The battle to save Bletchley Park

Sinclair McKay attends the 70th anniversary reunion of the men and women who broke the Enigma code, and asks why the government won’t fund their museum

‘The turnout is very good,’ says eighty-something Ruth Bourne, glancing around at the tight, slow-moving mass of neat pink woolly cardigans, sensible skirts, pressed grey flannels and sports jackets. ‘More of us,’ she adds, ‘have come out of the woodwork.’

Ruth Bourne helped to shorten the second world war by two years, as did the 80 or so other elderly folk gathered here. We are milling around the big house of Bletchley Park — a Victorian manifestation of ‘lavatory gothic’ as one old BP veteran tartly put it — where, in conditions of total secrecy almost unimaginable now, the German Enigma codes were cracked, translated and analysed by the brightest people in Britain.