TuckH

Bletchley Park is the name of a mansion, located near present-day Milton Keynes, where highly secret WW II work was done (by Alan Turing and others) to de-cipher the Nazis' Enigma Device. The breaking of this Code was instrumental in the Allies' victory and the ideas that came out this effort have led directly to our computer age. That site was chosen by the British Intelligence Services because it was equidistant between London, Oxford and Cambridge and thus brilliant minds could easily converge on that spot by rail.

I may be wrong, but I believe some of the buildings and grounds are open to the public today. Does anyone know if this is so and/or been there?

Intrepid

Try this website that I found on Google...
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

TuckH

Voila! Thanks Intrepid! Now I'd like to know of anyone who's been there...

flygirl

yup, it's open, but as of 2 years ago pretty decrepit. (but they are working on it, and actually it seemed to have more of an aura of 'old' which is missing from so many historical sites today)

I think BT owned it for a time, & now they are trying to (perhaps succeeded, it's been a while) to get national lottery approval in order to fund raise?

the house is something else. supposedly the owners were rich eccentrics (oh so rare among Brits I find) who traveled a lot and every time they saw an architectural style they came home and explained it to the local handyman who tried to oblige by building another weird wing. there are 5 styles visible from the front. I use the term style loosely.

try to read up on the code breaking AND making efforts before you go - you'll get a better flavor of the place. Leo Marks' book 'between silk and cyanide' was really good.

amazingly enough - many people who worked there lived right in town but they still kept the existence/use of the place a secret. can you see that happening today? not bloody likely.

elaine

Hi

For an article about the history of the work at BP: http://britishhistory.about.com/libr...secretwar1.htm

some family members of mine, including two young teens, went there last year
They were moderately impressed.
It is still funded and mostly run by volunteers and it's not a "slick" tourist venue, but my family thought it worth it--they are history buffs, especially WWII.

Kavey

http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...mp;tid=1367220

This may offer further feedback, though a little out of date.

ben_haines_london

I was there last month on a day visit set up by the Friends of the Imperial War Museum. Apart from a few main room in the hall, the place is not sparkling and new-painted, but is tidy, serviceable, with good guides and labelling, and simply fascinating. What if the Poles had not handed us machines just before the war ? The shipping losses in the Atlantic were bad enough even with Enigma in our hands.

Our (excellent) group guide, a lady of a certain age, has worked there as a Wren. She thinks she was put to work there because on call-up, in the form, she wrote Hobby: Crosswords. What a way to fight a war. But we won.

[email protected]

obxgirl

I was there for an afternoon last summer and I wouldn't characterize Bletchley as decrepit but more like "lovingly tattered." And I say that because for all its lack of slickness, the folks who work and volunteer there are passionately devoted to the place and its history. My husband is a history buff and was delighted to discover that our tour guide had been one of the enigma operators during WWII. She ran a fascinating but tight tour ("there will be a quiz!&quot. My daughter, friend & I split off after 1.5 hours (we're not history fiends) but most remained for close to 3 hours.

It was a fine day and nice enough to wander the pleasant grounds after a cup of tea in the somewhat threadbare restaurant.

Last year there were full tours offered on the weekend days but somewhat limited access during the week. They were hoping to attract more volunteers to expand the M-F hours.

As said above, the trip from Euston Station to Milton Keynes was an easy one. From there, a short walk to the house and grounds.

RJD

If you want to vist a site that provides a vivid impression of the war, visit the War Rooms under Whitehall, which Churchill and the Cabinet used until May 1945. They were restored at Margaret Thatcher's direction and are evocative of the courage of the British at that time.

TuckH

Thanks for the responses; it's a very interseting topic. It's amazing that the secret was so well kept during the war, also amazing that it was kept for (how many?) years AFTER the war.

It's touching that there are some still alive who lived through those perilous years.

I seem to remember reading that the Poles came upon one of these German machines and wanted to share it with the French, who declined. Thankfully it ended up at Bletchley!

The War Rooms at Whitehall are very interesting - there's also a similar exhibit at Dover Castle where they anxiously watched out over the Channel for, and awaited, the dreaded invasion.

dln

There was an amazing program about Bletchley Park on TV. I wish I could remember if it was PBS, Discovery or A&E! Does anyone know? It's quite a story. More than a few of the men and women became great friends and a few married each other. It was hush hush for many years.

TuckH

dln:

I recall a biopic some years back (5 maybe) on Alan Turing, THE genius behind the breaking of the code. It was sensitively done.

His was a tragic life; rather than enjoying the plaudits, he was cruelly tormented, having been exposed as being gay. He took his own life in 1954.

Yes, there have been some recent documentaries on the topic of "The Enigma Machine". Of course the Germans never caught on that the Allies frequently knew where their u-boat wolfpacks were in the North Atlantic.

flygirl

TuckH

you will also enjoy the book Bodyguard of Lies. as Churchill said, the Truth is so precious it always must be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

for example, Coventry was bombed b/c the Allies COULD NOT let on that they knew it was going to be bombed lest they give up their secret - that they were cracking the code.

fascinating book. might be hard to find? it was when I went looking 4-5 years ago...

karenabs

On our first UK trip in 1978, we stayed in Charlbury at a hotel called The Bell. After a day of sightseeing in the area, we thought we'd take a little road back to the hotel......part way through we were met by a woman who stopped our car and asked us how we happened to be there. We had no clue we were anywhere of interest. She explained this was a closed area and we should have been stopped earlier and that we could head out and if stopped by anyone, we could tell them Lady ? said we were fine and to let us continue through to Charlbury. We didn't know until much later where we had been and that the big old house had such a past. Through the many years, we've seen so many documentaries on code-breaking and recognize the surrounds of the home.

janis

karenabs - I think you are a tad confused. Bletchley Park is not near Charlbury. It is over in Buckinghamshire near Milton Keynes.

Charlbury is in Oxfordshire and the "Lady" you ran into was likely someone from the Duke of Marlborough's family. Charlrbury is on the backside of Blenheim Palace's grounds.

jimily

My curiousity is picqued, where is Bletchley Park and how can you get there(on a Sunday)?
Emily

flanneruk

Karenabs and Janis: The Bletchley/Ditchley Confusion

Karen was presumably walking through Ditchley Park, which borders Charlbury (which is on no-one's backside, and has been around a lot longer than Blenheim). Blenheim is criss-crossed with public rights of way, and if the Churchills ever had the temerity to tell anyone to get off "their" land, they'd be totally out of order.

Ditchley, during WW2, was used by Churchill as a country escape whenever his official country residence was so moonlit as to be a security hazard.

After WW2, it was bequeathed to the nation, and is now owned by the UK Foreign Office. It is used for "seminars". Which may be obscure meetings of experts on global issues. Or, for all anyone knows, serious debriefing of whichever former 3rd world ruler has sought asylum this week.

Whatever, they do have a habit, from time to time, of suggesting that walkers do not divert a foot from the public rights of way across the estate.

And, for the collectors of historic trivia, the curators of The Breakers in Rhode Island have a painting of a chatelaine of Ditchley, Anne Wharton (a prominent 17th century poet)by Peter Lely. They caption it "Anne of Ditchly" to confuse us all.

The estate is probably known best to all of you who've ever looked at the Gheeraerts portrait of Elizabeth 1 in the National Gallery, known to art historians as the Ditchley Portrait. Elizabeth's foot is planted on Ditchley: it's a symbol that the commissioner of the portrait - a former courtier who was cohabiting at Ditchley with one of Elizabeth's most strumpet-like former ladies in waiting - wanted to get back into the Queen's favour.

Historians cannot agree as to whether Elizabeth was miffed at the courtier's immorality, or at the fact that the immorality did not include her.

TuckH

flanner...what an amusing post!

You touch on another topic of interest to me - that of the "public rights of way", few of which do we have here in the US. As a matter of fact, when we've gone off on lengthy hikes in the UK, we've used the public footpaths that are part of a vast network of rights-of-way across private lands. What a national treasure this is! Does it date back to 1215 and the Magna Carta?

jimily: For the info that you seek, check out the website that Intrepid posted above. It's all there.

janis

flanneruk - you may be right. But karenabs was driving, not walking. I know Ditchley is right on the edge of Charlbury. But I had never found any roads I would mistake for public ones through Ditchley. There are several roads through Blenheim and since it is also close to Charlbury I just assumed they had gotten off on one of those.

In any case we definitely agree - it wasn't Bletchley.

flanneruk

TuckH

You're absolutely right. Our footpaths are right up there with rural parish churches, suburban gardens and Radio 4 as the things the guidebooks keep mercifully quiet about.

Oddly, nothing to do with Magna Carta.

My understanding is this: after the Conquest, just about all England was ultimately Crown land, though the population had complex rights of access and use. Practicaly everywhere had universal right of access.
Over the next 900 years, monarchs granted most of that land to private individuals (places near Ditchley were privatised only in the mid-19th century). Some public rights - like access - remained: some State rights - like oil drilling - were never assigned to the owners.

In 1947, this was finally codified. Public access rights were listed, and legally defined: landowners not only have to permit access across defined routes, but must maintain safe access points (hence the myriad kinds of stile). Why do - and did - landowners tolerate this?

Well, for the same reason that we have more major works of art in private ownership than anywhere else in Europe. We avoided revolution partly because landowners always just did enough to keep the rest of the country at bay. The great houses haven't been sacked, as they were in France, because the toffs kept throwing morsels to us peasants. Footpath access was one of them.