Bletchley Park

After surviving another lap around the local star aboard our collective ball of mud, my other half asked what I might like to do this weekend. I pulled "Bletchley Park?" out of thin air. I had read books about it and watched movies about it, but had never been there. It's only an hour from home.

I'm not sure what I expected really.

I didn't expect that it would be so big. The "museum" is wonderfully presented - with no obvious path as such - you are free to find your own way around the grounds near to the main house. We wandered the halls of the manor house, and visited the numerous huts where armies of code breakers and WRENs once worked to receive, decrypt, interpret, and dispatch communications from all over the world.

I think perhaps the biggest surprise was the scale. Beyond the immediate surroundings of the house there are numerous buildings that have fallen into disrepair. Where movies tell the story of a handful of reclusive boffins working in cigarette smoke filled huts, the reality was very different. By the end of the war Bletchley had many thousands of staff, and had expanded out to numerous off-site bases - all working in total secrecy.

The thing that surprises me the most? Given that so many worked on the breaking of the various cyphers, that the secret was held onto for so long. People are almost always the weak link in any security model - and yet in this case they held the line. Thousands of them.

I found it fascinating that many of the nation's car manufacturers of the time constructed parts of the machinery invented at Bletchley - with no idea what they were making. No one company was given the task of making enough of any one assembly to piece the clues together.

The visit brought into focus just how vast the leaps of imagination were, that were made by the codebreakers - with the means and methods of breaking codes wonderfully illustrated in the various displays throughout the site - from rods, to vocabulary books, and the fabled "banburismus" (think Riemann's Zeros, but related to the turnings of an unknown clock's innards).

I loved that the various methods and workshops were given nicknames after their inventors. "Turingery" will stay with me for some time.

Perhaps the only disappointment of the day was that there is no Colossus at Bletchley Park - not within the "Bletchley Park" museum anyway. The bizarre thing? It is there - on the same site - but in a different museum. Given that the Colossus was perhaps the crown jewels of the work by the scientists, engineers, and mathematicians at Bletchley, I thought it odd that Colossus is not present for visitors to both Bletchley, and the National Museum of Computing.

If you've never heard of it before, Colossus was - by modern interpretation - the first programmable computer. It wasn't a general purpose computer - more a specialised tool that invented many aspects later found in general purpose computers such as ENIAC and ACE. It's emergency from secrecy in the late 1980s rendered history books, museum displays, and building plaques around the world wrong in an instant. Many of them are still wrong today.