Bletchley Park

I'm back in Canada but still have a few blogs to post. The next two I wrote in Heathrow while waiting for my flight but despite sitting next to a 'free wi-fi' sign my laptop couldn't access the internet. So I'm posting them now.

I may be leaving England today but I still have a few more adventures to blog about. For one, I have to share with you my ultra-nerdy adventure to Bletchley Park (and I don’t mean ‘textile-nerdy’ for once).

Bletchley Park was the home of Britain’s WWII code breakers. Thousands of men and women worked in secret to find the secrets of Germany’s various codes, including most famously exploiting the flaws with Enigma (which was supposed to be unbreakable). The reason Bletchley was so successful was its structure- civilians were brought together and encouraged to find a solution to the problem in any way they could manage. Some of the staff were downright eccentric- one mathematician would bike to Bletchley wearing a gas mask in the spring to keep his allergies from bothering him. I wrote a paper on Bletchley for my ‘History of Espionage’ course in university and when one of my co-workers at Hampton Court told me it was open to the public I couldn’t miss it.

Building-wise, the museum still looks largely like it did during the war. The original mansion is at (roughly) the centre of the complex.

And a number of out-buildings, known as huts or blocks, were built to house most of the code-breaking activities.

I will start off by saying that Bletchley is part modern and part old-fashioned curiosities museum. It relies heavily of volunteer staff so some of the buildings are only open on weekends. It also features exhibits on life in the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s. A lot of the textiles are displayed in ways that make me cringe (I won’t even give you an example). Visitors my age were definitely in the minority and I felt very young. Some of the huts are in disrepair and closed to the public, like this one for example.

Now all the good points.

There are free guided tours and the guides (who are volunteers) are extremely knowledgeable and friendly. One part of the museum is a shrine to Alan Turning, who worked at Bletchley and was of the pioneers of early computers. The museum has functioning replicas of some of the machines that he helped design. Meet Colossus.

This computer was developed to help break the German diplomatic codes, which were incredibly labour intensive to solve with pencil and paper. Just a handful of these machines were produced and no originals are known to survive. Now meet a Bombe machine.

These machines weren’t computers, but they helped find the settings that an Enigma machine was set to when it sent a message. Hundreds of these were used during the war both at Bletchley and at other sites around the country. And volunteers spent years building a replica machine from scratch, because there are no known originals of it as well. Two volunteers were running the machine when I was there and I cannot stress how amazing it was to see it running.

Ultra-nerdy. I know.