Bletchley Park Trust to undergo organisational restructure | Hacker News Reader

Bletchley Park Trust to undergo organisational restructure

bletchleypark.org.uk

49 pointsleoc28 comments

That's disappointing. Given the size of the UK intelligence budget and how much the whole military must spend on recruiting, being a part of the story that began there is one of the things that gets smart people into public service.

Statist mindset.

Why not simply eliminate the private sector to ensure all smart people can't go anywhere but into public service, and get peace and prosperity for all?

Smart people shouldn't go into public service.

Well, then you'd have the UK in the 70's pre-Thatcher, or now, basically.

There is some wisdom to putting dull people in charge of governance tasks as they manage to keep themselves mostly out of the way. Too sharp, and you get sophisticated corruption as a way of life, which is the irony of countries where their cleverest people are in government. Too dull and you get mob rule and petty corruption, a junta with proverbial DMV clerks all the way down. The modern UK 'elf'n'safety state seems to lurch a bit toward the latter, so Bletchley could be a rallying point from a time when ordinary people were indeed capable of extraordinary things.

Worry instead about the National Museum of Computing.[1] Those are the people who did the bombe rebuild and the Colossus rebuild. Separate admission. They had a falling-out with the building-oriented Bletchley Park Trust.

I've been there, but before it was built up into a major tourist attraction.

[1] https://bletchleypark.org.uk/visit-us/the-national-museum-of...

> They had a falling-out with the building-oriented Bletchley Park Trust.

Does anyone know what this was about?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-25916048

Thanks, but that explains absolutely nothing. Even the guy being fired says 'I haven't got a clue'. The say that they want to develop a new visitor centre because they have lottery funding, but I don't see why that means they can't work with the National Museum of Computing.

Why doesn't the interview just ask them 'just tell me what is the problem here?'

I don't understand how we get these news reports that explain nothing.

I personally thought it was reasonably clear. Bletchley park estate split into two museums, one large one small. Tour guide from large museum takes visitors to small museum too as this is a major part of the story (i.e colossus, the bomb, witch) allowed for a number of years, now against policy (basically to pretend the small museum does not exist/is not worth visiting) and as such volunteer fired for his transgression.

Not in the video, but worth noting is that the small museum are a tenant of the large museum who get use of the estate basically free from Govt.

> I personally thought it was reasonably clear.

Well I must be mad because I still can't understand it from your explanation. I know it's against policy to take them to the smaller museum and this is why he was fired... but... why?

Why did they make it against policy? Why do they not want to work with the other museum? Why do they not get along?

> basically to pretend the small museum does not exist/is not worth visiting

Why do they want to pretend that the small museum does not exist and is not worth visiting?

There's like ten fundamental and completely unexplained why's still left after your explanation. I don't know how that can be 'reasonably clear'.

The Computer Museum in Mountain View has a similar problem. The museum management and the people restoring old computers don't get along.

This is a really common theme in the museum space. I’ve worked with a lot of museums over the last 10+ years and just about every single one has a very us vs them feel when it comes to upper management.

I don’t know if every government department ends up like that but these ones here certainly do.

Territorial pissing is a regrettably common — innate? — portion of the human experience that when reading the grandparent post I was just like “ugh, people.” There probably is some string of triggering incidents or resource contention but at the end of the day separate institutions are naturally inclined to competition not collaboration. Especially in highly politicized environments as things historical or museum tend to be.

Disclaimer: I’m not saying it should be different

I absolutely love how prior payments to executives/trustees escapes all scrutiny. Its like “ah we didnt get Xmillion this year there is nothing we can dooo”. Which is very responsible for personal finances. Never spend your own, use other people’s money. And in a trust it is almost impossible to do it any other way. Its still interesting to me.

This is exactly why I refuse to give to big brand-name charities. The amount of troughing going on in large charities is absolutely disgraceful.

Whether its the remuneration given to those at the top table, the fancy offices the charities occupy in prime real estate locations, the generous use of taxis and business class flights. The list goes on.

Until such day the charity regulators put an end to it, I shall continue my no-execptions refusal to give to large charities.

There are organisations that go to some length to assess which charities give you the most "bang for your buck". GiveWell is the one that I am most familiar with, which reccomends the AMF, amongst other organisations. Donations there can save many lives for little money, so if you're worried about, eg UNICEF spend, I suggest you check it out as an alternative!

https://www.givewell.org/

I had a free Saturday after some boring Friday sales meeting/presentation in London maybe a decade ago. Decided to take a field trip to Bletchley Park instead of wandering aimlessly in London. I just loved the whole experience (including the train trip and the walk from the Bletchley train station) so much. I want to do it again, so I hope it will be able to keep going.

Unfortunately since then the managers got rid of all the volunteers who had intimate knowledge of the computer science: https://www.theregister.com/2014/01/28/bletchley_park_sacks_...

I was very lucky that I got to meet Tony Sale a couple of times before he passed away, back in probably 2008 or thereabouts and he demonstrated the Colossus that he had rebuilt to me, which was a tremendous experience (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Sale).

While you do have to know what you are looking for, and walk the long way around from the larger Bletchley Park site, the National Museum of Computing is still (as of last year) there with volunteers showing off the workings of a bunch of rebuilt computers including the Colossus. I can't recommend a visit, with a guided tour, enough. And you might as well visit Bletchley itself while you are there, which is a different experience, but still worth while.

This is one of those articles that says a lot without saying anything. Why do these two museums not like each other?

Tony Sale is someone I really wish I got to meet before he died. The WW2 stuff is interesting enough, but he also spent a lot of time running around London chasing and bugging communists with Peter Wright. He would've been working only a few rungs under an alleged soviet mole, which isn't something every get's to do.

I live just over the fence of Bletchley park. 3 minutes away from train station, been commuting to London daily few years ago. For anyone who is thinking that train ride from London is enjoying - it's not. London Northwestern Railway trains are filthy and you're always choose to stand for those 45 minutes, which usually becomes 70-80 minutes, because of "signalling problems". You get off at Bletchley station, which is old, really old, never been refreshed and looks like it will fall apart any minute. It's never cleaned too. There's no such thing as cleaning service in Bletchley station. You finally get out of it, walk over the street (no atmosphere or feeling that anything happened here), walk for 3.5 minutes and you're in Bletchley park, which is nice to see.

Sounds like an excellent way to start and end 5 days a week of your life for many years

You’d think or hope GCHQ could be involved - or are they already?

This coming after their data breach (13 August 2020).

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53771942

Presumably cock-up rather than conspiracy, but you can search the UK Charities Commission for information on any charity. Bletchley Park says that its registered charity number is 1012743 - https://bletchleypark.org.uk/about-us/contact-us - but I can't find anything when searching the Charity Commission website: https://beta.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-search/?search...

I'd be interested to know a bit more about the breakdown of their finances. As another comment says, I wonder just how much Iain Standen, their CEO, gets paid, and whether he offered to take any kind of pay cut. Not saying it would eliminate all layoffs and / or furloughs, but it would be a meaningful gesture of solidarity.

Looks like at most £110k when you read the accounts. Not sure why you're not finding them and mentioning words like 'conspiracy' and 'cock-up' - they're right here if you bother to look for them:

http://apps.charitycommission.gov.uk/Showcharity/RegisterOfC...

Didn't mean anything arch by that. I tried looking for them by name and charity number but nothing turned up. I consider it a cock-up that I couldn't find them by searching by charity number on the Charity Commission website, which has worked for every charity I've done that for. The only other explanation was that they were going to change their charity status, but I considered that unlikely, hence "cock-up rather than conspiracy".

Latest accounts:http://apps.charitycommission.gov.uk/Accounts/Ends43/0001012... shows £5.32M cash at bank, which likely will have grown to over 6Mn in 2019.

This is all at the same time they are kicking out their large commercial tenant who run an innovation centre (end of this year) so they can create some more museum, office and education space. I imagine this situation is not 'so severe' that they will walk back that decision.

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