I just finished reading The Rose Code by Kate Quinn and it rekindled my fascination with Bletchley Park.
When Bridget and I were in London in January 2019, she suggested that we visit Bletchley Park. When she mentioned the name, I had a vague memory of hearing about it in the movie, The Imitation Game, which told the story of Alan Turing, but I was not really familiar with what happened there.
So off we went on a cloudy, drizzly day to the Milton Keynes train station and a short walk to the site of what was arguably some of the most important work of the Second World War. It was here that thousands of people worked throughout the war to decode the military communications that the Germans thought were impenetrable.
Both Churchill and Eisenhower stated that the war was shortened by 2 – 4 years due to the work done at Bletchley Park; in fact, they went so far as to say that the Allies may have lost the war without their efforts.
History
As we walked onto the grounds, we could feel the history all around us. There is a beautiful mansion, that served as both the headquarters and the site of some of the social activities. Then there were a series of wooden huts and brick “blocks”, each of which served a different purpose in the pursuit of decrypting the German messages and orders being sent from their headquarters to the soldiers in the field.
Staff with mathematics training might have been hired as codebreakers, admin staff were needed to gather and file the messages, then there were the bombe machine operators (these were the large computers that decrypted the messages once the daily codes were broken), and the translators who took the messages from German to English.
In order to keep the work being done at Bletchley Park completely secret, there were also intelligence staff whose job it was to devise a cover story for how information was gathered. It was critical that the Germans continue to believe that the Enigma machine they were using was unbreakable, so even allied military commanders did not know that the intelligence was gathered by intercepting radio messages.
Official Secrets Act
At the height of its operations 10,000 people worked at Bletchley Park and every person had signed the Official Secrets Act; meaning that they could not talk about what they did – even with co-workers in different “huts” – for 30 years after the end of the war.
Men who worked there were regularly harassed by locals for not doing their bit for the war effort; people wondered why they were not fighting to defend their country and they were unable to explain the reason.
Imagine playing a key role in World War II and then NEVER being able to talk about it. Bill Tutte has been credited with solving the Lorenz cipher, which was used to send high level messages from the German high command. He was Dean of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo in the 1970’s when his work at Bletchley Park became public, and was awarded the Order of Canada in 2001, but it seems incredible to me that he could not discuss his achievements before that.
After visiting, I watched the British series called Bletchley Circle, which follows 3 women who worked at Bletchley Park. Approximately 75% of the staff there were women; they played a key role in the work being done but could only say that they had administrative positions and then had to return to the world of the late 1940’s as a woman with very limited career options. This show really helped me empathize; I can’t imagine the frustration of “normal” life after being a part of something so important, especially when you couldn’t even share the story with your family or friends.
People who worked there were not recognized for their efforts until 2009. The grounds were opened in 2014 by Kate Middleton, whose grandmother and aunt both worked at Bletchley Park during the war.
I found Bletchley Park so interesting that I took Gilles there the next time we were in London. I highly recommend a visit if you are ever in London, especially if you share our interest in WWII history. In the meantime, pick up The Rose Code or watch Bletchley Circle and you will understand my fascination with Bletchley Park!
