Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [145]
Not all change is bad. There is a limit to the amount that one can learn from a potholed runway surrounded with weeds and roofless mess huts. But in the case of Bletchley, the case for preserving the site as close as possible to its wartime state was a great deal more important.
Through extraordinary efforts of persuasion and fund-raising, the Bletchley Park Trust painstakingly began work on transforming it into a place that the general public could come to visit, and learn. And in ensuing years, Bletchley Park has found new, and rather wonderful, life as a museum. The main exhibitions, involving reconstructed huts and displays of Enigma, the Colossus and bombe machines, are utterly fascinating, especially for younger visitors. For children – with computers in their classrooms and their bedrooms – the sight of these huge early proto-computers, with their drums and switches, wires and valves, hooks the imagination very strongly.
And the museum is extremely popular, with an estimated 200,000 visitors per year. It is a splendid achievement. Though some of the huts, as I write, are still crumbling away – blue tarpaulins flapping in every breeze – the place has at last received a special Lottery grant for the purposes of restoration.
To visit the Bletchley estate now is to get a vivid taste of what it must have been like to come through those main gates during the war. There is a security guard’s booth, past which are the first of the concrete blocks and huts. Then, just a couple of hundred yards or so up the driveway, you see the lake and the house itself. At weekends, the place is teeming with visitors and very often the lawn in front of the house plays host to special events, such as vintage car rallies, editions of Antiques Roadshow or military remembrance services. In some of the huts can now be found recreations of wartime conditions – plain desks, radio transmitter sets – that give the visitor an inkling of what it might have been like to work here.
But the restoration of the Park serves an even better purpose. For the last twenty years or so, it has provided a wonderful point of focus for the people who were actually there. Even now, among the eight thousand or so Bletchley Park veterans, there are still those who have yet to identify themselves or are yet to revisit the Park. With each anniversary event, Ruth Bourne notes affectionately, ‘more come out of the woodwork’.
Because no official staffing records were kept – if Bletchley was the utmost secret, then so also was the fact that one had worked there – it has been impossible for the Bletchley Park Trust to track all veterans down. Very often it has been a case of word of mouth, or veterans happening to have spotted a Bletchley Park-related item in the newspaper.
But for many veterans, Bletchley Park now is in some way a cross between a social club and a shrine; just to walk through its rooms, to gaze at the dark panelling of the hallway, to be reminded of a small pothole in the driveway, is enough to trigger a flood of memories that, for many years, had to be utterly suppressed.
Architectural historian Jane Fawcett – whose first visit back to the Park was in the autumn of 2009, some sixty-four years after she had left – recalled that the place was shabbier than it appears now. Oliver and Sheila Lawn, who had so loved the countryside around, made an expedition to drive along the green lanes that they had once cycled through; instead of which, they found themselves caught up in the endless roundabouts of Milton Keynes. Nothing ever stays the same. Yet the Park itself – together with the opportunities to meet up with people whom one was not even allowed to acknowledge