192 | 19 TURING’S mONUmENT
site was leased to an innovation company things looked up financially; but expenditure still
exceeded income by almost £500,000 in 2006. A controversial decision was taken to sell a parcel
of land for housing development. This enabled the Trust to clear its debts, but the core problem
of balancing expenditure and income remained. Another seemingly intractable problem was
how to maintain the buildings themselves: the Trust had no money for this. The site continued
to deteriorate alarmingly; some buildings were hazardous to enter and others were coming
close to being unsafe. The nation’s heritage was crumbling away.
During this stressful time the Trust was plagued by bitter infighting. In 2007, when ten-
sions were at their height, the National Museum of Computing—originally set up by Tony
Sale and Margaret Sale in the 1990s—broke away and became a separate entity on the site.
Today, the National Museum of Computing is a separate attraction and is housed in Block H, a
large concrete building into which the Newmanry with its Colossi had expanded in September
1944.^4 The museum contains Tony Sale’s magnificent rebuilds of Colossus and a British Tunny
machine,^5 as well as an exhibition about codebreaking and a priceless collection of later com-
puters (many in working order) illustrating the history of computing from Colossus through
to more recent times.
Things come right at last
In 2007 the Trust introduced some radical changes: cost savings, new initiatives for income
generation, and a generally more aggressive approach to cost control. Finally the Trust’s income
was running ahead of expenditure. But this only bought time. There remained the gigantic
problem of where to find the money to save and restore the buildings, and to develop Bletchley
Park into the world-class heritage site that it is today.
In the long run, effective publicity was the key to securing Bletchley Park’s future. A first
step followed on from the previously mentioned document declassifications of 1996–2000.
National and international attention was drawn to Bletchley Park by a clutch of new books:
packed with fresh and often revolutionary information from the recently declassified wartime
documents, these took the Bletchley Park story to a new level. They included Jack Copeland’s
The Essential Turing (2004), Michael Smith’s Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park
(1998), Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s Enigma: The Battle for the Code (2000), Ralph Erskine’s and
Michael Smith’s Action This Day (2001), and Jack Copeland’s Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley
Park’s Codebreaking Computers (2006). The Essential Turing published extensive extracts
from Turing’s wartime treatise on the Enigma, known at Bletchley Park as ‘Prof ’s Book’, and
also from Patrick Mahon’s fascinating ‘The History of Hut Eight, 1939–1945’, both declas-
sified in 1996; while Colossus and Action This Day contained eye-opening new accounts by
Bletchley Park’s leading codebreakers, including Keith Batey, Mavis Batey, Peter Edgerley,
Tom Flowers, Jack Good, Peter Hilton, Donald Michie, Rolf Noskwith, Jerry Roberts, Bill
Tutte, Derek Taunt, and Shaun Wylie. An important book from the era preceding the 1996–
2000 declassifications was Harry Hinsley’s and Alan Stripp’s 1993 Codebreakers: The Inside
Story of Bletchley Park.
By 2008 the Trust’s in-house publicity machine was in top gear and interest from the news
media in the Bletchley Park story was beginning to surge. Radio coverage during the first
months of that year included a 45-minute reunion interview by the BBC involving a group of
five Bletchley Park veterans, Sarah Baring, Mavis Batey, Ruth Bourne, Asa Briggs, and John