Bletchley Park

Imagine that a giant rock was hurtling through space, heading straight for Earth, arriving in about a year, and there is no way to destroy it. A UN-sponsored think tank is convened, charged with devising a way to save the planet; at the end of a month they present their ideas. The assembled presidents, prime ministers, kings, and scientists select plan #17, which is to construct a fusion drive on the moon, propel the moon into position to intercept the rock, which will careen off of the moon the way the cue ball might send the eight ball into the corner pocket at the end of a game of pool. When possible, propel the moon back into orbit to restore our tides, and romantic evenings.

“But,” the skeptics correctly object, “we have not succeeded with controlled fusion,” and “we don’t have the means to build things on the Moon,” and so on. Still, all governments put all of their eggs (scientists, engineers, dollars, pounds, and forints) into solving this one problem. With nine hours to spare, the Moon is put into position, and the world is saved! The Moon is chipped, and it rotates now, but otherwise the tides are mostly restored and moonlight walks saved for future lovers.

This is not too much more far-fetched than the belief-defying code-breaking efforts that took place during World War II on a British estate, purchased in secret by the UK government, housing geniuses and heroes whose efforts and stories will bring tears to your eyes.

What the Germans would have paid for that map back in 1943! The first picture shows the walk toward the Mansion from the Visitor Center. The second picture shows a side view of the Mansion, showing a range of architectural styles that my hosts, Sue and Barry Wood (of Haddenham, and 3rd picture) were able to tell me more about. The fourth picture shows one of the famous “huts” that were built on the estate, and where most of the mathematical magic happened. (That pic is Hut #11, now the Visitor Center.)

Perhaps the most famous worker at Bletchley Park is Alan Turing, portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in the 2014 movie The Imitation Game. He would have been the person designing the fusion reactor in the opening metaphor.

The first picture shows a statue of Turing. The other two show his office, as if he had just gotten up to get coffee. At the end of the war all of the offices at Bletchley park were shut down and emptied, papers were burned, computers were disassembled, workers were sworn to perpetual secrecy and scattered. There was some concern that what they had accomplished there would be needed again, and that secrecy was required to maintain superiority in code-breaking. Thus the office is a reconstruction from memories and (rare) photos from the period.

Could you imagine giving five years of your life to an amazing and successful effort to save lives (commanders at the time estimated 70-100 thousand allied lives were saved) and for thirty years being unable to share what you had done? How day after day you had to break a new Enigma key which was valid only until midnight, how real lives, maybe your brother’s or cousin’s, depended on reading German or Italian or Japanese reports today, this hour, now!

The visitor areas are full of demonstrations of the myriad little tricks they used to crack codes.

The Eins catalog, for example, helped them narrow down what a key might be for a given message, by examining the message, and trying to find an encoding of the word “eins,” which means “one.” By hand they created all approximately 17,576 coded versions of “eins,” alphabetized them, and stored them in a card catalog together with information about the keys that generated that encoding. Alastair Denniston is largely responsible for the UK’s Government Code & Cypher School (GC & CS) which formed at the end of WWI, and became “Bletchley Park” during WWII. (He was also on Scotland’s 1908 Olympic hockey team, winning bronze.) With war looking inevitable he began visiting the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge looking for “The Right Kind of People,” namely mathematicians, linguists, and classicists. You can see that Tolkein made the short list, but did not join. It worked! Any amount of reading you do about the miracles of cleverness worked at Bletchley Park during the war will be rewarded with surprise, wonder, some frustration, and much joy!

Above are some pictures of the inside of the mansion. The first two pictures show where some of the administration worked. The third is a dining room, where “high teas” may be enjoyed (these days) by visitors. The last two pictures show the kind of marble that made up the older part of the house, together with a very nice glass ceiling! There were several rooms like this (though without the glass ceiling) throughout the mansion, all of which were filled with teletypes, filing cabinets, worker desks, etc. during the war.

Two final pictures from Bletchley Park:

The first is from a collection of rotating panels that had pictures of BP workers on one side, together with something they said on the other. This was my favorite. The second picture shows a sculpture outside the huts. I am pretty sure it’s a puzzle, but I haven’t solved it yet – nor have I looked up what it might be. If you figure it out, let me know in the comments, but without giving away the solution.

Finally, let me show some pictures of the beautiful countryside that can be seen along the route from Haddenham (where I met Barry and Sue) to Bletchley Park.

The first picture shows a road that was only about a half-mile long, but I have no idea what we would have done if another car had come in the other direction. The other three capture the kind of countryside typical of the edge of the Cotswolds. Bletchley Park was chosen because it was a good 50 miles from London – a wartime bombing target – and had good train connections with both Oxford and Cambridge.

So much work, time, effort, accomplishment, all to stop an idiot aggressor from imprisoning and killing entire nations. Stupid Hitler.