the war was over.
At the end of the day we all made our way home, excited by the interviews that we had captured and people that we had spoken to.
Turing film at Information Pioneers event
I’ve been involved with the BCS for many years now, since around 1992 when I was studying for my degree at London South Bank University. My colleagues and friends at the BCS have been very supportive of my campaigning for Bletchley Park and I’ve had many an interesting discussion around Bletchley Park and its importance to the nation. The BCS had also gave me, or more correctly my organisation BCSWomen, funding to run the Women of Station X project, so that we could record the oral histories of some of the women that worked at Bletchley. My involvement with both the BCS and Bletchley Park over the years has taught me a lot about the ten thousand people who worked at Bletchley, as well as about others such as Tommy Flowers, who did not work at Bletchley Park per se but invented and built Colossus, the world’s first programmable computer, which was used at Bletchley Park to mechanise and industrialise the codebreaking effort.
In January 2010 I was invited to be on a panel for the BCS Information Pioneers campaign. The BCS wanted to emphasise the role that information technology has played over the years by highlighting key figures in the field and getting the public to vote for the most important. We were given a long list of pioneers by the BCS and asked to choose our top five about whom short films would be made. I was determined that there would be at least two women in the final five and that people connected with Bletchley Park should also be represented.
At the panel meeting to discuss who should be included, I noticed that the suggested shortlist that we were presented with, and asked to consider, did not include Tommy Flowers, and it only included one woman, Hedy Lamarr, overlooking Ada Lovelace.