Gateways to Bletchley

Special Section Goes Here GATEWAYS to BLETCHLEY Gair Dunlop letchley Park is a former country estate, with a large Bhouse in an undistinguished late Victorian style. During its time as the headquarters of UK cryptanalysis efforts in World War II, its grounds began to fill with huts, followed by massive information- processing blocks. In the postwar era, elements of the intelligence services remained until much of it became a telecommunications training school. It is located in the Home Counties of England, equidistant between Oxford and Cam- bridge, about an hour north of London, now encroached upon by archetypal developer- speculative suburbia, at the edge of the New Town of Milton Keynes. It can be seen as an under- acknowledged cauldron of information- processing experimen- tation, a cinematic cypher, and a prism through which we can view British senses of wartime, class, transatlantic power, stunted modernity, the military roots of the information age, and relations to ruin and redevelopment (fig. 1). There are a series of binaries at work in representations of Bletchley: revelation and coyness display and absence depth and surface Different approaches to a site of myth — redevelopment, nostalgia, mystery, and technology — are here explored in a primarily photographic journey. 151 Cultural Politics, Volume 10, Issue 2, © 2014 Duke University Press DOI: 10.1215/17432197-2651747 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/2/151/404209/0100151.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 Gair Dunlop on 25 September 2021 by guest Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/2/151/404209/0100151.pdf 152 CULTURAL POLITICS • 10:2 July 2014 Figure 1 Reception area, Block Photo: D. Gair Dunlop GATEWAYS to BLETCHLEY Background Londoner, his voice was returned to the Codebreaking relied on finding a “depth,” lower orders after the war. a sequence repeated nearly, but not quite identically, across messages, allowing Logistics intuition and computing power a space to The mythology of Bletchley Park is all pry apart the logic of the underlying mech- about the small: small huts, small huddles, anisms. Different approaches to our experi- a few initiates. The real Bletchley Park ence of the site might function similarly. grew to a complement of over nine thou- There were two main code systems sand staff. Codebreaking was an indus- broken at Bletchley: Enigma, which was trial, not artisanal, process. Bletchley as based on a (relatively) straightforward dreamtime, as place of public imagination, mechanical system, and Lorenz, a much is paradoxical. Half- known and constantly more complicated proposition. With recirculated legends persist in public Enigma, code wheel settings could in the- discourse alongside factual accounts, ory have been broken by hand, but it would interspersed with significant silences and have taken far too long to go through all gaps. Enigma stories have more traction the possibilities. Alan Turing suggested a than Colossus stories, despite the latter’s means of mechanization of the attack on greater significance. Vagueness persisted; the codes (the Turing “bombes”). as late as 1996, writers could still refer to The Lorenz cipher was considerably “Turing’s Colossus” (Edwards 1996). tougher; the answer was the world’s first Postwar uses of the site included a semiprogrammable computer, Colossus, Diplomatic Wireless Service transmission run on thousands of valves for high- speed station, as well as a telecommunications switching. While Turing’s theoretical training school for the General Post Office, insights suggested general approaches which would subsequently become pri- to the problem, and indicated desirable vatized as British Telecom. The site was qualities and capabilities of a computing abandoned in 1992, and the Bletchley Park machine, the device was, in fact, sug- Trust began operations to work with the gested and designed by a Post Office engi- remains. neer named Thomas Flowers, influenced In terms of the remaining structure by the mathematical intuitions of Bill Tutte. and its consequences for understand- Flowers’s prototype met with skepticism ing, the master plan document puts it and some resistance from the theorists, succinctly: “Whilst a central area of the but it worked the first time out and broke site has operated as a museum for the its first code settings in less than an hour. past decade, a lack of resources and sale Flowers never received due recog- of outlying parts of the site for develop- CS nition for his work; he had to watch the ment — without controls to capture some I T of the value created to effectively contrib- I glory showered on the ENIAC (Electronic L Numerical Integrator and Computer) sys- ute to conservation of the historic assets O P tem as the world’s first computer and of the whole — has limited the potential to endure humiliations from his employers, to bring forward a considered and holistic as he could not reveal the true source plan for conservation and renewal at the of his certainty that electronics and not Park” (EDAW Consultants 2005). CULTURAL analog servos were the communication Cramped suburban terraces, in tools of the future. As a working- class standard UK developers’ idiom, subsidized 153 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/2/151/404209/0100151.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 Gair Dunlop Figure 2 New-build suburbia, on the site of Colossus facilities, Bletchley Park. Photo: Gair Dunlop with tax breaks, have been built over the Cinematics margins of the site and now cover the site Between Blocks B and D, to the north of the famous Block F: the true origin- site of the site, a large model submarine sits of the computer age (fig. 2). The end of in front of the TS Invincible, which is a the Cold War meant the abandonment of Portakabin- style structure that is home the site by the intelligence agencies, while to the Milton Keynes Naval Cadet Corps the privatization of the General Post Office (Milton Keynes is over sixty miles from and its transformation into British Telecom the sea). meant that the link to a historic sense of This twenty- five- foot model of a VIIC ownership was broken. Telephone training U- boat carries no markings or identifica- moved, and the site margins were parceled tion. There is no interpretation or con- up and sold off. This process continued textualization. Depending on the cultural into the era of the trust; conflicts of interest baggage of the visitor, it can represent led to senior resignations, and the current either U- 571 or U- 559. The former is a trust has to plan and build within limited fictitious film (2000), set in the Atlantic parameters. Block G is inside the conserva- in 1942, in which American sailors battle tion area but not within the site perimeter: this submarine and recover an Enigma a limbo. Paradoxically, this in- between machine and codebooks, thus shortening state makes it peculiarly valuable as a site the war. The incident fictionalized in the for reverie, historical musing, and experi- film was, in reality, an attack on submarine encing an analogue structure to the U- 559, which was forced to the surface “Ur- site,” the now- vanished Block F (fig. 3). in the Mediterranean by HMS Petard. Figure 3 More new-build suburbia; ultra was the code word for intelligence material from Bletchley Park. Photo: Gair Dunlop Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/2/151/404209/0100151.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 GATEWAYS to BLETCHLEY The submarine crew attempted to sink (Kate Winslet) waits for moody protagonist the U- 559 and then abandoned it without and tormented codebreaker Tom Jeri- destroying their codebooks, which were cho (Dougray Scott) on the steps of the retrieved by two Royal Navy officers from National Gallery. War is over, normality is HMS Petard, at the cost of their lives, and restored, and finally real love, as opposed by a ship’s boy, who survived. A museum to obsessive, delusional love, is celebrated. allowing an uninflected and fictionalized Codebreakers are now once again civilians. reading of its own origin myth may be The “ordinary Britons” of Jennings’s film considered unusual (fig. 4). are foregrounded as the story reaches Figure 4 Submarine model, built for the filmEnigma (2001). Photo: Gair Dunlop Behind the submarine in the left- hand toward its exit scene. The acid yellow photograph is Block D, now used as stor- colors of its finale — as the lovers drive into age for the National Museum of Comput- their cinematic future through fields of ing collection. It is not currently accessible rapeseed (barely grown in England before to the public. the 1970s) places our sense of genetically modified, technologically determined Anachronistic Yellow: Listen to Britain springtime into theirs. The indeterminate submarine and its CS competing national narratives of conquest Splitting: Half a Past I T floats as a metaphor for the relationship You are inside the gates. In theory, sites I L between the United States and the United of wonder await. But not all doors are O P Kingdom, in the same way in which the open. Decisions involving access, health Trafalgar Square sequence of the film and safety issues, managed decline, and Enigma (2001) places us in relation to the restoration priorities have left their mark idealistic, longed- for nation of Humphrey on the visitor experience. Simulations CULTURAL Jennings’s Listen to Britain (1942). In stand in for artifacts. Hut 11 uses props Enigma, Bletchley worker Hester Wallace for the Enigma film in re- creations of the 155 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/2/151/404209/0100151.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 Gair Dunlop Figure 5 Hut 11, a.k.a.

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