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

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Figure 1 Reception area, Block D. Photo: Gair Dunlop cs i t i o l P

Cultural 152

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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 glory showered on the ENIAC (Electronic of the value created to effectively contrib- i

Numerical Integrator and Computer) sys- ute to conservation of the historic assets o l 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

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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

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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

between the United States and the United of wonder await. But not all doors are o l 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

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Figure 5 Hut 11, a.k.a. the Bombe room, a.k.a. the hell hole. Photo: Gair Dunlop

real Bombe room (fig. 5). The site is the model railways, and a slowly clearing original; the contents are imaginary. clutter of heritabilia. It is an impossibly vast Pathos and a tragic narrative arc distance for tiring aged legs. Return to the bookend Alan Turing’s memory, with his bus is inevitable for most. teddy bear and a framed formal apology for his treatment from the last Labour govern- Fons et Origo ment on display in the galleries. Again, the The place has been well looked after, but focus is on Enigma. as Waterhouse draws closer, he can see black Over one hundred volunteer guides lianas climbing up the brickwork. The root meet every month to discuss the content system that he glimpsed in the Underground and route of the tour, which is evaluated has spread beneath forest and pasture even to in terms of contemporary preoccupations. this place and has begun to throw its neoprene The duration of the walking tour has creepers upwards. But this organism is not recently been cut down due to the increas- phototropic — it does not grow towards the light, ing age and frailty of visitors. Discussion always questing towards the sun. It is info- of Colossus on the tour is reduced to a tropic. . . . Bletchley Park has roughly the same 10:2 July 2014

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parting request to remember to visit the situation in the info world as the sun does in the

cs National Museum of Computing. A gesture solar system [fig. 6]. (Stephenson 1999: 143) i t

i is made across the open green space, to a

o l peripheral set of huts. This empty space, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon mines P once the courtyard of Block H, was the the atmospherics of Bletchley for its final dismantling and burning site for most grounding of contemporary connectivity of the Colossus machinery. Many visitors in war and the mercantile — a Virilian novel have already expended energy on the near-­ of compressed epochs, communication Cultural random range of displays accommodated limits, and Borgesian labyrinth. Although it on the site: a garage of vintage vehicles, is a more conventional novel than it at first 156

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appears, the inchoate sense of information In reality, motorcycle couriers and as life-form expressed by “Waterhouse” communication cables were the informa- in this text attest to an extraordinary tion lifeblood of the park. Increasing vol- explosion of network, speed, and social umes of transcript would arrive, undergo organization that will come to have such processing, and eventually form the infor- consequences for the postwar world. mation stream. But what then? cs i t i o l P

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Figure 6 Upper floor room, Block G. Photo: Gair Dunlop 157

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cs i t i o l P

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Figure 7 Upper floor room, Block G. Photo: Gair Dunlop 158

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What could be done with this cease- less avalanche of paper? Improbably, the small town of Thetford in rural Norfolk became the final destination for the waste of Bletchley. Under armed guard, the tapes, papers, teleprinter reels, and notes were shredded and pulped, mixed with resin, and pressed into Thetford Pulpware (Grace’s Guide 2007). This was a patented form of reinforced papier-­mâché. Finally, the material was transformed into baths, trays, bowls . . . and motorcycle helmets. Motorcyclists arriving at the park, in its later stages, could conceivably be wear- ing protective gear made from previous deliveries. Noise into Signal into usable and unreadable Noise. In this light, Bletchley Park can be seen as an unexpected precur- sor of ecological parsimony.

Limbo Spaces and Amnesia A known unknown: what was Colos- sus really used for after the war? Two machines survived, at least one of which was still working in 1960 at Govern- ment Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) — Bletchley’s successors — in Cheltenham. Coyness prevails; hints of its use in relation to the American National Security Agency (NSA) and also its poten- tial to check “one-­time pad” systems for true randomness are all that remain. “The Newmanry’s Colossi might have passed into the public domain at the end of the fighting, to become, like the ENIAC, the electronic muscle of a scien- cs

tific research facility. . . . The history of the i t computer might have unfolded quite differ- i

ently with such a momentous push right o l P

at the beginning. Churchill’s order to break up the Colossi was an almighty blow in the face for science — and for British industry”

(Copeland 2006: 172). Cultural 159

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late to write a story of the coming of the information age, as seen by its protago- nists. Information may want to be free, but the history of information is everywhere in chains. These chains are sometimes offi- cial, sometimes organizational, sometimes habitual. What now exists: mold and paint peel, battery efflorescence, broken floors, a bucket. Sounds of the railway, remnants of telephone training facilities. For those who valorize the actual, the genuine, and the original, Bletchley Park is a very partial and unsatisfactory experience. A site whose own story cannot be completely acknowledged makes for an ambiguous relationship with history. Attempts to trade on the “charm” of lingering secrecy seem slightly forced. For others with a nose for the cover story, the unrenovated, and the near-­truth, the conserved but not

Figure 8 Curtain in projection room, ground floor, Block G. preserved zones, in the no-­man’s-­land Photo: Gair Dunlop between heritage and developer, have their own particular charm. The unrestored, exhausted spaces of Block G exude a calm A New Kind of War Monument and contemplative atmosphere, where the Bletchley Park is a site formed through behaviors generated by massive informa- absences and evasions . . . and thus per- tion systems were first formed. A parallel fectly suited to be a new kind of battlefield might be drawn with the more successful monument. Current preoccupations with sites adapted by squatters: mired in legal cyber attack, computer warfare, botnets, ambiguity, the problem of what to do and so on remind us that the warfare of with such places is dismissed. A contem- the future could well be . . . boring. In our plative, usefully silent place to reflect on imaginative preparation, the mythology the British half-­fulfilled modernist dream is of Bletchley Park, with its thousands of 10:2 July 2014 the result (figs. 7–9).

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attentive Wrens, tweeded intellectuals,

cs and tireless technicians, allows us to hover i We are so attuned to the vividness of the virtual t

i between the two poles of Zen-­like concen- that the encounter with the crumbling “National

o l tration, on the one hand, and an empirical Code Centre” at Bletchley Park seems to P ability to bear and function in an immense accelerate the aging process. The phantasms of tedium, on the other. Baudrillard’s code, the ecstasy of digitality and Alain Resnais could make a very the caress of the tactical and tactile, violently British Marienbad of Block G, the new pan- Cultural recede when faced with the dinge and despair demonium. Unfortunately, it may be too 160

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Figure 9 Upper corridor, Block G. Photo: Gair Dunlop cs i t i of an English suburb and abandoned telecom experienced the uncanny wandering in the red o l P

buildings overrun by weeds and vandalism. . . . light district from which he could not escape, almost none of the machines function; for us the machine is the thing that creates only the reconstructed Colossus computer, unease, not by producing dissatisfaction, but by first switched on in 1943, bears witness to the real’s taking such license with the virtual. that machine heritage. Unlike Freud who (Hegarty and Gonosko 2009) Cultural 161

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References Copeland, B. Jack, ed. 2006. Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park’s Codebreaking Computers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. EDAW Consultants. 2005. “Bletchley Park Area Masterplan and Supplementary Planning Guidance” (commissioned by English Partnerships on behalf of the Bletchley Park Steering Group). Milton Keynes Council Environmental Protectorate, www.mkiobservatory.org.uk /document.aspx?id=7463&siteID=1026. Accessed June 23, 2013. Edwards, Paul N. 1996. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Postwar America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Grace’s Guide. 2007. “Patent Pulp Manufacturing Co,” www.gracesguide.co.uk/Patent_Pulp _Manufacturing_Co. Accessed June 23, 2013. Hegarty, Paul, and Gary Genosko. 2009. “Another Bletchley Park.” CTheory, September 16, www .ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=613. Stephenson, Neal. 1999. Cryptonomicon. London: Arrow Books.

Filmography Enigma. DVD. Directed by Michael Apted. 2001; London: Jagged Films. Listen to Britain. DVD. Directed by Humphrey Jennings. 1942; London: BFI, 2012. U-­571. DVD. Directed by Jonathan Mostow. 2000; Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, 2001. 10:2 July 2014

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cs i t i o l P

Gair Dunlop makes artworks that explore entropic modernism: the New Town, the military airfield, the film archive, and the memory of progress. He is program director of time-­based art and digital film at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD), Dundee, Scotland. His investigations have developed into engagements with sites of secrecy: military Cultural zones, scientific test establishments, and other evidence of the “dark side” of modernism. The works investigate and play with different eras of discovery and propaganda. 162

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