A piece of land, with an old home, in a random neighborhood in Buckinghamshire, is the stuff of legends. In some humble, stuffy outbuildings, hundreds of brilliant minds siphoned through millions of scraps of paper. They took these shreds of information and pieced them together into meaningful clues about the enemy’s plans.
When Britain launched headlong into WWII, government recognized the need to assemble intelligence. They recruited from universities, of course, but they also placed difficult cryptic puzzles in the newspapers then contacted people who sent in for their prize.
Bletchley Park became the home of the Bombe, a project led by Alan Turing to computerize decryption. It was built on the stolen technology of the Enigma machine, a brilliant piece of German engineering.
“The messages were in groups of five letters or figures in Morse code – nothing was clear at all. Some dates appeared. It was total gibberish, but you had to register everything, so senior people could call on a date or message at any time. We knew very little of what was going on. We really were in the dark.” Betty Webb, Bletchley codebreaker
B.P. or Station X as it was known was invaluable throughout the war. But after the codebreakers went home (and continued to pretend they had other jobs), Bletchley Park served various government purposes, including training facility and postal offices. Then in the 1980s, the U.K. government announced plans to demolish the buildings and sell the land. A group of local citizens and historians quickly formed a nonprofit to save the structures and the site from development.
Bletchley Park is now a fantastic museum with a mix of artefacts on display and in situ tableaus. Some rooms in the mansion and in the huts are recreated as offices using antique furniture, old hats and coats, vintage coffee cups and typewriters, and more. It looks like the agents have just stepped out. And because none of the items are these true artefacts, people can get close and really immerse themselves in the setting.
Despite early resistance by the officials, women were eventually recruited to work at Bletchley. They quickly became essential to codebreaking efforts beyond filing and recordkeeping. As the war effort ramped up the number of analysts working at B.P. grew from a few hundred to nearly 10,000 by the beginning of 1945 — and about 75% of them were women.
“[Alan Turing] was a very nice man, very shy. We all used to have lunch at Bletchley on the green beside the lake, but he didn’t converse much with us. He was very eccentric. He used to do funny things like have a mug tied with a bit of string around his wrist, and because he had asthma, he used to wear a gas mask when he was cycling around on his old-fashioned bike.” – Joan Joslin, Bletchley codebreaker
It is not an overstating it that the work done at Bletchley changed the world. It accelerated modern computing and artificial intelligence. Following the war, the thousands of people who worked endlessly to decrypt enemy messages returned to civilian life and never told their families what they did. Even as archives began to be declassified, former codebreakers wouldn’t reveal themselves. Though they are in the 90s and 100s, there are a few of these amazing minds left. Recent years have seen a resurgence in interest and some have been convinced they can finally tell their stories.
Bletchley Park is a legendary place that I never thought I’d get to see. I was genuinely overcome seeing a real Enigma machine and the Bombe. I feel privileged to have visited the Home of the Codebreakers.
Visit the Bletchley Park website for more stories, images, and visiting the site.
And I am equally glad that you were able to spend time in this place firsthand!!