This post will be pretty short but I figured i would make it a separate post since it was a really cool stop and really doesn’t fit into the theme of the next one.

I left Cambridge and took a train to Milton Keenes, where I transferred to another train which headed south the Bletchley Park which is the place where the British Intelligance set up their code breaking operations during the war.  It is also where the movie The Imitation game took place which is about the brilliant mathematician Alan Touring who created the Touring Test as well as the Bome machine.

The whole complex was based around the purchase of the mansion and surrounding grounds by MI6 shortly before the outbreak of war to house a codebreaking school.  Eventually it became the central codebreaking center for the British and eventually the Allied code breaking efforts.  The site was turned into a public museum in 1991 and most recently has been operating as a really interesting museum.

I dedicated most of a day to visiting this museum as many people in the reviews said you could easily spend an entire day there.

The grounds surrounding the complex were very beautiful and there were many photographs of the various codebreakers enjoying the lovely lake in the centre of the property.

I took a guided tour of the complex which went over how things operated here during the war and what life might have been like for the codebreakers who lived and worked in the area as well as how the operations happened.

The main task of the people here were to decipher the output of the Enigma machine.  There were a lot of techniques that were employed to try and break the days code.  Sometimes they would get lucky and decipher the days enigma code which could be used to decipher all of the German messages for that day but at the beginning of each day the code reset and they were back to square one.

The main codebreaking happened in these additional out buildings constructed beside the mansion which allowed for more people to work.

There were two adjacent buildings with a passageway connecting them.  When the messages were recieved, they were processed by the first building and then passed to the second building for code breaking.  The passage way used an old fashioned broom to push the box back and forth.

I visited touring’s office which showed that he used to chain his coffee cup to the radiator so nobody would steal it.

There were tons of interactive exhibits which showed how some of the manual codebreaking techniques were performed, including holes through paper stacked on top of each other to complicated grids of numbers trying to figure out the patterns.

In addition to the manual techniques, they also showed the BOME machine that was developed to break the enigma machine automatically by trying all possible combinations in succession.  The codebreakers would build a map of known patterns and the BOME machine would figure out the Enigma settings for that day.  It was really cool how things were programmed and even more amazing that it worked.

Unfortunately Alan Touring never received much praise for his invention and was actually medicated heavily for being a homosexual.  He ended up committing suicide several years after the war before all of his work had been declassified in the 70s.

The whole experience was really cool and I am glad I made the effort to stop by.  They even had their own beer available in the cafeteria and of course I had to try it.

After I had finished walking through all of the exhibits and checking out the national radio center, I headed out to the exit, where I ran into a mother and her young son who were also from Canada and had rented an RV and was taking it across England.  This was one of their last stops and so they not only offered me a ride to the train station, but also some of their leftover food and cider, which they were not going to use.

They were so nice!  The train wasn’t supposed to come for several hours, so I asked them to drop me off at a nearby park which had a lake.  There, I had a picnic with the leftover food and read my book on the shore.

It was a great day and I am very glad I stopped there.  I then jumped on the train towards Birmingham which was just a gateway place to Burton on Trent which was my actual next destination.