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Dr Sue Black explains how technology won us the second world war

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Imagine saving over 22 million lives, but not being able to talk about it – not even the slightest brag. Nothing. Well, that was reality for those who worked in the codebreaking department at Bletchley Park.

A reality that Dr Sue Black – former head of the Department of Information and Software Systems at the University of Westminster – would draw attention to with her campaign to save the park.

“It’s mad that it played such an important role in bringing about the end of the war, but most people hadn’t even heard of it until recently,” said Black.

Long one of Britain’s best kept secrets, Bletchley Park was home to an organisation called the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) from 1939 to 1945.

The group, which boasted pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing as one of its senior members, was tasked with deciphering the military codes and ciphers used by Hitler and the other Axis powers to communicate.

Brought into mainstream consciousness by historical thriller The Imitation Game, Bletchley Park has come back to life.

With this reawakening comes a new awareness of the vital work of its codebreakers, which has been credited with shortening the war by at least two years.

A chance encounter

“The first time that I went up there, I didn’t really know much about it all. I just kind of knew it was something to do with codebreaking,” Black explained.

There for a meeting in 2003, the computer scientist was intrigued by the site and what had happened there, but disheartened to find it in such a state of neglect.

Following the meeting, she wandered the site and stumbled across a huge piece of machinery, which turned out to be none other than Turing’s codebreaking machine.

Employees at the site told Black about the contraption – called the Bombe machine – and she learned that, at the end of the war, Churchill sought to destroy all the machines that had been used for codebreaking, so enemy forces wouldn’t know how their codes had been deciphered and their plans thwarted.

The Bombe machine – a complex electro-mechanical device designed by Turing and Gordon Welchman – tackled coded messages by the Germans, enciphered on devices called Enigma machines. It worked through all possible configurations, ruling out those that didn’t work and decreasing the number of possible correct settings so they could be further tested by the codebreaking team.

The problem was, there wasn’t just one code to crack and it didn’t stay the same. An early version of the cipher was broken by the Poles in 1932, but this iteration was only altered once every few months. By the time Turing and his team at Bletchley were working on cracking the code, things weren’t so simple.

“The codes changed at midnight every night, which gave the team only 24 hours to crack that day’s code,” Black explained.

Women at Bletchley

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The gender split in the modern technology and computer science spheres is often the subject of scrutiny, so it’s surprising to learn that Bletchley Park – the home to such advanced technical computing work – was largely staffed by women.

At its peak, Bletchley Park was home to over 10,000 workers, two thirds of which were female. Many of the women, Black explained, were in their late teens or early 20s and ended up at Bletchley after joining the Navy.

“They would interview lots of the women and ask them questions about whether they were good at cryptic crosswords and that kind of thing. They wanted people who had good logical minds,” she said.

Black, a strong advocate for women in tech, having founded founded BCSWomen, a Specialist Group of the British Computer Society, feels strongly that it should be celebrated that so many females were involved in this early technological endeavour.

Having graduated from London’s South Bank University in 1993 and earned her PhD there in 2011, Black was named one of the top 50 Women in Tech in Europe last year by Inspiring Fifty.

An award-winning computer scientist and social entrepreneur, she has spent the last twenty years trying to address the perceived lack of women working in technology.

“The percentage of women involved in computing in the 90s is probably about the same now, but there’s so much more awareness, so I think things are now getting better,” explained Black.

The Second World War changed women’s working roles. As men were sent off to fight, women were increasingly called up to fill their jobs, some of which would have previously been deemed unsuitable for females.

The real issue for women, however, came after the war.

Similarly to their male counterparts, most women who had worked at Bletchley would have struggled to find work in a tech-driven environment in the postwar era because they were not allowed to disclose their codebreaking skills and experience.

Saving the Park

Given its prominent role in the Second World War, it seemed unthinkable that the Park’s history would lay forgotten for years to come.

Soon after visiting, Black discovered it was on the brink of closure due to a lack of funding.

“I just thought: ‘I have to do something about this. I have to do everything I can to stop this happening,” Black explained.

So that’s what she did. She made it her personal mission to raise awareness about the site and the pioneering work that was carried out there during the war.

She set up a blog and soon gained recognition for her cause from celebrities and powerful public figureheads such as Stephen Fry.

In July 2008, Black contacted the nation’s top computer scientists about the Park’s bleak future, fielding support and signatures on an open letter – later sent to The Times – condemning the situation.

“I wanted to do something to make a bit of a splash. It was all very quick, it took me by surprise,” said Black. “The campaign became an obsession, an addiction, but it was fun.”

In November that same year, English Heritage announced it would donate £300,000 to help maintain the buildings on the treasured heritage site.

Three years later, the Bletchley Park Trust received a £4.6m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund with the condition that £1.7m of funding was raised by the trust.

Soon, global tech giants such as Google joined in, contributing £550,000.

Iain Standen, CEO of the Bletchley Park Trust, told Tech City News that thousands of people, including Black – who was awarded an OBE for her contribution to technology in this year’s Honor List – had contributed to saving the park.

“Without their collective work, the site would have been lost forever,” he added.

Restoring its glory

For Black, who has since written a book titled Saving Bletchley Park, an important narrative to share is that of the extent to which technology can be used to extraordinary effect.

But her main prerogative is to spread the word about the missing part of the Second World War story.

Today, the work of its codebreakers has re-entered mainstream consciousness and the site, which once stood dilapidated, has been restored.

Having opened as a museum in 1994, it now attracts thousands of visitors every year, eager to learn about the great things that took place there.

“It’s really important that people are getting to hear about it now, the information didn’t used to be public, so we weren’t taught about it at school,” said Black.

That’s perhaps the saddest thing about the work done at Bletchley Park – that it was carried out in such shrouded secrecy. Even once the war had ended, the former employees were banned from talking about it, banned from sharing the important work they had been a part of.

Black regaled a heartbreaking anecdote about a former employee who couldn’t even tell his father the true nature of the work he had been doing. The man’s father, while on his deathbed, chastised him for never amounting to much and never having done anything of importance with his life. Even faced with this situation, the man kept his oath and didn’t reveal the secrets of Bletchley Park.

At least now, thanks to The Imitation Game, Black and her fellow campaigners, the work of these war heroes can be aptly celebrated.

This article first appeared in issue 9 – The Cybersecurity issue – of Tech City News magazine. View the digital version online and subscribe to receive future issues to your door, for free.

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