Monday, 14 August 2017

Bletchley Park 22 April 2017


Bletchley Park



On Saturday 22nd of April a group of ladies joined a Jay & Kay coach tour to Bletchley Park, Home of the Codebreakers.

After a pleasant journey with a jolly coach driver we arrived at about 11.30am. We were greeted and shown into the visitor centre where we were given a map and saw an introductory exhibition about Bletchley.  I think many of us were surprized by the size of the site, there is the visitor centre, museum, the Mansion and 12 huts, many of which have been restored to how they were during the war.

Hut 8 was home to the office of Alun Turing the famous code breaker. His office with his desk and typewriter was like stepping back in time, you can even see his enamel mug that he kept chained to the radiator! By all accounts he was a genius and just a little bit eccentric.

In the Museum in block B we saw the Cipher machines used by Hitler and learnt how the code breakers devised the first computer to decipher the codes from the Enigma machines.

Some ladies took a guided tour of the site which was very interesting and gave us an insight into what life would have been like working there during the war

We returned to the coach at 4pm in awe of the work that took place at Bletchley. The thousands of men and women who worked there listening to Morse code messages day and night, the people who built the machines and the mathematicians who cracked the codes, all working in total secrecy none of them even knowing what the people in the next Hut to them were doing. Amazing.

And as out tickets are valid for a year I’m sure that some ladies will be returning to Bletchley Park to see all the bits we missed the first time around.

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