Bletchley Park by Elaine Hagger

Elaine has been a volunteer at Bletchley Park since 2019 and began her very interesting talk by giving us a potted history of the house and its estate. The site appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as a farmhouse however, this was demolished and replaced over the years by several different ‘mansions’ until it was bought in 1883 by Sir Herbert Samuel Leon who was a stockbroker and local MP. He extended the house into what we see today and both he and his wife lived there until they both died.

In 1938, the mansion and much of the site went up for auction however, it did not meet its target price and was eventually privately bought the same year by Sir Hugh Sinclair who was head of the Secret Intelligence Service  (SIS or MI6). He used his own money because the Government said they did not have the budget at the time to do so although they did eventually buy it off him. Sinclair was keen to relocate the SIS from its London base in the event of war and immediately saw the benefits of Bletchley Park’s geographical location.  Being adjacent to Bletchley railway station enabled easy access to the West Coast railway line which connected London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh and, the A5 was also nearby which linked London to the north-west.

Bletchley Park housed the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), which included a highly qualified team of codebreakers and cryptanalysts of which Alan Turing is probably the best known. He joined the team the day after war was declared in 1938 and used his remarkable knowledge of cryptology to help break the German naval codes including the famous Enigma machine. In 1940, Turing designed the Bombe machine which helped to speed up the decryption process so intelligence could quickly be passed on.

The secrecy around these Bombe machines was so successful that the Germans remained totally unaware that their information had been ‘cracked’ and, hundreds of these Bombes were made and housed in numbered huts within the Bletchley Park grounds. The legacy of this forward-thinking computer expert cannot be disputed as he unquestionably laid the foundations for modern day computing and Artificial Intelligence driving innovations like speech recognition and machine vision we know today. 

The staff were mainly recruited from the three armed forces and Oxford and Cambridge universities. Each one came highly recommended for his or her particular ability or expertise in mathematics, languages, physics or engineering. For obvious reasons, the majority of the staff were female nevertheless, their ability to perform calculations and coding as well as clerical and administrative work meant they were an integral part of the computing processes. The staff worked a twenty-four-hour day in three eight-hour shifts, with a half-hour meal break for six days a week. At its peak, forty coaches were used to bring the workers into work each day as most of them were billeted in private homes within a five-mile radius of Bletchley Park. In addition to this volume of transport, there were also large numbers of (mainly female) dispatch riders entering and leaving the site throughout the day and night carrying important information. In January 1945, at the peak of codebreaking efforts, nearly 9,000 personnel were working at Bletchley.

Finally, in 1944 an electronic computer was developed called Colossus which was able to code break at the electronic speed of 5,000 characters per second. Sadly however, its life was very short because in 1945, everything at Bletchley Park was dismantled and taken away and, as every member of staff had signed the Official Secrets Act, they were prevented from speaking about their work for another 30 years. The Post Office used the now empty house for training purposes but it soon started to show signs of wear and tear and began to crumble. By 1990, the Park was up for sale again but thankfully, Milton Keynes Council made it into a conservation area and the Bletchley Park Trust was set up in 1991 by a group of people who recognised the site’s importance.

It is now a very vibrant heritage attraction which is open daily for visitors to learn how the Codebreakers’ breath-taking achievements helped shorten WW2 by up to two years and, it features numerous interpretive exhibits and huts that have been rebuilt to appear as they did during their wartime operations. The separate National Museum of Computing now includes a working replica Bombe machine and a rebuilt Colossus computer which is housed in Block H on the site and helps attract hundreds of thousands of visitors every year.