by Sue Black
Me, Peter Barron and Simon Greenish in front of Hut 6 On the way back to London after a successful trip to Bletchley Park Simon and Kelsey took us for the obligatory tour around Bletchley Park and as usual I learned even more interesting facts about the place. I never tire of touring the Park. There is so much to know and understand about what happened there and the implications over the years.
When the tour finished Peter and I said our goodbyes and got the train back to London. We discussed our meeting and potential funding possibilities. It was the first time that I’d met Peter. I really liked him. A smart, friendly and interesting chap, I found out that he had previously been the editor of BBC’s current affairs flagship programme Newsnight.
When we reached Euston Peter and I parted, agreeing to meet up again once he had received the necessary information from Simon. I went home feeling very positive about the relationship and the possibilities that opened up if Google became involved with saving Bletchley Park.
Straight out of Compton Street
One of the really cool people I’ve met through the campaign is Patrick Sammon, President of Story Center Films. Patrick is from the US and is a big fan of Alan Turing – such a big fan that he decided a few years ago that he wanted to get a documentary made about Turing, his life and his contributions to the world. I’d first met Patrick at Balans restaurant on Old Compton Street in London in 2010 for a drink and a chat while he was visiting the UK to talk to people about making the documentary. It was obvious that we were kindred spirits who share a love of Alan Turing and great respect for his legacy. This is what Patrick said about Alan Turing and the documentary:
“As you know, Alan Turing was the British WWII code breaker and father of computer science who faced persecution for being gay. In his short life, Turing profoundly changed our world. Historians believe that his WWII code breaking work helped save millions of lives and shortened the war by two years. He also founded three new scientific fields: computer science, artificial intelligence, and morphogenesis.
“In 1952, he was arrested by British police for having a relationship with another man and eventually was forced to undergo chemical castration to ‘fix’ his sexual orientation. Two years after his arrest, Turing killed himself at age 41. Turing is one of the most important scientists ever, yet his tragic story and lasting legacy remain largely unknown. This film will change that fact.
“Almost 100 years after his birth, an international production team is set to take viewers on a journey to rediscover Alan Turing. Research and development for this feature-length drama documentary is underway, with plans to reach millions of viewers around the world through broadcast and theatrical release. The international production team includes Turing’s pre-eminent biographer Dr Andrew Hodges. Funding is currently being lined up for the film, with a goal for completion in mid-2012, to coincide with the centenary of Turing’s birth. It’s an important story that needs to be told.”
I thought that making a documentary about Turing was a great idea and offered to connect Patrick to people and organisations that might be able to help. One thing that I really do love doing is connecting people and organisations to make things happen. It really is true that if you can bring the right people together, incredible things can happen – my work on the Save Bletchley Park campaign had certainly taught me that. I wrote a blog post about Turing, Patrick and the film, and I introduced Patrick to Peter Barron at Google in the hope that he would be interested in helping Patrick make the film a reality. Google ended up hosting the premiere of Codebreaker at BAFTA!
Turing papers saved
Between November 2010 and February 2011 I had several conversations with Simon Greenish, Google and others about securing the Turing papers for Bletchley Park. There was a lot of activity going on in the background, some of which I was party to and some of which I wasn’t. From my perspective, it seemed like things were reasonably positive and that hopefully the Turing papers would be secured for Bletchley, but there was the dual problem of reaching the funding target and making sure that a better offer wasn’t accepted by the seller. All that we knew about the seller was that they lived in Canada and wanted to remain anonymous.
I was delighted, therefore, to get a call from Simon Greenish one day in February letting me know that the Turing papers had been secured for Bletchley Park.
Simon and others had been working quietly away, finding funding from the Heritage Memorial Fund and a private donor to meet the price that the anonymous seller was asking. The local Member of Parliament, Iain Stewart MP, had asked a question about the papers as part of Prime Minister’s Questions in December:
Iain Stewart MP addressing David Cameron:
“Will my Right Honourable Friend do all he can to secure these important papers for the nation?”
Prime Minister David Cameron replied:
“I would certainly like to do that . . . of course, I hope private donors will generously support the fundraising campaign and I’m happy to work with him to do all I can to make it happen.”
It was wonderful to see so many people picking up the mantle.
A few days later I went up to Bletchley Park with Peter Barron from Google to finally get a glimpse of the papers and to meet the other people who had played a role in making sure that they ended up at Bletchley Park. One of the great moments of the day was meeting Gareth, who had set up the JustGiving page and raised almost £20,000 towards the papers. Throughout the build-up to the auction we had been in touch regularly, so it was great to finally meet up and reminisce about the excitement we had felt.
I also got to meet Julian Wilson, who looked after the papers at Christie’s, and Iain Stewart MP. Along with Peter Barron, we all had a chat about the parts that we had individually played in ensuring that the Turing papers ended up at Bletchley Park. Gareth had started the whole thing off and set up the JustGiving site, I had brought in the $100,000 from Google, Julian had emailed The Pink Paper with the story to try to increase coverage, and Iain had asked the question in Parliament. After we went around telling our stories, I remarked on something that I found very interesting – each of us had said a variation of the same thing: “I didn’t know what the chances of success were, but I just thought, ‘Sod it!’ and decided to give it a go.” During my years of campaigning to save Bletchley Park, I’d had that thought many times – it just goes to show that it’s important to take chances sometimes!
Codebreaker Max Newman’s family visitors’ book Max Newman’s family visitors’ book close up, including Turing’s signature “On Computable Numbers” by Alan Turing Another highlight of the day was meeting Professor William Newman, son of codebreaker Max Newman, and hearing his stories about Alan Turing, who had beenone of Max’s good friends. He told a particularly wonderful story about Turing running ten miles to their house one morning and, on finding no one in, writing a message using a leaf and a twig and putting it through the letterbox in the front door.
I spent some time looking at the Turing papers, which were laid out over a very large table. I walked around the table and took a few photos; a tear in my eye thinking about Turing, his genius, and the awful way that he had been treated. It was wonderful that we had all worked together to bring the Turing papers to Bletchley Park, but everything to do with Turing was always tinged with sadness due to the fact that he was never publicly appreciated in his lifetime for his enormous contribution.
Something else that Julian said during the day really captured my attention. Apparently the massive amount of support on Twitter in November, just before the auction at Christie’s, really made a difference to what had happened in the auction room. Christie’s were expecting bids of well over £300,000 for the Turing papers, but the bidding stopped under that and the papers did not meet the reserve. Julian said that several of the people who had been planning to bid for the Turing papers held back because they didn’t want to take the papers away from Bletchley Park.
/> I was thrilled that once again the voices of supporters on Twitter had made some tangible difference to the campaign. Acquiring the Turing papers for Bletchley Park was a great example of many people and communities, online and offline, working to achieve a common aim. The spirit of the thousands of people that had worked at Bletchley Park during the war lived on.
Don’t halt me now
Over the last few months, a number of people had asked me why Turing’s papers were important. What was it about them that made them so valuable, and why was it meaningful for Bletchley Park to have them? I found myself only able to answer in very general terms, so I asked Christie’s Books and Manuscripts specialist Julian Wilson, who had handled the papers at auction, if I could interview him to get a definitive answer. Julian agreed, so I set off one afternoon to meet him for a coffee and then interviewed him in his office at Christie’s auction house in Mayfair.
Julian’s office was up a back staircase and was full of books and other artefacts. I nosed around a little bit; it was obvious from the room that he enjoyed what he did. I thought the best way to record the interview would be on Audioboo (now audioBoom), an audio recording app which is very easy to use and automatically uploads your audio file to your account on its website. I told Julian that I would introduce us and ask him a question about the Turing papers, and then he just needed to answer within about five minutes. Julian explained how extremely rare the Turing papers are, their connection to the leading thinking in mathematics and computer science at the time, and why his scholarly paper “On computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem” is of the utmost international importance for the history of the science of computing. As Julian put it:
“This collection of offprints is really important for a number of different reasons. I think the first thing to stress is just how rare these offprints are. There’s been quite a lot of confusion surrounding these; a lot of people think that they’re manuscript material – in fact they’re not, they are actually printed, but they are so rare that they might as well be unique. [ . . . ] The collection was assembled by Professor Max Newman, who was a very close scientific colleague and one of the true friends of Alan Turing – and of course in connection with Bletchley Park, Max Newman was the co-inventor of the Colossus. So for Bletchley this really does have everything. It has the founding theoretical paper of computers, owned by somebody who I think could and should be seen as the father of the practical application of the computer.”
If you are interested in listening to the full interview, you can hear it online - http://bit.ly/1O7ISDn
Riding techie
At some point Robert Llewellyn and I had become aware of each other on Twitter. Robert is an actor, famous for appearing as Kryten in Red Dwarf, amongst other things. In early 2011 Robert got in touch with me to ask if I would be interested in appearing on his Carpool programme. The format for Carpool is an interview by Robert during a journey in his Prius hybrid car. Robert picks you up and takes you somewhere that you would like to go, interviewing you along the way. He has interviewed some of my favourite people, including Jo Brand, Stephen Fry, and many other comedians and techy people. So I was excited when Robert emailed me saying that he would like to interview me for Carpool sometime in the spring, and could I please have a think about where I would like to go?
We decided on a trip from my office at UCL to – you guessed it – Bletchley Park, and arranged a date and time to suit us both. When the date arrived, I headed to my office to meet Robert at midday. It was a lovely spring day and all the leaves on the trees in Gordon Square were glinting in the sunlight – perfect conditions for a trip to Bletchley Park.
I saw Robert sitting in his Prius outside my office. He showed me the cameras that were placed around the car to record the interview; they are tiny and after no time at all I had forgotten they were there.
We drove around Gordon Square and up to the Euston Road, then along Edgware Road and up to the M1. There was quite a lot of traffic – I don’t know how Robert manages to hold a cogent conversation and navigate through traffic at the same time. It’s quite a skill! The interview was completely open in terms of subject matter; I could have talked about any aspect of my career or my passion for encouraging more girls and women to go into computing, but I wanted to focus on Bletchley Park as I knew that this interview would be put online and viewed by a large audience. Although Bletchley Park was in a much better place than it had been in 2008, it still needed support, and I was still in campaign mode.
Robert asked me to tell him how I had got involved with Bletchley Park, and so began a two-hour conversation. Along with recounting my first few visits to Bletchley Park and describing my desire to do something to help, I also told Robert some of the stories told to me by female veterans. One lady from Scotland had been put forward by her school headmaster. She had never left home before leaving for Bletchley Park at the age of 18. She arrived with a group of girls and they were all taken to one of the blocks at Bletchley after being picked up from the station. They had been surprised to find that their block was guarded by a soldier with a gun. The girls worked eight-hour shifts around the clock in huts that were freezing cold in the winter and boiling hot in the summer. In the winter they sat wrapped up in thick blankets, as there was no heating at all. They were teenage girls away from home for the first time, working hard, in complete secrecy and sometimes in poor conditions. And yet they were still able to really enjoy themselves in the evenings, getting up to all sorts of harmless mischief. I told Robert about the RAF pilots flying low over Woburn Abbey to see the topless WRNS – such a great story.
We arrived at Bletchley Park just after 2pm and were met by Simon Greenish who took us for a whistle-stop tour. We got the edited highlights edition as we only had 45 minutes before we had to leave. Simon took us to the canteen in Hut 4 first for a lunch of sausage and mash, then into the Mansion House, up to see Colossus, into Hut 8 for a quick peek at Alan Turing’s old office and then down to see the Bombe machine rebuild and the slate statue of Alan Turing. Then we thanked Simon, said our goodbyes and got back into Robert’s car.
Me and Robert Llewellyn at Bletchley Park It had been a short visit but I felt confident that Robert had got a good sense of the general ambience of Bletchley Park, and I hoped he might come back and encourage others to do the same.
The drive back to London took another two hours, during which time we carried on the conversation about Bletchley Park. Now that Robert had seen it first-hand he was, like most people who actually visit, really excited about the place. It really does have an atmosphere which is palpable when you’re there but difficult to put into words. It’s clear that something quite extraordinary happened there. How wonderful to still be able to walk around the lake, knowing that Alan Turing, Tommy Flowers, Winston Churchill and so many incredible people had spent a lot of time and energy there.
The video of our trip is on YouTube - http://bit.ly/1RVUw30
Secret Days
On 15th April 2011 I was invited to a book launch at Bletchley Park. Lord Asa Briggs, who had been stationed at Bletchley during the war, had written Secret Days: Codebreaking in Bletchley Park and had personally invited me to the launch in the Ballroom at Bletchley. I was very excited to attend as I had not met Lord Briggs before and was really interested to hear his memories of his time at Bletchley. I was also delighted to find that Lord Briggs had mentioned me in his book, noting that I had led a social media campaign to raise awareness of Bletchley Park.
At the beginning of the event Simon Greenish welcomed us all and introduced Lord Briggs, who spoke for some time about his involvement at Bletchley Park. It was very affecting to hear him talk about how important it had been to keep his work secret:
“I felt very reluctant to reveal secrets, even after Winterbottom had written his book in the 1970s. When I got married in 1955, I didn’t dare to tell anything to my wife about what I had done at Bletchle
y. Occasionally people would come up to me in the street in London and say, ‘It’s nice to see you back from Hut 6 again,’ and Susan [Lord Briggs’ wife] would say to me ‘What in the world was Hut 6?’ I could tell her that I had been at Bletchley, but I couldn’t tell anything about what happened in Hut 6. In fact it is most interesting that during the war, I couldn’t tell my mother and father anything about what I had been doing . . . it wasn’t the Official Secrets Act that made me keep secrets, it was a feeling that these secrets had to be kept if we were going to win the war.”
Lord Asa Briggs and me at Bletchley after his book launch
Incredible campaign news
Bletchley Park’s situation was strengthening by the day, with more interest from the media, higher visitor numbers and a higher profile generally. I was still spending most evenings and weekends raising awareness through tweeting and chatting to everyone I met – looking back now I can see that I was absolutely obsessed, but at the time these things had just become part of my normal routine.
During my talks about Bletchley Park and the campaign to save it, I always asked the audience if they had visited. I was now noticing that more and more people were putting their hands up and saying yes. The demographic of people interested in Bletchley Park was also shifting; it now seemed to be a much younger and geekier crowd.
I was also very happy that the relationship between Google and Bletchley Park had been moving along. I’d had several discussions with Peter Barron and others at Google around what needed to be funded and how Google could potentially help.
In the spring of 2011, Peter and I went up to Bletchley for a regular meeting to discuss Google’s continuing relationship with Bletchley Park. We discussed where we were with various issues, and as part of the conversation I used the phrase “saving Bletchley Park”. To my surprise, Simon Greenish interrupted,