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Cash Lifeline For Bletchley Park
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Nov 06, 2008 11:04 AM
from the hanging-on-by-a-thread dept.
from the hanging-on-by-a-thread dept.
Smivs writes "Bletchley Park, the home to the allied codebreakers during WWII, and a major computing heritage centre, has been given a financial lifeline, reports the BBC. The grant of £330,000 will be used to undertake urgent roof works as the rooms of the Grade II-listed mansion, replete with painted ceilings, timber panelling, and ornate plasterwork, are at risk because the roof has been patched rather than renovated so many times during the 130 years of the mansion's history.
The donation follows efforts to highlight the dilapidated state of the huts and other buildings at Bletchley.
Discussions are also in progress on a further three-year, £600,000 funding programme for the historic site.
'Bletchley Park played a fundamental role in the Allies winning the Second World War and is of great importance to the history of Europe,' said Dr Simon Thurley, chief executive of English Heritage."
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IT: Bletchley Park Facing Financial Ruin 234 comments
biscuitfever11 writes "Bletchley Park, the home of Station X, Britain's secret code-breaking base during World War II, is barely scraping by financially, as shown in these images compiled by ZDNet this week. The site has undergone major redevelopment as an act of remembrance for the Allied efforts to break the German Enigma code, but now its future is clouded — among others, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation turned them down for financial assistance (since it doesn't have to do with the Internet). Its director estimates that Bletchley Park's funds will be exhausted in three years. Hungry land developers are circling. This is an insightful look at what's happened to Bletchley Park these days and the pain it's going through."
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IT: Bletchley Park Faces Financial Rescue 60 comments
biscuitfever11 writes "Just two months ago it seemed that Bletchley Park, the home of Station X, Britain's secret code-breaking base during the War, was doomed as the codebreakers' huts rotted and the site fell into disrepair. But today Britain's Lottery Fund is set to step in with a grant to rescue the ailing heritage site. (There was an earlier story on ZDNet.)"
[+]
IT: PGP Leads Corporate Efforts To Save Bletchley Park 83 comments
blake182 writes "CNET reports that PGP, together with IBM and other technology firms, is mounting a fundraising effort to benefit the ailing Bletchley Park, home of the Station X codebreaking efforts in World War II. 'We're calling attention (to the fact that) Bletchley is falling into disrepair, and that, probably, the world owes a debt of gratitude to that place,' said Phil Dunkelberger, chief executive of PGP."
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Love for old crypto (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Love for old crypto (Score:5, Informative)
Heroism surrounded code breakers in Poland where the first mechanical algorithmic machines were made with the help of the secret services. Germany had their share of the game with their first programmable electronic device (some would call it a computer). The weirdness surrounding the decision of choosing an Indian language as American code (no, it was not because it was supposedly harder to break, but it was faster to have a native speaker of a code than a cryptographer who needed minutes to code even a short message). Bletchley recruitment effort that involved crosswords games, the sad story of Turing death cause by his mandated anti-homosexuality treatment, Yamamoto's death possible because of a message interception and so on...
WWII is so full of facts and anecdotes that trading them for a fictional content can only look tasteless...
Parent
Lame. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lame. (Score:5, Informative)
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation refused to offer any support to Bletchley earlier this year.
http://it.slashdot.org/it/08/05/16/1225225.shtml [slashdot.org]
Parent
Re:Lame. (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
You see, if I made a donation of about one percent of my monthly income (that's about 20), it would h
So where do we send our bucks? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So where do we send our bucks? (Score:5, Informative)
To donate via paypal go here:
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/paypal-donate.rhtm [bletchleypark.org.uk]
or by WorldPay:
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/shop/changeDonate.rhtm [bletchleypark.org.uk]
No excuses. If you live in the UK, go for a visit. Fantastic place full of great exhibits.
Darren.
Parent
Re:So where do we send our bucks? (Score:5, Interesting)
I second that. When I made it there after a business trip, I really wished I had more time. There is so much to browse it's hard to fit into an afternoon. The volunteers that give the tour are great...highly recommend it. They, however, wouldn't answer my question about if they used the enigma to insert messages, orders, or replies to any of the Germans in order to confuse them (-:
They didn't have the Bombe replica running when I was there, really wanted to see that.
The best thing they did have was a complete working replica of the Colossus Mark 2 up and running. This thing was build by volunteers that reconstructed it purely from pictures and from the memories of women who ran it during the war. It filled a room and kept it at 80+ degrees in there. It was built to decipher messages from the Lorenz machine, and it did it faster than optimized decryption software running on a Pentium II. There's definitely something to be said for optimized hardware.
They were in the process of re-opening a national computing museum or something of the like, so hopefully that's an exhibit there now as well.
And not that the walk around town wasn't nice, but take a right on the street in front of the station you get off at if you ride the rail to get there (-:
Parent
Re:So where do we send our bucks? (Score:5, Funny)
If you live in the UK, go for a visit. Fantastic place full of great exhibits.
I've been. They have a cool computer museum there.
And let me tell you, NOTHING in the world can make you feel as old as being in frakin museum and finding yourself saying "I remember those!"
Just ask John McCain.
Parent
Re:So where do we send our bucks? (Score:5, Funny)
$5/10/20
It's nice that you want to help, but I don't think sending 2.5 cents is really going to have that much of an effect on the project.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
$5/10/20
It's nice that you want to help, but I don't think sending 2.5 cents is really going to have that much of an effect on the project.
Perhaps, but given the economy, those 2.5 cents in todays dollars will be $30 in 2012 dollars. Not sure if this is actually funny, or terrifying. I'll let the mods decide.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I can think of a few groups that should pony up. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Intel.
Each of you are swiming in cash and this is your history.
Why not pony up some bucks for History.
While your at it the Apollo 1 launch pad is also fading away.
How about the state of California... (Score:3, Insightful)
...that just spent US$73 million dollars [sfgate.com] arguing over Proposition 8 - should there be same sex marriage in the state of California.
I'm not American, or gay, but it fucking shits me when I see this sort of money being thrown around - in the middle of this epic credit crisis, no less - over something as utterly trivial as whether or not gay people can get married, when there's actual, serious, important things all over the world that get practically no funding.
I don't know how much money came from where but t
It's funny, isn't it? (Score:5, Interesting)
You would never suspect that everyone at this school is a professional dancer.
*ba dum bump*! TING!
Seriously though, it's funny how the British government (among others), can find tens of billions, if not trillions, of dollars to bail out private businesses who are failing due to the incompetence of those running those businesses yet, it can't find a few meager thousands of dollars to repair one building who helped save its own hide.
Just goes to show where priorities lie.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
A government's priorities lie with immediate issues, not with entities that won't have an immediate effect. Saving Bletchley park is a matter of sentimentality and history and a government or corporation has every right to choose to ignore it - I'd rather they spent their efforts at least talking about the current economic crisis than helping a WW relic. When things are better, that'd be the time to look at anything else.
Conversely, if the government decided to give
Re: (Score:2)
Which is of course, typically short-sighted of every government. Sure, Blethley won't have any immediate or long-term effect on the country's operation, but it is because of Bletchley Park that GB even exists.
If we're going to say that historical buildings/sites such as Bletchley should be left to rot, then why bother having any historical organizations at all? Places such as the Arizona memor
Re: (Score:2)
The difference being that going on past experience the billions dumped into banking will pay a healthy profit (eventually...)
But museums represent our past *and* our future once they are gone they are gone forever ....
National Lottery? (Score:2)
When you see some of (frankly) SHIT that the National Lottery in the UK funds, it's mind boggling to me that they haven't ponied up some cash for this site already.
Maybe as a Lottery, they feel a deep resentment for anyone who is good at math? I don't know.
There's not really that much there (Score:5, Interesting)
I've visited Bletchley Park. It's a nice day trip out from London. The actual exhibits aren't that extensive. They have a few Enigmas, a fancier version with twelve rotors and a teletype machine interface, some replica bombes (some from a movie), the replica Colossus, and a collection of minor crypto-related items. The whole collection would fit in a corner of the Imperial War Museum.
It's a big country estate that needs to be maintained. There's a manor house, a lake with swans, some outbuildings, and the remainder of the famous "huts". There's far too much real estate for the exhibits. The technical exhibits aren't in the manor house at all. The manor house is used for conferences and such. The upkeep on all that real estate is the problem.
It's nice that it's being maintained, but there's not that much to see there.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Try not to burn it down (Score:2)
Please keep an eye on your roofing contractors, so they don't burn it down like happened with David Garrick's 18th century mansion.
GCHQ showing itself for what it is (Score:3, Interesting)
Bletchley Park (I have some VAXen that went through you at one point, and we'll both pretend you crushed the media... ;-) is the father of GCHQ [gchq.gov.uk], the British sorta-NSA. It would not, of course, dream of allocating any part of its budget to the memory of its intellectual founders, because it differs from Bletchley in one important respect: Bletchley fought a real war against a real threat to the nation.
On the off-chance that the guys that jumped into the Service from the same crappy minor public school I went to are reading this: sorry to hear you weren't good enough to get into the City, and let Ulbricht serve as your modest guide to the new century. No matter what you achieve, your old schoolchums will always know that you did it because you weren't bright enough to do anything more creative.