Why are people yarn-bombing in Lincoln city centre?

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What’s all this yarn-bombing2 about in Lincoln city centre? The area around High Bridge on the city’s High Street has been adorned with pretty forget-me-nots. They’re a tribute to women whose wartime exploits are still mainly kept a secret.

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The Sleaford-based ForgetMeNots Facebook group has already been busy with a variety of tributes this year to the likes of the men who served on The Somme 100 years after they joined The Fallen.

YARN-BOMBING: A tribute on Lincoln’s High Bridge.

Now the yarn forget-me-nots3 have been festooned in Lincoln as a tribute just a few of 800, indicated as 1 for every 10 women who served at Bletchley Park in the Second World War. They are the work of volunteers from the Sleaford Remembrance Trail who have spent most of 2016 placing various tributes to unsung Lincolnshire wartime heroes. Bletchley Park rejoices in the fact that, until fairly recently, it was probably Britain’s best kept secret.

This is because the secrecy surrounding all the activities carried on there was of vital importance to our national security and ultimate victory.

FORGET-ME-NOTS: Adorning a wall in Lincoln city centre.

It was there that an organisation called the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) studied and devised methods to enable the Allied forces to decipher the military codes and ciphers that secured German, Japanese, and other Axis nations’ communications. The code-breakers, many of them women, produced vital intelligence in advance of military operations. Bletchley Park also heralded the birth of the information age with the industrialisation of the code-breaking processes enabled by machines such as the Turing/Welchman Bombe and the world’s first electronic computer Colossus.

Today, Bletchley Park is a treasured heritage site designed to preserve the important story of the code-breakers.

But it has no connections to the Government and receives no funding, the site is self-financing from admissions, grants, donations and charitable contributions.

To find out more visit https://www.facebook.com/sleafordforgetmenots/4

References

1. ^ Comments (0) (www.lincolnshireecho.co.uk)
2. ^ yarn-bombing (www.lincolnshireecho.co.uk)
3. ^ yarn forget-me-nots (www.lincolnshireecho.co.uk)
4. ^ https://www.facebook.com/sleafordforgetmenots/ (www.facebook.com)