Page 63 - Phonebox Magazine November 2014

Mischa Allen pays the historic site a visit
in Bedford – where it was known locally as “the Spy School”) before heading to the site. This was code breaking on an industrial scale but security was paramount, and every person who worked on the site signed the Official Secrets Act.
The advances made at Bletchley Park were only made possible largely because of human errors made by the German operators. If the enemy ever realised that the British had cracked it, it would all have been for nothing. As a result, many of the site’s workers didn’t even fully understand what they were doing. Information supplied by the Buckinghamshire site proved crucial to Britain and its allies at several key points, including the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the Battle of Cape Matapan, Crete, North Africa, the Battle of the Atlantic and D-Day.
A people story
Mavis Lever was just 18 when she arrived at Bletchley Park in 1940 to work as a cryptographer. Having studied German at University College, London, at the outbreak of the war, she was recruited after previously checking the personal columns of The Times for coded spy messages.
The following year, as British ships inMediterranean covered movements in Greece, she made a breakthrough, successfully reading the Italian Naval enigma for the first time. The message read that a large Italian fleet was sailing. As a result, the British Royal Navy found the Italians first and sank or severely damaged several ships. It became known as the Battle of Cape Matapan and saved thousands of
British sailors on the other side of the world – all thanks to a 19-year-old in a Bletchley cottage.
And this is just one of many examples where the work at the Buckinghamshire code breaking hub changed the war.
Even Ian Fleming, the author behind the iconic James Bond books, liased with Bletchley Park while working with naval intelligence during the war.
One of the most famous code breakers was Alan Turing, a mathematician, philosopher and pioneering computer scientist, who famously invented the Bombe machine that helped discover the settings. Winston Churchill himself said Turing made the single biggest contribution to Allied victory in the war, but sadly he committed suicide two years after being prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952.
A new film on his life is out this month, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley. To celebrate the release of The Imitative Game, Bletchley Park will open a major new exhibition from November 12, giving visitors the chance to see behind the scenes of the movie.
“These amazing minds worked in stark conditions”
Thanks to the multi-million pound restoration, large parts of the site have been restored to the WW2 settings. There’s even a free multimedia guide on an iPod touch for each visitor, with a family or adult version available. And the visitor centre celebrates the site’s role in early computing, with information on 21st century cyber security. Chief Executive Officer of the Bletchley
Connecting the dots – School children playing with interactive games at the site.
Park Trust, which was formed in the early 1990s to save the then derelict site, is Iain Standen. Joining the trust after serving as an officer in the British Army for 28 years, having worked in the communications and intelligence fields.
For Iain, it’s a labour of love as he explains: “You can really feel how it was during the early days of the war. It’s much more accessible and clearer, so visitors can wander around at their own pace. “Essentially, it’s a people story that is fascinating. These amazing minds worked in conditions that were pretty stark. It must have been a challenge for all of them.” Famously, top code breakers from the site wrote a letter to the then Prime Minister Winston Churchill, asking for more resources to complete the vital work. Famously he ordered “Action this day! Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done.” He was an ardent support of the work at Bletchley Park, and once referred to them as “the geese that laid the golden egg and never cackled.”
Iain continues: “Bletchley Park is an important part of British history, and it’s a great place to involved in. Everyone is working together to move forward as an international restoration site.”
With 190,000 visitors expected this year, the numbers are up and Bletchley Park is a common subject of discussion in the media, but there’s work to be done yet.
“There’s more buildings to work on and it’s a complex story, so we hope to carry on our work.” For more information, go to bletchleypark.org.uk.
Could you be a code breaker?
Are you good at maths or crosswords? Analytical and lateral minded individuals are known to make good code
breakers. The original team at Bletchley Park were mainly from top universities, including Cambridge and Oxford, but others joined the site throughout the war years.
Mainly, they needed problem solvers, who could think unconventionally and outside the box. Humans set the Enigma machines, so code breakers needed to understand their nature, as well as building machines of their own. It wasn’t about following procedure; it was about trying something new every single day.
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