Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [144]
‘They had altered a lot since then,’ says Mr Lawn. ‘Buildings had been taken down. But there was much there that we remembered. It was like double vision. And I couldn’t believe having forgotten everything. It was like having a bit of your life shown to you again.’ Having made themselves known to the recently set up Bletchley Park Trust, the Lawns found that their connections to the place were firmly – and amusingly – re-established.
The Lawns, and thousands of others, had had a unique experience. Poet Vernon Watkins, who had served at Bletchley, said of his time there that it was ‘a situation, an era and an excitement which cannot be repeated’. And one anonymous codebreaker, a few years ago, summed his own feelings just as acutely: ‘No work I have ever done in my life,’ he said, ‘has been more fascinating or given me greater satisfaction.’
29 The Rescue of the Park
And so Bletchley Park’s life as the centre of Britain’s cryptographic effort ended; the duties of GCHQ were transferred first to a leafy London suburb, and then to the West Country.
But the old property in Buckinghamshire was kept going as a government concern, mainly for the training of Post Office engineers. In that immediate post-war period, the General Post Office, as it was then known, was a state-run concern. The business of telephone lines was masterminded by Whitehall as opposed to private firms.
In the 1960s, there were some unlovely architectural additions made to Bletchley Park in the shape of a stumpy pebble-dashed block of offices facing the gate nearest the railway station. Come the 1980s and following the privatisation of telephones – the new company was called British Telecom (BT) – and the advances being made in fibre-optic technology, the need for a specific training centre began to dwindle.
For a time the estate was multi-tasking. As well as the engineers, it also, for a while, provided a training centre for employees of GCHQ. There was also a BT management school, a teacher training college, and a branch of the civil service called PACE (Property Advisers to the Civil Estate). But as the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, the old house itself was beginning to crumble, as were the many huts still dotted around. Even though the estate was handy for Milton Keynes, just a few miles away, it was clear that in business terms, its potential uses were dwindling. British Telecom did not own the land or the house; the government assumed, quite understandably, that it did. And so came the first germ of an idea to sell the land off and put it to more profitable use.
But the house didn’t belong to the government. According to some reports, it belonged to the late Admiral Hugh Sinclair, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, who had paid his own £7,500 for the estate back in 1937 when Whitehall was dragging its feet over the matter. The government had no business attempting to dispose of it.
And in 1991, the newly formed Bletchley Park Trust stepped in, determined quite rightly that a site of such significance had to be preserved properly, and in such a way that members of the public would eventually be able to visit.
The house by that stage was in a sorry state. The ballroom, with its elaborate carved and fretted ceiling, was semi-derelict and the ceiling itself had begun to disintegrate. Outside, the huts – which had survived all weathers over the space of fifty-odd years – were also in terrible condition. Yet it was immediately obvious to many – Bletchley Park veterans and non-veterans alike – that it would be worthwhile to turn the site into a proper museum where younger generations could learn of the vital work and the leaps of genius that had, arguably, made their own world possible.
Bletchley Park was not alone when it came to the question of the sale of former war sites. Go to Eastcote now, or Dollis Hill, and you will find that these once sprawling secret institutions have been turned over to the property market. In the case of Dollis Hill, the rooms in which Tommy Flowers and his team worked so brilliantly on Colossus