Bletchley
Park Home of Station X
One place I always like visiting with my Dad is
Bletchley Park fifty miles north-west of London, is situated in
beautiful parkland setting with a lake in Buckinghamshire. It was during
WW2, Britain’s best kept secret being home of Station x, and is now a
heritage site and museum, and the birthplace of modern computing and
communications.
During WW2 Bletchley Park played a vital role in the war effort, it was
requisitioned by the government for use by the Government Code and
Cypher School, which was part of Foreign Office in London when they
needed a safer home, it was Commanded by Alastair Denniston and became
known as Station X, as it was the tenth of a large number of sites
acquired by MI6 for its wartime operations, and became home to some of
our countries best mathematicians, linguists, crossword experts, and
chess champions, most of them eccentric in one way or another, it was
said at the time the place was full to overflowing with geniuses, half
of whom were thought to be completely mad, and very strange in ordinary
life, but somehow they worked well together to break the ingenious
cipher codes used by the German military and intelligence, the most
famous of which were the enigma codes, which the Germans believed were
impossible to break because of their complexity, the odds against
achieving a result were over 150,000,000,000,000,000,000, to 1. Yet they
succeeded and as a direct result of all their hard work and efforts
experts say the war was shortened by two years, and countless lives were
saved on both sides of the conflict.
However until 1974 if you asked any of them what they were doing they
would have been unable to tell you, as they were bound by the Official
Secrets Act. During the war the work done at Bletchley Park was so
important and so secret that even people that worked there did not
realise the significance of what they were doing, and they were told
that if any of them spoke to anyone outside the park about their work
they would receive the death penalty.
Alastair Denniston realised just how important it was to break the
German codes and let the War Office know what the Germans were up to, so
he spent just over a year persuading young mathematicians to join him,
amongst them were Alan Turing a brilliant mathematician, who has had a
film made about him, and Gordon Welchman, who both were to become key
figures not only in winning the war but also in the technological
development of the 20 century. The internet stems from Alan Turing’s
fundamental ideas.
It is estimated that between 10,000 and 12,000 people worked at
Bletchley Park at the height of its activity, many huts were built to
house these workers and each hut had a dedicated task, huts 6 and 8 were
used for breaking the Naval Enigma Code, hut 8 was were Alan Turing
worked and has been totally restored, most of the huts are still there
today.
All About Me
What Katy did
The film about Bletchley Park
Being an evacuee can be a hard life
Inside the Main House
Hut 1
