The magic of Bletchley Park

Cast your minds back to early July. Boris had reopened the pubs, there was glorious sunshine, and we were meant to enjoy ‘Super Saturday’ as we got drunk and saw our friends as lockdown began to ease.

What did I do? I managed to avoid the pubs, and instead convinced my girlfriend to take my nerdy self to Bletchley Park, home of the code-breaking activities that were crucial to bringing World War II to an end.

I first heard of Bletchley Park way back when I was at school, when a maths teacher decided they fancied a few lessons off and stuck on a documentary about Alan Turing and the ‘Colossus’ computer that he helped design to break codes during WWII. It has stuck with me ever since.

For someone who has always enjoyed puzzles and logic games, and has a fascination with history, visiting Bletchley Park is pretty ideal. The code-breaking activities were based at an old manor house in the small town of Bletchley, with large grounds that now include several restored buildings from WWII. All of this has been turned into a museum telling the story of its activities, from the dark rooms full of nerdy code-breakers, to the rows of linguists translating decoded messages, and the vast spaces full of early computing machines based on punch-cards and ticker-tape and the painstaking work of the Wrens (Women’s Reserve Naval Service members) who kept them running.

The museum is really well set up. Whether you’re interested in what life was like working eight-hour shifts as a cryptographer, what the food was like during WWII (atrocious), or how the fiendish Lorenz cypher was finally cracked, it’s all very well presented and you can easily spend a whole day there.

I could happily write up a whole post about how fascinating I find some of the codes and decrypting work, and the maths and logic involved in them, or how intriguing the mix of hardware and software developments must have been for those early creators of computers. I will save that for another time, but we did enjoy the visit so much that we ended up buying a couple of books to find out more about the history of Bletchley Park.

The Secrets of Station X, by Michael Smith, focuses more on the code-breaking activities at Bletchley Park and the individuals involved in them. There’s some good outlines of how the codes were cracked, including those using the famous Enigma machines, and the book provides some nice insights into the intellectual efforts required by both the cryptographers and the linguists involved in the work.

You find out about the amazing work of Alan Turing, as well as a host of other less well-known characters: Mavis Lever, Alfred ‘Dilly’ Knox, Sheila and Oliver Lawn, Gordon Welchman, Tommy Flowers, and many, many more. All of these people had top-notch brains, and this book made it clear exactly how important every single one of them was. There is also plenty in Smith’s book about the importance of Bletchley Park’s activities to different aspects of the war effort, including detailed accounts of how the decrypted information was crucial for Field Marshal Montgomery’s campaign in North Africa and in the double-cross operation in the build-up to the D-Day landings. General Eisenhower notably said that the work at the Park helped to shorten the war by two years, potentially saving millions of lives.

On the other hand, The Secret Life of Bletchley Park, by Sinclair McKay, is a great account of the more social and personal aspects of the code-breaking activities. It provides a far better context to understand the type of world that the code-breakers inhabited, before, during and after the war. There’s accounts of the mixing of different social classes, of the professionalisation of code-breaking activities away from the early amatorial approach embraced by the Oxbridge academics, and of the more day-to-day aspects of life at Bletchley Park.

Most importantly, McKay’s book tells the story of what happened after the end of WWII. True to their word, and orders, everyone kept silent. Nothing was said publicly about the work that went on at Bletchley Park until 1974, when the first account of wartime operations was published by Frank Winterbotham, and those who worked there only received official recognition in 2009(!).

Since the 1970s more books have come out and the site of the Park itself has been transformed multiple times. Having gone through a variety of owners and uses up to 1990, the site was falling into disrepair and provoked little interest. It was turned into a public site as a museum in 1993, and then more recently underwent a major restoration, completed in 2014 thanks to private donations and Heritage Lottery Funding, bringing it to its current state as a museum.

So, back to COVID-19 and the lockdown.

We visited the museum on July 5^th, the first day that Bletchley Park re-opened to the public. It was safe, it was fascinating, and it was a brilliant day out. However, the lack of visitors and financial struggles generated by the pandemic have led to the Park announcing staff cuts, with substantial worries about its future. Given its historical significance, as part of the war-time effort and as a technological development centre, the memory of Bletchley Park is well worth preserving. If you can, pay it a visit!