I thought Bletchely could not be too far from London, so I looked it up. At just about an hour train trip from London's Euston railway station we were set to take off for Bletchley. If two people take the train and visit the museum at Bletchely Park you can get in 2 for 1 admission by showing your train ticket. You have to find the voucher online at the museum's website and print it out. The bonus too is that the museum ticket is good for 1 calendar year. So if you get a chance to go back within a year, you can do so for free by showing the museum ticket. Once you arrive at the train station, follow the signs leading to Bletchely Park. It is not far by foot.
As you approach Bletchley Park on foot you see these buildings.
The grey building contains the ticket windows and a few exhibits about the park.
You can pick up a free audio guide in the main room. I am afraid we blew by that and neglected to do so. I am sure it can be helpful to listen to. However there are good written out descriptions at each stopping point.
The property is a bit spread out, so be prepared to do some walking. There is the main mansion to visit as well as many huts scattered about with displays in them. In the mansion make sure to find an employee who can give you a pass to take a free guided tour at a specific time. We did the tour after looking around on our own. The tour gives you a good overview of the huts, but you would want to go back and look at the exhibits in more detail on your own time.
Here is the main mansion.
The grounds are lovely with the pond. While you were working at Bletchley Park during WWII they thought it important to have nice places to relax and repose. In the winter the workers would sometimes skate on this pond if it was completely frozen. Otherwise picnics beside it were fine too.
The main room of the mansion contained an exhibit on the movie "The Imitation Game". A few scenes were filmed on site, including the scenes inside the bar. Otherwise the movie was filmed elsewhere.
Here is the bar from the movie set.
In addition to this set, there were costumes from the movie on display.
If you saw the movie "The Imitation Game", then you will remember Commander Denniston who was in charge and responsible for the hiring of the code breakers, including Alan Turing. Here is a mock up of his office. I don't think this was the actual location of his office in reality or in the movie. It simply shows you what it would have looked like.
In his office was posted this plaque about the involvement of the United States in the code breaking going on at Bletchley Park. I had no idea that we helped out here during and after the war with this gathering of intelligence.
As you leave the mansion you will see many different huts. These were where the code breakers were stationed. Some of the huts have displays in them. Others are closed to the public. Make sure you find hut A where Alan Turing's office was located. You can see his office like he left it. It was pretty bare.
He had his trusty typewriter, a desk and his coffee mug that he chained to the radiator so it would not be stolen.
Here is a photo of the entrance gate where workers would enter the park. The actual entrance gate was further down the same street. This is a view of the gate from inside the complex.
In one of the huts there was a display on dispatch riders. Their job during the war was to deliver intercepted enemy messages (coming through in Morse code) from nearby listening stations to Bletchley Park. The riders did the transporting of these messages via motorcycles. The riders were not concerned with the content of the messages and did not necessarily know exactly what kind of information they were delivering. Their job was to be efficient in getting the message back to Bletchley Park. From there the messages were passed on to the code breakers to decipher.
In another building is a working model of Turing's machine "The Bombe" that was used to figure out the settings on the German's enigma machine in order to decipher the German's messages. Since all the decoding machines were dismantled after the war, this is a replica.
The enigma machine that the German military used to send their messages in secret code to their colleagues.
The next series of photos will show you how the whole process worked from intercepting a coded message to decoding it. Rather than write out all of this info, I decided to take photos of the text on the walls.
As you can see, this was a very involved process to get the coded messages deciphered. It involved many people who were responsible for very specific tasks. They did not know what type of work their colleagues were doing at Bletchley Park. It was forbidden to talk about your job responsibilities to anyone. When they all worked together the results were a deciphered message. Only the higher ups at Bletchely Park knew how the whole process worked from start to finish to decipher messages. The Germans changed the settings of the enigma machine every day, so it was a constant challenge to keep up with deciphering messages.
For a wonderful video on Bletchely Park, go to youtube and search "Bletchley Park" and choose Bletchely Park Tour (a full documentary around 1 hour long). There are other shorter videos on the topic as well.
It is well worth visiting this place. Alllow a full day if you want to be thorough. We did.
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