They created vast, primitive, pioneering computers to decode the encrypted German military communications puzzled for hours, days and weeks over the fantastic intricacies of the enemy's Enigma ciphering machines, which Berlin supposed foolproof. Today, everybody interested in the war knows the outline of the Bletchley story: a group of brilliant mathematicians presided over an operation that represented Britain at its best and cleverest.
Even then, surviving veterans among the 10,000 people who eventually worked there felt shocked that oaths of lifelong secrecy had been betrayed by those who blew the gaffe. The Bletchley story was revealed to the world only in 1974, almost 30 years after the war ended. At a guard post, they presented their passes, and were then led inside, to be let into the deepest secret of the war effort.įor the next three years, they worked at 'BP' as small cogs in Britain's supreme achievement - the breaking of Germany's codes. They walked half a mile, staggering under their luggage, before reaching a long chain-link fence, surmounted by coils of barbed wire. Sinclair McKay’s book is the first history for the general reader of life at Bletchley Park, and an amazing compendium of memories from people now in their eighties – of skating on the frozen lake in the grounds (a depressed Angus Wilson, the novelist, once threw himself in) – of a youthful Roy Jenkins, useless at codebreaking, of the high jinks at nearby accommodation hostels – and of the implacable secrecy that meant girlfriend and boyfriend working in adjacent huts knew nothing about each other’s work.Secret world: Kate Winslet and Dougray Scott in the 2001 film Enigmaįour days later, they got off a grimy wartime train at dreary Bletchley station, 50 miles north of London. The military codes deciphered there were instrumental in turning both the Battle of the Atlantic and the war in North Africa.īut, though plenty has been written about the boffins, and the codebreaking, fictional and non-fiction – from Robert Harris and Ian McEwan to Andrew Hodges’ biography of Turing – what of the thousands of men and women who lived and worked there during the war? What was life like for them – an odd, secret territory between the civilian and the military?
This country house in the Buckinghamshire countryside was home to Britain’s most brilliant mathematical brains, like Alan Turing, and the scene of immense advances in technology – indeed, the birth of modern computing. Bletchley Park was where one of the war’s most famous – and crucial – achievements was made: the cracking of Germany’s “Enigma” code in which its most important military communications were couched.
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