This was published 7 years ago
Visiting World War II's Enigma-breaking Bletchley Park in England
By Daniel Scott
The code-breaking work done at Bletchley Park is believed to have shortened World War II by two years, saving countless lives.Credit: Ian G Dagnall /Alamy Stock Photo
As a child I was prone to inhabiting dream worlds and to making fantastical pronouncements, to the extent that it is sometimes hard, looking back, to know what was and wasn't true.
"My Mum won the war," I used to tell chums from an early age.
I would go on to explain to my wide-eyed audience that she had had a magical machine with which she intercepted and translated secret Nazi messages and that, without her, the entire world would have been toast.
"Mum always knew what Hitler would do next," I added, grasping at the tiny straws of reality with which I'd been furnished by my tight-lipped parent.
I thought then that she was probably being modest but it turns out that she was one of what Winston Churchill described as "the geese that laid the golden eggs but never cackled". One of the heroic souls who spent World War II at the Buckinghamshire country house, Bletchley Park, a vital allied intelligence and code-breaking centre, and were sworn to secrecy about their work there.
Of course the lid has long since been blown off what went on at Bletchley by television series and films, the latest of which was The Imitation Game, released in 2014 and starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the cryptanalyst Alan Turing.
Seeing that excellent movie rekindled my curiosity in my Mum's connection with Bletchley and planted the seed of my visiting the venue of her wartime valour.
I arrive at Bletchley Park a few months later, on a drizzly summer's day, having cycled the 95-kilometres north of London along the Grand Union Canal.
My mode of transport is homage both to my Mum, for whom a bicycle was the means of getting between her "digs" and Bletchley during the war, and my childhood, in which bike riding figured as prominently as mythmaking. But bumping along the towpath is apt too because, in the early 1940s, the Grand Union Canal was a major thoroughfare for transporting goods and munitions crucial to the war effort.
In 2014, the first phase of the restoration of Bletchley Park, funded by several million dollars in lottery money, was completed, returning much of the mansion and its grounds to how they looked in World War II. Among the most painstaking work has been the restoration of the dilapidated huts occupied by most of the 9000 people stationed at Bletchley.
At a time when most British women were being urged to "make do and mend", three-quarters of Bletchley's personnel were female. My mother was a member of the WAAF (Women's auxiliary air force), a young woman away from her Oxford family home for the first time.
Re-reading my mother's wartime journals I already have a strong sense of Bletchley during her time there. Her writings reflect her fear, uncertainty and discomfort and describe her relationship with a young airman named Pip, who never returned from a nighttime bombing raid over Germany.
Walking around Bletchley, it's hard not to see my beautiful, moon-faced Mum working diligently among the dank low-level buildings. I can't be sure but I think she is in several black and white photographs on display, as part of the multi-media recreation of wartime Bletchley.
I can certainly hear her voice among the atmospheric soundscapes, which include snatches of conversation and laughter, playing against background noises including period music, steam trains and bicycle bells. There is even the pop-pop of balls being patted across the tennis court, but thankfully the heavy smog of cigarette smoke that hung in every room has been left to posterity.
The exhibitions not only recreate Bletchley as it was in the 1940s but put its role into perspective. It begins, in Block C, with a history of military intelligence, outlining its importance during the First World War and detailing how from that, a school was formed that ran through the 1920s and 30s and informed what happened here.
As we know from The Imitation Game, Alan Turing was part of a crack team of decipherers brought to Bletchley to try to unravel German radio messages protected by the Enigma machine. Some of those involved were recruited as code-breakers after completing a special Daily Telegraph puzzle in less than 12 minutes.
Turing worked mostly from offices in Hut 8, the German Enigma messages were deciphered in Hut 6 and sent to Hut 3 for translation, military analysis and distribution. Messages arrived in German, Italian, Japanese and Polish and operatives worked long hours in cold, uncomfortable conditions.
For Turing and his gang, cracking the Enigma was like shuffling a deck of codes.
"Mathematical reasoning may be regarded schematically," he once said, "as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity."
To aid the process, Turing famously created the "Bombe" machine, which was kept in Hut 11 and was nicknamed "Victory" (not "Christopher" as suggested in the movie). A forerunner of the modern computer, the team would stand by it for hours on end, seeking clues and answers, rather like we use Google and other search engines today.
The Bombe machine has been rebuilt in Hut 11, a place its female operators described as the "Hell-hole" because of the incessant noise and the long hours of manual labour. The machine features 3 sets of 36 constantly turning, colour-coded drums that were used to sift German messages.
Beyond that, even 70 years later, I am too technologically challenged to elucidate. But, in that, I am not alone.
"It is not at all easy now to recapture the atmosphere of those days," wrote Stuart Milner-Barry in his account of his time at Bletchley, "the main sensation of the bewildered newcomer was that he was participating in a miracle which he was entirely incapable of comprehending."
What is certain is that information provided by Bletchley Park was instrumental in the success of the aerial Battle of Britain, the naval Battle of the Atlantic and in the efficacy of the D-Day landings, which the Germans were led to think would take place at Calais and not Normandy. The work done here is also believed to have shortened the war by two years, saving countless lives.
Alan Turing's role in this extraordinary achievement was ignored for decades and the man many consider to be the founder of modern computing was later hounded and persecuted for his homosexuality. In 1952 he was arrested for homosexual acts and accepted chemical castration as an alternative to prison.
Two years later, at the age of 41, he was dead from cyanide poisoning, an inquest recording his death as suicide. His life and work is celebrated in Block D at Bletchley, where there is also a transcript of the 2009 apology for his treatment, by then British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.
Hopping onto my bicycle and leaving Bletchley, like my Mum must have done daily in the early 1940s, the extent of her contribution remains unclear, although I can see now that "winning the war" was probably more of a team effort than acknowledged by my younger self.
Mum died 15 years ago, before I'd had a chance to quiz her much about her time at Bletchley. But studying her diaries at a nearby hotel that night, I search in vain for any mention of Alan Turing or of others like Gordon Welchman, Hugh Alexander or Joan Clarke (played by Keira Knightly in The Imitation Game), who strove to decipher the German radio messages.
If there are any references to her work at Bletchley in what she wrote, then they are recorded in another unfathomable code.
Indeed her greatest excitement, leaping from the yellowed page, seems to have been this, un-war related incident:
"A man ran naked around the lake today, all the girls were giggling like mad and clamoring for a look."
TRIP NOTES:
MORE INFORMATION
GETTING THERE
British Airways flies from Sydney and Melbourne to London via Singapore. Phone 1300 767 177 (see britishairways.com). If cycling is not your thing, trains run regularly to Bletchley station from London Euston, journey time one hour, see nationalrail.co.uk
TOURING THERE
Bletchley Park is at Sherwood Drive, Bletchley, Buckinghamshire. Admission costs £17.25 ($32), £15.25 for over 60s and students and £10.25 kids 12-17. Children under 12 enter free, see: bletchleypark.org.uk
Daniel Scott was a guest of Visit Britain.
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