Sir, All of us at the Bletchley Park Trust very much welcomed the supportive letters from a number of distinguished academics on July 24 — the day, by pure coincidence, of a long planned and very successful visit to Bletchley by the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. We believe that Bletchley is indeed a really important piece of Britain’s heritage, not just because of its great historical significance but as a powerful symbol for a new generation of British excellence and innovative spurt.

We took over the site in 1992 (though we only got title to it some ten years later) in an appalling state of neglect. We have had to catch up on almost 50 years’ backlog of maintenance on a huge complex of buildings, to develop exhibits to tell Bletchley’s story from scratch, and to generate income to support all this activity with no public funding and no endowment other than parts of the site which we could turn to commercial use.

We have come a long way. We have over the years raised more than £5 million to develop and restore parts of the site. We have almost extinguished an annual operating loss of £500,000, and eliminated our debts. In the past three years we have increased visitor numbers by 40 per cent to more than 50,000. We have done all of this with wonderful support from staff, volunteers and our amazing Bletchley veterans.

But we have a long way to go. We have an ambitious programme to raise our exhibition to the standards fitting a museum of national (and international) importance, and are planning — with advice and support from the Heritage Lottery Fund itself and from our local MP, Dr Phyllis Starkey — a bid for substantial Heritage Lottery funding. But major investment will be needed to unlock such funding before any bid can succeed, and we shall still have a long-term need for support for our operating costs. We shall shortly be launching a new fundraising drive.

The military historian Richard Holmes, a friend and patron of Bletchley, last month aptly described the park as “hallowed ground”. The park is a fascinating place to visit, but we can make it much more so. Much of our estate is still shabby, and in parts ruinous. Our future is still precarious. Your distinguished correspondents’ call for support from central — and, we might add, local — government is therefore timely, and any support that readers of The Times can give us will be more than welcome.

Sir Francis Richards
Chairman, Bletchley Park Trust

Sir, Might it be appropriate to consider again the question of a posthumous knighthood for Alan Turing, who did so much to make its success possible?

Anthony Roberts
Shoreham-by-Sea, W Sussex

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