Day 10 Friday October 28th Bletchley Park

the mansion

  This is one of the many days I was looking forward to as we approached this holiday.  Christine had bought us a trip to Bletchley Park with a cream tea in the mansion dining room as a birthday present last year.  I had chosen the nearest Premier Inn to the Park (3.5 miles) which also turned out to be a good choice.  We breakfasted in the windmill and soon set out for the venue.  We had booked the tea for 1430 and wanted to go on a guided tour and see as many of the huts as possible.

We arrived at 1030 and the next tour was 1120 so we had time to visit some of the huts and exhibitions.  There was plenty to see including a memorial to the contribution of Polish scientists who had gone a very long way 

Polish memorial

in decrypting the enigma machine coding.  It was soon time to assemble for the guided tour.  We had an interesting introduction and brief history of the unlikely story of the site which involved making careful decisions at each stage.  The outside tour lasted about an hour and our guide told us about the development of each hut and each stage of the work as it rapidly expanded during the war.  There were the breakthroughs on deciphering enigma messages, the making of the process like a production line and 

reconstructed Bombe

the development of the computer aids (Bombe and Colussus) which rapidly improved the production speed of this process.  

Alan Turing's office

By the end of the war Bletchley had found where every German unit was in France and where all planes and ships, including U-boats, were.  Incredible that the Germans had no idea how much the English knew. Fascinating and afterwards we were able to see where some of these incredibly clever people worked.  

It came round to our teatime and we went

our tea!

 to the mansion dining room for a classic, sumptuous afternoon tea.  It was so much we had to ask for a doggy bag to take some home for later.  We both enjoyed it!

office where some 1st work was done

After tea we saw more of the mansion and then to see more exhibits including a reinforced container which was used as a mobile cipher unit in Afghanistan. During the war many dispatch riders came with encrypted messages to  Bletchley from all over the world.  Most of the riders were women who maintained their own motorbikes.  Most of the people at the establishment were ladies and one feature of the way they worked was that everything was secret and hardly anyone knew of their work until the 1970s.

dispatch motorbike

Afghan mobile unit

A thoroughly interesting and absorbing day which flew past far too quickly.  We had to leave and went back to the Premier Inn for a snack after such a huge tea. It was so instructive and explained what a huge debt we owed these genius' in saving lives and shortening the war.  What a day and we were not disappointed.  So much to absorb and so little will be retained.  So much to admire and such incredible brainpower. So much to be thankful for and they kept it so secret.