Saving Bletchley Park

I received my hardcover copy of "Saving Bletchley Park" by Dr. Sue Black with Stevyn Colgan yesterday. I correspond every now and then with Dr. Black, and hope to eventually be able to meet her.

After learning the story behind Germany's biggest team success in chess, the 1939 Chess Olympiad in Buenos Aires, the curious tale of the British team leaving to home for a secret government project eventually let me take the opportunity to visit Bletchley Park for myself in 2012. Now, I can NOT recommend hotels in London to anyone, but there is a breathtaking chess book store in Baker Street, and the Simpson's, the Park Lane Hotel (well, if you can afford it, this hotel IS worth it, the personnel is super friendly and even goes an extra mile for you - literally, as I saw personally on my inquiry about the world championship 1986, and I was not even one of their guests!), and other sites of historical events that are worth a visit.

So once you settle with a B&B outside of London (Milton Keynes is a nice place, close to Bletchley Park and less than an hour away of London) you can get to visit Bletchley Park yourself? And why can you? Well, since the British government does not give a damn, Dr. Black dedicated her time to saving it. The full story can be read in the abovementioned book. Through her use of social media, she saved the site where not only World War II was secretly won and the fictional spy James Bond born, but where the most brillant people of Great Britain worked on a project so secret that they literally did not know what they were doing. There is an Israeli t-shirt that says "My job is so secret, I don't even know what I'm doing". The line meant as a joke was true in Bletchley Park: Nobody knew everything, and most people thought they just do some stupid office job, not knowing that they worked towards unraveling a secret of war-turning consequences, trying to break a code that until today is unbreakable, and that might not even have been deciphered at all if the Germans didn't make a tiny mistake. This is the story of 8000 people, living in a small town without even knowing why: CHOD Alexander, Philip Stuart Milner-Barry and Harry Golombek working together with Alan Turing and Ian Fleming. All of this while there is complete war in Europe, while they don't even know about the time pressure brought up by the shoah, by the genocides.

It is exciting history, it is a place of greatest importance in the history of Europe and the world, and it is social media that saved the heritage! While I have yet to read the book, I can say that the place is worth a visit from my own experience, and I am thankful to Dr. Black and everyone else for preserving it, and to Unbound for enabling the book!