Bletchley Park, home of the World War II Codebreakers

After a thrillingly creepy and wild day at the Crocodile Park it was time for different kind of evolution and development, the technological kind. We were heading to The National Codes Centre and The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes. A trip to Bletchley Park would make a wonderful school history trip.

Once a bustling secret hub of wartime codebreaking Bletchley Park is now a treasure chest of codebreaking history. The people who worked there during World War II worked tirelessly around the clock to impact the course of the war. It’s said that this work shortened the war by two years and saved up to 14 million lives. Until recently nearly 10,000 women and men who worked here were the unsung heroes of the war, many still are. Everything that went on within the many walls of Bletchley Park was top secret. No one knew what went on in there and wasn’t unclassified till many years after the war. Only then did friends and family of Bletchley Park staff know what they did during the war and many had already passed away.

As soon as you are through the ticket office in Bletchley Park you are immediately greeted with voices and images from the past projected onto the walls. Telling you about work and life in Bletchley and you are immediately but gently guided by the ghosts of the past to the beginning of the World War II codebreaking saga.

So what went on In Bletchley Park exactly. Well, this is what my 11 year old Mattias thought of it:

“Bletchley Park is a place where codebreakers cracked the codes in WW2, it is quite interesting and it tells you a lot. You can get a tour guide or a voice guide. You can see a lot of things in Bletchley. The Bombe, The Enigma and a mansion (which is probably haunted). There are some interactive things you can do too, like the maths and physics behind the Enigma and puzzles to solve like words to find in a filing cabinet to help crack a code.”

There was a little more to it my darling Mattias. It all started in May 1938 when the head of MI6, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair bought Bletchley Park, mansion and land in the event of a war breaking out. Its location was perfect as it was next to a major railway junction with connections to the South and North of England. The railway line also connected the two university towns Oxford and Cambridge from where many of the codebreakers were recruited from. For the line of work intended in Bletchley Park it didn’t hurt that it was also close to a major telecommunications network which enabled messages to come in and out from Bletchley Park quickly.

In the beginning there were secret delegates from MI6 and The Government Code and Cypher School who worked there, a team of geniuses who set up and started the important work of decoding the enemy’s messages. To hide the delegation's true identity they went about as ‘Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party’ and Station X was one cover name used for Bletchley Park throughout the war. By late 1944 there were nearly 10,000 people working in Bletchley Park, a much bigger operation than the 200 strong it began with in 1939. Still it always stayed very hush hush. It didn’t take long for the operation to outgrow the mansion which simply wasn’t big enough to house the growing number of staff, paperwork and machines needed for the complicated decoding and ever growing volume of interception. In 1939, before the war with Germany was even announced two huts had already been built on site to house all the various different jobs in the chain of the operation. This all sounds like the stuff of the movies, codebreakers, interceptors and spies. But this was very much the reality for all the people who worked there, often not knowing or realising the actual importance of their jobs or what it was that they were contributing to the war efforts. No one was allowed to talk about their job, not to fellow staff in the offices next to them nor friends and families.

As happened in many workplaces during World War II more and more women were recruited to work at Bletchley Park. They came from various places as diversity was key, Women’s Services were employed. These were the WRNS, the ATS and the WAAF and by 1945, 75% of staff were women. Other people were recruited through the Civil Service and for example through crossword puzzle competitions . Some had university backgrounds, others did they and they did everything from clerical work to codebreaking. Thus civilians and uniformed staff worked together in most sections of the operation. It’s worth mentioning that Bletchley Park was special in a way that women worked intellectual jobs, which had never been seen on such a scale before. But remember no one knew was it was all top secret.

The machinery, oh the wonderful complicated machinery, where do I even begin? I think it's probably best for me to not say much as I will not do them justice. You’ll have to see for yourselves as seeing is believing. So what did this unique never seen before (although no one knew they existed at the time) Intelligence Factory produce.

Bletchley Park was the work place of the brightest and most genius talents of Britain and together they broke the Enigma Code used by Hitler and his generals. It was believed that the Enigma machine was unbreakable with its 103 billion trillion possibilities to encoding messages. That’s a way too many 0’s for my brain! But who would have thought that it was flawed, well some amazing polish cryptographers did and based on that work The Bombe was born. Alan Turing and his talented team of codebreakers designed a machine that could eliminate the vast majority of possible ciphers that weren’t possible with Enigma. This left far fewer to be analysed by hand. Yes by hand! If I remember correctly The Bombe was equivalent to 36 Enigma machines. Let’s not forget that although this was an incredible piece of machinery it needed the aforementioned people to work it. Imagine eight hour shifts day and night tending to the Bombe. Click, clock and the fast hum of all the drums in the Bombe turning and whirling, clogs clogging.

The Lorenz code was another ball game, it was known as Hitler’s unbreakable cipher machine. Unlike the Enigma it was non Morse and could be attached to any teleprinter and thus not mobile but thought to be a more secure option as it travelled via telephone line rather than radio waves. Again this unbeatable machinery has to be controlled, fed and read by human operators, and that’s just what codebreakers at Bletchley Park were counting on took in the human factors, behaviour and errors of the enemy. Staff were tired and overworked on both sides which made room for mistakes. And just that brought about the breaking off the Lorenz code. It unravelled with a message sent in august 1941 from Athens to Vienna but the message wasn’t received correctly in Vienna. The receiving operator then sent an uncoded request back to the sender asking for the message to be sent again. Which was against all rules. This simple mistake led the codebreakers to know something was happening and in January 1942 Bletchley Park cryptographers had deduced the operation of the machine without ever having seen a Lorenz machine. This was the birth of the Colossus Machine designed by Tommy Flowers, it read the Lorenz code. It is believed that his machine shortened the war, saved many lives and was a prototype if you will of your modern day computer. Fun fact, computers used to be a job description, not a machine. And guess what, computers were usually female.

Until recently Bletchley Park was in a dilapidated state but has since then been completed renovated and The Intellectual Factory Exhibition utterly brings Bletchley Park to life. So now when you enter a hut or block on site it looks like the codebreakers just nipped out for a minute. On the desks are typewriters, enigmas, stationary, codes, maps and scribbles, even half drunk cups of tea left just as their users have just stepped away, leaving their coats, jackets, hats and scarfs still hanging on pegs. In the Bombe room there is even some graffiti left on the wall by an operator. In every room, nook and cranny there is almost a ghostly presence of the people who worked there. Moving and talking images projected onto the walls which help transport us guests back in time bringing about a sense of time and place. There are interviews with veterans to choose from where they talk about their experiences and impressions of Bletchley. How their knowledge was limited to the exact task they were given, how thrilling it could be all while how extraordinarily boring it was doing the same receptive task every single day for years in poor dimly lit conditions while under extreme pressure. We were absolutely mesmerised by the human factor. It was also interesting seeing all the rebuilt machinery set up where they would have been working back in the days and how they had evolved from what to the untrained eye seemed like scribbles and ribbons and lines of letters scramble.

What kept my kids interested through this almost six hour museum visit was how interactive it was and how the whole set up and atmosphere made you feel as if you had stepped back in time, you could almost feel the past staff presence still there. There were codes to solve, stories to hear, equipment to touch and feel, maps to plot a trans-Atlantic convoys and much more. The sense of feeling what it was like for men and women who worked here, each one a clog in this massive almost 10,000 people machine, keeps young and old engaged throughout their Bletchley Park visit.