The world's first programmable computer, Colossus, is fenced off from visitors to the rest of the wartime codebreaking site in the latest chapter in a dispute between volunteers and management

Bletchley Park, the home of British wartime codebreaking, opens on Monday with new lawns and a new visitor centre for the 150,000 people who come each year to explore the historic site.

The visitor centre was built in 2011 with the aid of a £5m lottery grant as well a further £3m in matched funds, raised by the Bletchley Park Trust. This money secured the future of the site and helped to restore the decaying huts in which many of the codebreakers worked.

But it also opens with some six foot-high fences – separating two museums which each claim the legacy of Bletchley – which have been described as a Berlin Wall and symbolise an ugly, long-running dispute with Bletchley Park's neighbour and tenant, the National Museum of Computing (TNMOC).

The trust claims that the fences and gates are to improve safety for pedestrians by removing some car parking. The museum says visitors have to walk twice as far to reach them, and that the Trust doesn't explain that the working rebuild of Colossus – the world's first programmable digital electronic computer and key codebreaking engine – is on site [see footnote].

The tension between the two factions, and the fence and what it represents, have attracted considerable attention, including unwelcome press and a discussion in the Lords led by the Conservative peer Lady Trumpington, who herself worked at Bletchley during the war.

Dr Sue Black, the campaigning computer scientist who was pivotal in securing the funding, left the Bletchley Park board in December 2013. Disgruntled volunteers continue to put out a satirical underground newspaper deriding the Trust's management.

“I've known people in both trusts for quite a long time, and when I've talked to them, everyone basically wants the same sort of thing at the big-picture level,” says Black. “They want to make sure that everything is preserved for posterity, and that the place is there not just as a memorial but also to tell the story.”

She remains confident the disagreements can be sorted out. "At the highest level, they both want the same thing," she says. "From all my conversations over the last six or seven years, I would say that there will be a happy outcome at the end. It's just the details that have gone a bit awry. I think getting them all round a table actually talking through everything would be the best way to sort it out.”

Colossus: Bletchley's crowning achievement

Hitler's second world war intelligence systems were formidable. By the time D-Day was approaching, the Nazi high command had used spies and intercepted radio communications to determine that the huge 1st US Army Group, led by the formidable US general George S Patton, was stationed at Dover and poised to land at Calais. Even as the Allies were landing on the Normandy beaches in June 1944, Hitler's forces were still split, anticipating the main force landing at Calais.

Only the 1st US Army Group was fictitious. In Operation Fortitude, one of the most successful military deceptions of the war, the allies built balsa wood aeroplanes and army buildings at Dover, placed false marriage and death certificates in the local press and faked waves of radio traffic. It was at Bletchley Park in February 1944 that the Colossus computers were used to help break German messages coded using the Lorenz cypher, confirming that the Germans had fallen for the deception.

It was the crowning achievement of Bletchley Park, the home of the British codebreaking effort during the second world war.



While the last surviving Colossus machine was lovingly rebuilt by a team of volunteers, and completed in 1996, the Bletchley Park Trust was formed, in 1992, to preserve and develop the estate itself. Both wanted to preserve the uniquely precious spirit of Bletchley.

The Trust emphasises the story of Bletchley Park's contribution to the war effort, telling the story of how geniuses like Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman battled to break the Nazi codes and end the war years earlier than it might otherwise have been.

The National Museum of Computing, the home of Colossus, sits in a squat block, Block H, on the outskirts of the Bletchley Park site, taking the war as its starting point and describing Bletchley as the birthplace of the computer. With an impressive array of vintage machinery, it charts the line from Turing and Welchman's work on Enigma, through Colossus itself, and on to the age of computing.

Huge volunteer workforces

It was at Bletchley Park that Alan Turing defined the basic concepts of computability, so it's only natural that TNMOC has made its home there. And while the museum and the Bletchley Park Trust cover similar ground, a shared pride in the history of the site has, over the past decade, generally encouraged co-operation rather than conflict – at least at grassroots level.

Kevin Murrell, co-founder of TNMOC, says: "Both the Bletchley Park Trust and us have a huge volunteer workforce. These people are incredibly enthusiastic and incredibly knowledgeable, and have always worked together and worked together well. We've always trusted that enthusiasm.

"Undoubtedly the two trusts are quite different, but we have complementary goals. They [Bletchley Park] focus on the wartime effort of codebreaking, and then we show how that progressed into the computing revolution."

But the complementary goals haven't healed tensions between the groups. Block H is owned by the Bletchley Park Trust, meaning that TNMOC is its tenant. The rent, £75,000 a year plus £25,000 for utilities and a service charge, is a big chunk of the small museum's turnover, creating tension between the two.

One site, two entry fees

The most longstanding issue is ticketing: none of the £15 entry price to Bletchley Park goes to TNMOC, so the museum has to charge a second fee to visitors (currently £2 to visit just Colossus and £5 to see the whole museum). To visitors unaware of the difference between the establishments, the second fee can be an unwelcome surprise, and TNMOC has for years had to deal with complaints about it.

Attempts to introduce a joint ticket faltered after the what the trust describes as "lengthy negotiations which ultimately proved inconclusive". TNMOC says the sticking point was a condition "which implicitly questioned the ownership of the Colossus Rebuild", but while Bletchley Park agrees that the ownership of the Colossus Rebuild was a sticking point, it accuses TNMOC of inserting a clause which forced Bletchley Park to relinquish claims on the computer.

Colossus isn't owned by TNMOC; it is on long-term loan from Colossus Rebuild Limited, a shell company created by Tony Sale, himself a founder member of the Bletchley Park Trust, for that purpose. But when Sale was building Colossus, although much of the money for the project was his own, he was still heavily involved with Bletchley Park, and donations came in from supporters of the trust. As a result, the trust has never quite accepted the claim of ownership, even if it has no inclination to launch a challenge while the machine stays in Bletchley Park on TNMOC's property.

Colossus wasn't the only reason why negotiations fell apart. TNMOC was also asking the trust to lift a debt of hundreds of thousands of pounds, built up over years of renting its site. "On behalf of my trustees, I couldn't agree to that," says Bletchley's chief executive, Iain Standen [see footnote].

Through it all, the can-do attitude – appropriate, given the history – has pervaded. Bletchley Park's volunteers' tours ran from the house, through the grounds, and ended in the Colossus rebuild; TNMOC was prominently positioned on the map handed out to visitors; and the trust's bid for lottery funding pitched the rebuilt Colossus as "an integral part of the Bletchley Park story" while cautioning that its separate ownership placed it "outside the scope of this project".

Volunteers rebel

But money changes things. If there has to be a single cause for the falling out of the two organisations, it is the £8m funding of the development. The Bletchley Park Trust was awarded £5m from the Heritage Lottery Fund to restore the buildings on the site to create a museum-quality experience for visitors. The cash – £8m in total with the additional matched funds of £3m – is equal to more than two years' worth of income, and offers the opportunity for a radical rehaul of the whole site. The trust is refurbishing buildings, pedestrianising areas of the complex and trying to create "an inspiring experience for its ever-increasing numbers of visitors".

According to some volunteers at the site, the implementation of those improvements has led to an attitude that all change is good. "'Change' is a common word at Bletchley Park," writes PJ Evans, a volunteer at TNMOC. "If you disagree with policy you are 'resistant to change'."

Other TNMOC volunteers speak of waves of defections, while a group of Bletchley Park volunteers, who claimed they were tired of being treated like "pond scum" by management, bought tadpole badges in an act of surreptitious rebellion. They created an underground satirical newspaper, the Bletchley Bugle, with headlines such as "Nasa photo of Earth’s most inhospitable place is Bletchley Park Management Offices" and "Park to replace staff with docile clones".

No dissatisfied Bletchley volunteer was willing to go on the record for this article.

Some of the tensions began before the lottery funding was awarded. In particular, by 2012, a lack of oversight meant that some volunteers were giving guided tours that lasted up to two and a half hours. A decision was made to standardise the tours at one hour, "to manage increasing numbers of visitors, and to make it more accessible and family friendly". That decision entailed removing the trip to TNMOC, which had previously taken up the last 20 minutes of the tour.

Although the decision was made by a group of staff and volunteers, not every tour guide was happy with it. Tony Carroll, one such guide, refused to use the new tour route. The trust took action and as a result he no longer gives guided tours, although the trust assures me that "he continues to be a valued volunteer at the Bletchley Park Trust", giving tours for school groups instead. Carroll's tearful recounting of the conversation aired on the BBC six o'clock news brought the trust an unwanted level of attention.

Bletchley's chief executive, Iain Standen, says: "He was counselled on a number of occasions to return to the planned tour but you can only ask people so many times. Eventually he was told, 'Sorry, but you're not guiding.'"

But since rebuilding began in earnest, the changes have been harder to fight. It's also become harder to ignore the fact that if the trust did want to disassociate itself from TNMOC, this is how it would do it.

'Mecca for geeks'

During the war, the Bletchley Park complex sprawled far beyond just the house itself, with more than 25 huts being built to hold everything from a makeshift pub to Colossus itself. But after the war, it fell into disrepair. BT took over the site, and used it as a management school, but by 1991 the huts were being considered for demolition and redevelopment. It was against that background that the trust was formed.

Roger Bristow, a founder member of the Bletchley Park Trust, wrote an open letter to the trust published in MK News, a local paper published in Milton Keynes, in February.“Over the last 23 years many ordinary committed hard working volunteers and groups have helped to save a large part of Bletchley Park from the destruction of the developer’s bulldozers,” Bristow wrote. “It could be said it is the second time a group of dedicated people came together to save something worth saving, only this time it was the saving of this historic site itself.”

The Trust saved the site, but didn't have the resources to fill the entire area with exhibits. Some of the huts were let out to private tenants; others were rented to enthusiasts drawn to the area by its history. Part of the latter group was a private collection of vintage computers, known as Retrobeep, which was housed in Block H, the brick building which had held the Colossus machines until they were destroyed at the orders of Winston Churchill at the end of the war. (Two Colossi survived, and moved with GC&CS – the Government Code and Cypher School, newly renamed as GCHQ – to Cheltenham in the 1950s, but they too were dismantled by the end of the decade.)

In 2005, Retrobeep applied for, and received, charitable status and became the National Museum of Computing. It officially opened two years later, and the star of its collection was a rebuilt Colossus, the culmination of a 14-year project by Tony Sale.

Kevin Murrell says: "Within two metres of our backdoor are residential properties, so Tony Sale and I had the building listed to protect it, and we established the museum at that point." Sale died in 2011; Murrell continues as a trustee of the museum.

Christian Payne moved a monthly gathering of cryptography fans from Bletchley Park to TNMOC after what he said was indifference to the group from the trust. "You can put a fence up, you can move the gates, but you can't shift the heart of Bletchley," he says. "There's a reason Stephen Fry called this 'Mecca for geeks'. The heart of Bletchley is here."

Worryingly for the trust, it’s not just those affiliated with TNMOC who agree. Bristow’s open letter argues that the museum “should be at the heart of the park, where the computer was born”. He continues: “It makes me very cross and upset to see how the current Bletchley Park Trust is repaying and treating those volunteers without whom the site would have been lost… One must ask ‘where were you’ when the Park needed saving?”

The park's legacy

Lady Trumpington was posted during the war to Bletchley, where she worked in naval intelligence. “I still find it difficult to discuss this subject in public,” she told the Lords in March. “After all, the Bletchley that I knew was a highly secret place and for many years we were forbidden from mentioning it.”

Strong words were aired in the House. The Lib-Dem Lord Sharkey pointedly refused to comment on “the obviously dysfunctional management that allows the situation to continue”, while Lord Cormack, another Conservative, emphasised that it “would be very bad indeed if we allowed any disputes between individuals to confound the preservation of Bletchley Park”.

That sentiment is echoed all around. Bristow’s letter concludes by declaring the trust “custodians of a legacy which celebrates the incredible achievements of the wartime personnel, and a historical record which belongs… to our future generations”. Black agrees: “Everyone that I've spoken to wants [Bletchley] to be a great historical site, that's restored for everyone to understand the whole story.”

A collection of huts hastily thrown together in the midst of war were never intended to be here 80 years later, and keeping them in useable condition is an expensive job. But when the modern world was born inside them, it's a necessary one.

• This article was amended on 10 June 2014 to correct errors and provide additional information. An earlier version wrongly stated that the £8m cash used to develop Bletchley Park came entirely from the Heritage Lottery Fund. In fact this sum was made up of £5m lottery funding with additional matched funds of £3m raised by the Bletchley Park Trust. References to the role of the Colossus computers in breaking German messages using the Lorenz cypher were clarified to show that they were only a part of the operation. There is an exhibition in the Bletchley Park Museum dedicated to the Lorenz story and a sign promoting TNMOC and the Colossus replica in this exhibition. There are also a number of signs throughout the Bletchley Park payzone that show the location of TNMOC, which is also promoted on leaflets given to visitors. In addition the Trust has pointed out that by the middle of 2013 TNMOC’s accumulated debt had reached more than £250,000. In consequence the Bletchley Park Trust Board approached TNMOC with a compromise settlement to resolve the issue. This settlement reduced the debt to £147,000 and it was paid on 6 April 2014.

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