The team at Bletchley Park,75% women, devised automatic machinery to help with decryption, culminating in the development ofColossus, the world's first programmable digital electronic computer.[a] Codebreaking operations at Bletchley Park ended in 1946 and all information about the wartime operations was classified until the mid-1970s. After the war it had various uses and now houses the Bletchley Park museum.
It was first known as Bletchley Park after its purchase in 1877 by the architectSamuel Lipscomb Seckham,[1] who built a house there.[2] The estate of 581 acres (235 ha) was bought in 1883 by SirHerbert Samuel Leon, who expanded the house[3] into what architectLandis Gores called a "maudlin and monstrous pile",[4][5] combiningVictorian Gothic,Tudor, andDutch Baroque styles.[6] After the death of Herbert Leon in 1926, the estate continued to be occupied by his widow Fanny Leon (née Higham) until her death in 1937.[7] In 1938, the mansion and much of the site was bought by a builder for a housing estate, but in May 1938 Admiral SirHugh Sinclair, head of theSecret Intelligence Service (SIS orMI6), bought the site for use in the event of war.[8]
Bletchley's Polish Memorial, commemorating "the [prewar] work ofMarian Rejewski,Jerzy Różycki andHenryk Zygalski, mathematicians of thePolish intelligence service, in first breaking the Enigma code. Their work greatly assisted the Bletchley Park code breakers and contributed to the Allied victory in World War II."
Sinclair bought the mansion and 58 acres (23 ha) of land for use by SIS. A key advantage seen by Sinclair and his colleagues (inspecting the site under the cover of "Captain Ridley's shooting party")[9] was Bletchley's geographical centrality. It was almost immediately adjacent toBletchley railway station, where the "Varsity Line" betweenOxford andCambridge – whose universities were expected to supply many of the code-breakers – met the mainWest Coast railway line connecting London,Birmingham,Manchester,Liverpool,Glasgow andEdinburgh.Watling Street, the main road linking London to the north-west (subsequently theA5) was close by, and high-volume communication links were available at the telegraph and telephone repeater station in nearbyFenny Stratford.[10] Sinclair bought the park using £6,000 (£484,000 today) of his own money as the Government said they did not have the budget to do so.[11]
Before the site was considered for use by GC&CS, it had been initially selected byLaurence Grand and established to be a school for his own section of the SIS called theSection for Destruction, or Section D, a paramilitary outfit specializing inirregular warfare,guerrilla warfare, andsabotage. This site was selected to be an experimentalresearch and development station andexplosives schoolhouse for a rather pyrotechnical team belonging to Section D. Modern sabotage from a scientific approach was a brand new field of science, and Bletchley was only one of many such early locations where new ingenious devices were studied.[12] Grand was asked once to explain the conception behind this outfit, to which his response was: "We just want to blow off people's hats."[13]
They began their programs here on June 15, 1939. The chemical engineer Colin Meek (D/X1), a recent graduate fromManchester University, employee ofImperial Chemical Industries and one of the early members of the team to inventplastic explosives, was selected to train recruits in the composition and usage ofdemolitions andexplosives under the explosives program schoolmaster, Dr. Drane (D/X).[12]
However, when the war officially began, and the codebreakers finally moved in, they constantly complained that the noise of the explosives being tested by Section D made them lose their concentrations. The explosives testing of Section D was then moved toAston House in November, several months after the codebreakers had set up shop.[12]
Five weeks before theoutbreak of war, Warsaw'sCipher Bureau revealedits achievements in breaking Enigma to astonished French and British personnel.[14] The British used the Poles' information and techniques, and theEnigma clone sent to them in August 1939, which greatly increased their (previously very limited) success in decrypting Enigma messages.[15]
Flow of information from an intercepted Enigma message[16]
The first personnel of theGovernment Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) moved to Bletchley Park on 15 August 1939. The Naval, Military, and Air Sections were on the ground floor of the mansion, together with a telephone exchange, teleprinter room, kitchen, and dining room; the top floor was allocated toMI6. Construction of the wooden huts began in late 1939, and Elmers School, a neighbouring boys' boarding school in a Victorian Gothic redbrick building by a church, was acquired for the Commercial and Diplomatic Sections.[17]
The only direct enemy damage to the site was done 20–21 November 1940 by three bombs probably intended forBletchley railway station; Hut 4, shifted two feet off its foundation, was winched back into place as work inside continued.[18]
During a morale-boosting visit on 9 September 1941,Winston Churchill reportedly remarked to Denniston or Menzies: "I told you to leave no stone unturned to get staff, but I had no idea you had taken me so literally."[19] Six weeks later, having failed to get sufficient typing and unskilled staff to achieve the productivity that was possible, Turing, Welchman, Alexander and Milner-Barry wrote directly to Churchill. His response was "Action this day make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done."[20]
After theUnited States joined World War II, a number of Americancryptographers were posted toHut 3, and from May 1943 onwards there was close co-operation between British and American intelligence[21] leading to the1943 BRUSA Agreement which was the forerunner of theFive Eyes partnership.[22]
In contrast, theSoviet Union was never officially told of Bletchley Park and its activities, a reflection of Churchill's distrust of the Soviets even during the US-UK-USSR alliance imposed by the Nazi threat.[23] However Bletchley Park was infiltrated by the Soviet moleJohn Cairncross, a member of theCambridge Spy Ring, who leaked Ultra material to Moscow.[24]
Onthe day Britain declared war on Germany, Denniston wrote to theForeign Office about recruiting "men of the professor type".[27] Personal networking drove early recruitments, particularly of men from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford. Trustworthy women were similarly recruited for administrative and clerical jobs.[28] In one 1941 recruiting stratagem,The Daily Telegraph was asked to organise a crossword competition, after which promising contestants were discreetly approached about "a particular type of work as a contribution to the war effort".[29]
This eclectic staff of "Boffins andDebs" (scientists and debutantes, young women of high society)[40] caused GC&CS to be whimsically dubbed the "Golf, Cheese and Chess Society".[41] Among those who worked there and later became famous in other fields were historianAsa Briggs, politicianRoy Jenkins and novelistAngus Wilson.[42]
After initial training at the Inter-Service Special Intelligence School set up byJohn Tiltman (initially at an RAF depot in Buckingham and later inBedford – where it was known locally as "the Spy School")[43] staff worked a six-day week, rotating through three shifts: 4 p.m. to midnight, midnight to 8 a.m. (the most disliked shift), and 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., each with a half-hour meal break. At the end of the third week, a worker went off at 8 a.m. and came back at 4 p.m., thus putting in 16 hours on that last day. The irregular hours affected workers' health and social life, as well as the routines of the nearby homes at which most staff lodged. The work was tedious and demanded intense concentration; staff got one week's leave four times a year, but some "girls" collapsed and required extended rest.[44] Recruitment took place to combat a shortage of experts in Morse code and German.[45]
In January 1945, at the peak of codebreaking efforts, 8,995 personnel were working at Bletchley and its outstations.[46] About three-quarters of these were women.[47] Many of the women came from middle-class backgrounds and held degrees in the areas of mathematics, physics and engineering; they were given the chance due to the lack of men, who had been sent to war. They performed calculations and coding and hence were integral to the computing processes.[48] Among them wereEleanor Ireland, who worked on theColossus computers[49] andRuth Briggs, a German scholar, who worked within the Naval Section.[50][51]
The female staff in Dilwyn Knox's section were sometimes termed "Dilly's Fillies".[52] Knox's methods enabledMavis Lever (who married mathematician and fellow code-breakerKeith Batey) andMargaret Rock to solve a German code, theAbwehr cipher.[53][54]
Many of the women had backgrounds in languages, particularly French, German and Italian. Among them wereRozanne Colchester, a translator who worked mainly for the Italian air forces Section,[55] andCicely Mayhew, recruited straight from university, who worked in Hut 8, translating decoded German Navy signals,[56] as didJane Fawcett (née Hughes) who decrypted a vital message concerning theGerman battleshipBismarck and after the war became an opera singer and buildings conservationist.[42]
Alan Brooke (CIGS) in his secret wartime diary frequently refers to "intercepts":[57]
16 April 1942:Took lunch in car and went to see the organization for breaking down ciphers [Bletchley Park] – a wonderful set of professors and genii! I marvel at the work they succeed in doing.
28 June 1945:After lunch (with Andrew Cunningham (RN) and Sinclair (RAF) we went to "The Park" … I began by addressing some 400 of the workers who consist of all 3 services, both sexes, and civilians, They come from every sort of walk of life, professors, students, actors, dancers, mathematicians, electricians signallers, etc. I thanked them on behalf of the Chiefs of Staff and congratulated them on the results of their work. We then toured round the establishment and had tea before returning.
Properly used, the German Enigma andLorenz ciphers should have been virtually unbreakable, but flaws in German cryptographic procedures, and poor discipline among the personnel carrying them out, created vulnerabilities that made Bletchley's attacks just barely feasible. These vulnerabilities, however, could have been remedied by relatively simple improvements in enemy procedures,[14] and such changes would certainly have been implemented had Germany had any hint of Bletchley's success. Thus the intelligence Bletchley produced was considered wartime Britain's "Ultra secret" – higher even than the normally highest classificationMost Secret – and security was paramount.[58]
All staff signed theOfficial Secrets Act (1939) and a 1942 security warning emphasised the importance of discretion even within Bletchley itself: "Do not talk at meals. Do not talk in the transport. Do not talk travelling. Do not talk in the billet. Do not talk by your own fireside. Be careful even in your Hut ..."[59]
Nevertheless, there were security leaks.Jock Colville, the Assistant Private Secretary toWinston Churchill, recorded in his diary on 31 July 1941, that the newspaper proprietorLord Camrose had discovered Ultra and that security leaks "increase in number and seriousness".[60]
Despite the high degree of secrecy surrounding Bletchley Park during the Second World War, unique and hitherto unknown amateur film footage of the outstation at nearbyWhaddon Hall came to light in 2020, after being anonymously donated to the Bletchley Park Trust.[61][62] A spokesman for the Trust noted the film's existence was all the more incredible because it was "very, very rare even to have [still] photographs" of the park and its associated sites.[63]
Bletchley Park was known as "B.P." to those who worked there.[64]"Station X" (X =Roman numeral ten), "London Signals Intelligence Centre", and "Government Communications Headquarters" were all cover names used during the war.[65]The formal posting of the many "Wrens" – members of theWomen's Royal Naval Service – working there, was toHMSPembroke V. Royal Air Force names of Bletchley Park and its outstations includedRAF Eastcote, RAF Lime Grove and RAF Church Green.[66] The postal address that staff had to use was "Room 47, Foreign Office".[67]
Number of signals despatched daily from Bletchley Park Hut 3 during the Second World War[68]
Initially, when only a very limited amount of Enigma traffic was being read,[69] deciphered non-Naval Enigma messages were sent fromHut 6 toHut 3 which handled their translation and onward transmission. Subsequently, underGroup Captain Eric Jones, Hut 3 expanded to become the heart of Bletchley Park's intelligence effort, with input from decrypts of "Tunny" (Lorenz SZ42) traffic and many other sources. Early in 1942 it moved into Block D, but its functions were still referred to as Hut 3.[70]
Hut 3 contained a number of sections: Air Section "3A", Military Section "3M", a small Naval Section "3N", a multi-service Research Section "3G" and a large liaison section "3L".[71] It also housed the Traffic Analysis Section, SIXTA.[72] An important function that allowed the synthesis of raw messages into valuableMilitary intelligence was the indexing and cross-referencing of information in a number of different filing systems.[73] Intelligence reports were sent out to the Secret Intelligence Service, the intelligence chiefs in the relevant ministries, and later on to high-level commanders in the field.[74]
Naval Enigma deciphering was inHut 8, with translation inHut 4. Verbatim translations were sent to theNaval Intelligence Division (NID) of the Admiralty's Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC), supplemented by information from indexes as to the meaning of technical terms and cross-references from a knowledge store of German naval technology.[75] Where relevant to non-naval matters, they would also be passed to Hut 3. Hut 4 also decoded a manual system known as the dockyard cipher, which sometimes carried messages that were also sent on an Enigma network. Feeding these back to Hut 8 provided excellent "cribs" forKnown-plaintext attacks on the daily naval Enigma key.[76]
Initially, awireless room was established at Bletchley Park.It was set up in the mansion's water tower under the code name "Station X",[77] a term now sometimes applied to the codebreaking efforts at Bletchley as a whole. The "X" is theRoman numeral "ten", this being the Secret Intelligence Service's tenth such station. Due to the long radio aerials stretching from the wireless room, the radio station was moved from Bletchley Park to nearbyWhaddon Hall to avoid drawing attention to the site.[78][79]
Subsequently, other listening stations – theY-stations, such as the ones atChicksands in Bedfordshire,Beaumanor Hall, Leicestershire (where the headquarters of the War Office "Y" Group was located) andBeeston Hill Y Station in Norfolk – gathered raw signals for processing at Bletchley. Coded messages were taken down by hand and sent to Bletchley on paper by motorcycledespatch riders or (later) by teleprinter.[80]
Hut 1Hut 4, adjacent to the mansion, is now a bar and restaurant for the museum.Hut 6 in 2004
Often a hut's number became so strongly associated with the work performed inside that even when the work was moved to another building it was still referred to by the original "Hut" designation.[82][83]
Hut 1: The first hut, built in 1939[84] used to house the Wireless Station for a short time,[77] later administrative functions such as transport, typing, and Bombe maintenance. The first Bombe, "Victory", was initially housed here.[85]
Hut 2: A recreational hut for "beer, tea, and relaxation".[86]
Hut 3: Intelligence: translation and analysis of Army and Air Force decrypts[87]
Hut 4: Naval intelligence: analysis of Naval Enigma andHagelin decrypts[88]
Hut 5: Military intelligence including Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese ciphers and German police codes.[89]
Hut 6: Cryptanalysis of Army and Air Force Enigma[90]
Most German messages decrypted at Bletchley were produced by one or another version of theEnigma cipher machine, but an important minority were produced by the even more complicated twelve-rotorLorenz SZ42 on-line teleprinter cipher machine used for high command messages, known asFish.[97]
Thebombe was an electromechanical device whose function was to discover some of the daily settings of the Enigma machines on the various German militarynetworks.[99][100][101] Its pioneering design was developed byAlan Turing (with an important contribution from Gordon Welchman) and the machine was engineered byHarold 'Doc' Keen of theBritish Tabulating Machine Company. Each machine was about 7 feet (2.1 m) high and wide, 2 feet (0.61 m) deep and weighed about a ton.[102]
At its peak, GC&CS was reading approximately 4,000 messages per day.[103] As a hedge against enemy attack[104] most bombes were dispersed to installations atAdstock andWavendon (both later supplanted by installations atStanmore andEastcote), andGayhurst.[105][106]
Luftwaffe messages were the first to be read in quantity. The German navy had much tighter procedures, and the capture of code books was needed before they could be broken. When, in February 1942, the German navy introduced the four-rotor Enigma for communications with its Atlantic U-boats, this traffic became unreadable for a period of ten months.[107] Britain produced modified bombes, but it was the success of theUS Navy Bombe that was the main source of reading messages from this version of Enigma for the rest of the war. Messages were sent to and fro across the Atlantic by enciphered teleprinter links.[80]
A Mark 2 Colossus computer. The ten Colossi were the world's first (semi-) programmable electronic computers, the first having been built in 1943.
TheLorenz messages were codenamedTunny at Bletchley Park. They were only sent in quantity from mid-1942. The Tunny networks were used for high-level messages between German High Command and field commanders. With the help of German operator errors, the cryptanalysts in theTestery (named afterRalph Tester, its head) worked out the logical structure of the machine despite not knowing its physical form. They devised automatic machinery to help with decryption, which culminated inColossus, the world's first programmable digital electronic computer. This was designed and built byTommy Flowers and his team at thePost Office Research Station atDollis Hill. The prototype first worked in December 1943, was delivered to Bletchley Park in January and first worked operationally on 5 February 1944. Enhancements were developed for the Mark 2 Colossus, the first of which was working at Bletchley Park on the morning of 1 June in time forD-day. Flowers then produced one Colossus a month for the rest of the war, making a total of ten with an eleventh part-built. The machines were operated mainly by Wrens in a section named theNewmanry after its headMax Newman.[110]
Italian signals had been of interest since Italy's attack on Abyssinia in 1935.During theSpanish Civil War theItalian Navy used the K model of the commercial Enigma without a plugboard; this was solved by Knox in 1937.When Italy entered the war in 1940 an improved version of the machine was used, though little traffic was sent by it and there were "wholesale changes" in Italian codes and cyphers.[111]
Knox was given a new section for work on Enigma variations, which he staffed with women ("Dilly's girls"), who includedMargaret Rock, Jean Perrin, Clare Harding, Rachel Ronald, Elisabeth Granger; andMavis Lever.[112]Mavis Lever solved the signals revealing the Italian Navy's operational plans before theBattle of Cape Matapan in 1941, leading to a British victory.[113]
Although most Bletchley staff did not know the results of their work, AdmiralCunningham visited Bletchley in person a few weeks later to congratulate them.[113]
On entering World War II in June 1940, theItalians were using book codes for most of their military messages. The exception was theItalian Navy, which after the Battle of Cape Matapan started using theC-38 version of theBoris Hagelinrotor-basedcipher machine, particularly to route their navy and merchant marine convoys to the conflict in North Africa.[114] As a consequence,JRM Butler recruited his former studentBernard Willson to join a team with two others in Hut 4.[88][115] In June 1941, Willson became the first of the team to decode the Hagelin system, thus enabling military commanders to direct theRoyal Navy andRoyal Air Force to sink enemy ships carrying supplies from Europe to Rommel'sAfrika Korps. This led to increased shipping losses and, from reading the intercepted traffic, the team learnt that between May and September 1941 the stock of fuel for theLuftwaffe in North Africa reduced by 90 per cent.[116]After an intensive language course, in March 1944 Willson switched to Japanese language-based codes.[117]
A Middle East Intelligence Centre (MEIC) was set up in Cairo in 1939. When Italy entered the war in June 1940, delays in forwarding intercepts to Bletchley via congested radio links resulted in cryptanalysts being sent to Cairo. A Combined Bureau Middle East (CBME) was set up in November, though the Middle East authorities made "increasingly bitter complaints" that GC&CS was giving too little priority to work on Italian cyphers. However, the principle of concentrating high-grade cryptanalysis at Bletchley was maintained.[118]John Chadwick started cryptanalysis work in 1942 on Italian signals at the naval base 'HMS Nile' in Alexandria. Later, he was with GC&CS; in the Heliopolis Museum, Cairo and then in the Villa Laurens, Alexandria.[119]
Soviet signals had been studied since the 1920s. In 1939–40,John Tiltman (who had worked on Russian Army traffic from 1930) set up two Russian sections at Wavendon (a country house near Bletchley) and atSarafand in Palestine. Two Russian high-grade army and navy systems were broken early in 1940. Tiltman spent two weeks in Finland, where he obtained Russian traffic from Finland and Estonia in exchange for radio equipment. In June 1941, when the Soviet Union became an ally, Churchill ordered a halt to intelligence operations against it. In December 1941, the Russian section was closed down, but in late summer 1943 or late 1944, a small GC&CS Russian cypher section was set up in London overlooking Park Lane, then in Sloane Square.[120]
An outpost of the Government Code and Cypher School had been set up in Hong Kong in 1935, theFar East Combined Bureau (FECB). The FECB naval staff moved in 1940 to Singapore, thenColombo,Ceylon, thenKilindini,Mombasa, Kenya. They succeeded in deciphering Japanese codes with a mixture of skill and good fortune.[121] The Army and Air Force staff went from Singapore to theWireless Experimental Centre atDelhi, India.[122]
In early 1942, a six-month crash course in Japanese, for 20 undergraduates from Oxford and Cambridge, was started by the Inter-Services Special Intelligence School in Bedford, in a building across from the main Post Office. This course was repeated every six months until war's end. Most of those completing these courses worked on decoding Japanese naval messages inHut 7, underJohn Tiltman.[122]
By mid-1945, well over 100 personnel were involved with this operation, which co-operated closely with the FECB and the US Signal intelligence Service atArlington Hall, Virginia. In 1999, Michael Smith wrote that: "Only now are the British codebreakers (likeJohn Tiltman,Hugh Foss, andEric Nave) beginning to receive the recognition they deserve for breaking Japanese codes and cyphers".[123]
Commemorative medal for those working at Bletchley Park
Until the mid 1970s thethirty year rule meant that there was no official mention of the work done at Bletchley Park. This meant that there were many operations where codes broken by Bletchley Park played an important role, but this was not present in the history of those events.[125]
After the War, the secrecy imposed on Bletchley staff remained in force, so that most relatives never knew more than that a child, spouse, or parent had done some kind of secret war work.[126] Churchill referred to the Bletchley staff as "the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled".[127] That said, occasional mentions of the work performed at Bletchley Park slipped the censor's net and appeared in print.[128]
With the publication ofF. W. Winterbotham'sThe Ultra Secret in 1974[129][b] public discussion of Bletchley Park's work in the English speaking world finally became accepted, although some former staff considered themselves bound to silence forever.[130] Winterbotham's book was written from memory and although officially allowed, there was no access to archives.[131]
Not until July 2009 did the British government fully acknowledge the contribution of the many people working at Bletchley Park.[132] Only then was a commemorative medal struck to be presented to those involved.[133] The gilded medal bears the inscriptionGC&CS 1939–1945 Bletchley Park and its Outstations.[134]
The site passed through a succession of hands and saw a number of uses, including as a teacher-training college, and by various government agencies, including theGPO and theCivil Aviation Authority. One large building, block F, was demolished in 1987 by which time the site was being run down with tenants leaving.[135]
Bletchley Park Trust was set up in 1991 by a group of people who recognised the site's importance,[136] as it was at risk of being sold off for housing.[137] and in February 1992, theMilton Keynes Borough Council declared most of the Park aconservation area.[138]
The site opened to visitors in 1993, and was formally inaugurated by theDuke of Kent as Chief Patron in July 1994[139] andTony Sale became the first director of the Bletchley Park Museums in 1994.[140]
June 2014 saw the completion of an £8 million restoration project by museum design specialist,Event Communications, which was marked by a visit fromCatherine, Duchess of Cambridge.[142] The Duchess' paternal grandmother,Valerie Middleton, and Valerie's twin sister, Mary (née Glassborow), both worked at Bletchley Park during the war. The twin sisters worked as Foreign Office Civilians inHut 6, where they managed the interception of enemy and neutral diplomatic signals for decryption. Valerie married Catherine's grandfather, CaptainPeter Middleton.[143][144][145] Amemorial at Bletchley Park commemorates Mary and Valerie Middleton's work ascode-breakers.[146]
The Bletchley Park Learning Department offers educational group visits with active learning activities for schools and universities. Visits can be booked in advance during term time, where students can engage with the history of Bletchley Park and understand its wider relevance for computer history and national security. Their workshops cover introductions to codebreaking, cyber security and the story ofEnigma andLorenz.[147]
In October 2005, American billionaireSidney Frank donated £500,000 to Bletchley Park Trust to fund a new Science Centre dedicated toAlan Turing.[148]Simon Greenish joined as Director in 2006 to lead the fund-raising effort[149] in a post he held until 2012 when Iain Standen took over the leadership role.[150] In July 2008, a letter toThe Times from more than a hundred academics condemned the neglect of the site.[151][152] In September 2008,PGP,IBM and other technology firms announced a fund-raising campaign to repair the facility.[153] On 6 November 2008 it was announced thatEnglish Heritage would donate £300,000 to help maintain the buildings at Bletchley Park, and that they were in discussions regarding the donation of a further £600,000.[154]
In October 2011, the Bletchley Park Trust received a £4.6 millionHeritage Lottery Fund grant to be used "to complete the restoration of the site, and to tell its story to the highest modern standards" on the condition that £1.7 million of match funding is raised by the Bletchley Park Trust.[155][156] Just weeks later, Google contributed £550,000[157] and by June 2012 the trust had successfully raised £2.4 million to unlock the grants to restore Huts 3 and 6, as well as develop its exhibition centre in Block C.[158]
Additional income is raised by renting Block H to the National Museum of Computing, and some office space in various parts of the park to private firms.[159][160][161]
The National Museum of Computing is housed in Block H, which is rented from the Bletchley Park Trust. Its Colossus and Tunny galleries tell an important part of allied breaking of German codes during World War II. There is a working reconstruction of a Bombe and a rebuiltColossus computer which was used on the high-levelLorenz cipher, codenamedTunny by the British.[164][165]
The museum, which opened in 2007, is an independent voluntary organisation that is governed by its own board of trustees. Its aim is "To collect and restore computer systems particularly those developed in Britain and to enable people to explore that collection for inspiration, learning and enjoyment."[166] Through its many exhibits, the museum displays the story of computing through the mainframes of the 1960s and 1970s, and the rise of personal computing in the 1980s. It has a policy of having as many of the exhibits as possible in full working order.[167]
This consisted of serviced office accommodation housed in Bletchley Park's Blocks A and E, and the upper floors of the Mansion. Its aim was to foster the growth and development of dynamic knowledge-based start-ups and other businesses.[168] It closed in 2021 and blocks A and E were taken into use as part of the museum.[169]
In April 2020 Bletchley Park Capital Partners, a private company run by Tim Reynolds, Deputy Chairman of the National Museum of Computing, announced plans to sell off thefreehold to part of the site containing former Block G for commercial development. Offers of between £4 million and £6 million were reportedly being sought for the 3acre plot, for which planning permission for employment purposes was granted in 2005.[170][171] Previously, the construction of aNational College of Cyber Security for students aged from 16 to 19 years old had been envisaged on the site, to be housed in Block G after renovation with funds supplied by the Bletchley Park Science and Innovation Centre.[172][173][174][175]
TheRadio Society of Great Britain's National Radio Centre (including a library, radio station, museum and bookshop) are in a newly constructed building close to the main Bletchley Park entrance.[176][177]
The Agatha Christie novelN or M?, published in 1941, was about spies during the Second World War and featured a character called Major Bletchley. Christie was friends with one of the code-breakers at Bletchley Park, and MI5 thought that the character name might have been a joke indicating that she knew what was happening there. It turned out to be a coincidence.[181][182]
Bletchley Park is the setting ofKate Quinn's 2021 historical fiction novel,The Rose Code. Quinn used the likenesses of true veterans of Bletchley Park as inspiration for her story of three women who worked in some of the different areas at Bletchley Park.[183][184]
TheBig Finish ProductionsDoctor Who audioCriss-Cross, released in September 2015, features theSixth Doctor working undercover in Bletchley Park to decode a series of strange alien signals that have hindered hisTARDIS, the audio also depicting his first meeting with his new companion Constance Clarke.[188]
The Bletchley Park Podcast began in August 2012, with new episodes being released approximately monthly. It features stories told by the codebreakers, staff and volunteers, audio from events and reports on the development of Bletchley Park.[189]
The 1979 ITV television serialDanger UXB features the character Steven Mount, a codebreaker at Bletchley who is driven to anervous breakdown (and eventual suicide) by the stressful and repetitive nature of the work.[190]
The Second World War code-breaking sitcom pilot "Satsuma & Pumpkin" was recorded at Bletchley Park in 2003 and featuredBob Monkhouse in his last screen role. The BBC declined to produce the show and develop it further before creating effectively the same show onRadio 4 several years later, featuring some of the same cast, entitledHut 33.[193][194]
Bletchley came to wider public attention with the documentary seriesStation X (1999).[195]
The 2012 ITV programmeThe Bletchley Circle is a set of murder mysteries set in 1952 and 1953. The protagonists are four female former Bletchley codebreakers, who use their skills to solve crimes. The pilot episode's opening scene was filmed on-site, and the set was asked to remain there for its close adaptation of the historic setting.[196][197]
Bletchley Park was featured in the sixth and final episode of the BBC TV documentaryThe Secret War (1977), presented and narrated by William Woodard. This episode featured interviews with Gordon Welchman,Harry Golombek,Peter Calvocoressi,F. W. Winterbotham, Max Newman, Jack Good, and Tommy Flowers.[200]
TheAgent Carter season 2 episode"Smoke & Mirrors" reveals that Agent Peggy Carter worked at Bletchley Park early in the war before joining the Strategic Scientific Reserve.[201]
A 2012 LondonScience Museum exhibit, "Code Breaker: Alan Turing's Life and Legacy", marking thecentenary of his birth, included a short film of statements by half a dozen participants and historians of the World War II Bletchley ParkUltra operations.[203]
^Colossus itself was designed and built byTommy Flowers at thePost Office Research Station atDollis Hill in north London, to solve a problem posed by mathematicianMax Newman at the GC&CS. From there, it (and nine more) were installed and operated in Bletchley.
^ He had permission to publish, but no access to official records, so had to rely on memory.
^Ellsbury, Graham (1988),"2. Description of the Bombe",The Turing Bombe: What it was and how it worked, archived fromthe original on 1 January 2011, retrieved1 May 2010
^Gross, Kuno, Michael Rolke and András Zboray,Operation SALAMArchived 16 May 2013 at theWayback Machine - László Almásy's most daring Mission in the Desert War, Belleville, München, 2013
^Hinsley, HarryBritish Intelligence in the Second World War, Volume One: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations (1979, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London) pp. 191–221, 570–72ISBN0 11 630933 4
^Furness, H (14 May 2019)."Kate meets the codebreakers: Duchess of Cambridge tells of her sadness over her grandmother's secret Bletchley Park life".UK Daily Telegraph.Archived from the original on 17 May 2019. Retrieved20 May 2019.The 37-year-old opened up as she visited the estate near Milton Keynes on Tuesday to see a new exhibition celebrating the role codebreakers played in the D-Day landings almost 75 years ago....she was shown a memorial containing the name of her father's mother and great-aunt, who also worked at Bletchley.
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Russell-Jones, Mair (2014),My Secret Life in Hut Six: One Woman's Experiences at Bletchley Park, Lion Hudson,ISBN978-0-745-95664-0
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