SECRETS, LEAPING, SPEED & FEATHERS.

BLETCHLEY PARK

...A few weeks later, in late August, we went to Bletchley Park, home of the WWII code breakers. Bletchley is in Milton Keynes famous for being a planned and perhaps, therefore, boring town. It certainly reminded us of Canberra! Despite being planned and built in the 1960s, the streets in residential areas were narrow and driving was still very much a game of 'duck & weave', much to Mark's disappointment.

A German Enigma machine 

It was at Bletchley Park that the most brilliant scholars and students from Oxford, Cambridge and beyond were brought to try to break the famous German Enigma cypher machine codes.  Alongside them, doing the painstaking manual work of trial and error code breaking, and using the machines developed at the park, were many young women from good homes whose loyalty to the nation was beyond reproach!  All were sworn to a lifetime of secrecy and, amazingly, Bletchley's stories have only become more widely known since the release of secret archival information in the 1970s.  There are many sad tales of people never telling their friends or families what their war time contribution had been (and being castigated/scorned for not joining up), even their own children as the years rolled on.  Indeed many passed away never having told their stories.


The way the Enigma machines worked and all that was involved in cracking the codes is so complex as to be only vaguely comprehensible to most people, including us! Despite that, the modern Bletchley park, which is run by enthusiastic volunteers, attracts large numbers of cipher geeks, many of whom seemed to actually understand how the code making and breaking machines worked!

Another Enigma machine used in 1944.
It was never cracked by Bletchley

The Germans believed Enigma would make communications impenetrable to the enemy. However, with the help of Polish mathematicians who had managed to acquire a machine prior to the outbreak of WW2, British code breakers stationed at Bletchley Park managed to crack the Enigma code, giving the Allies a key advantage. The intelligence produced at Bletchley Park was codenamed 'Ultra' and was crucial to the Allied war effort. It is widely considered that 'Ultra' shortened the war by two to four years, saving many lives, and that the outcome of the war could have been very different without it.

While the code breakers at Bletchley were immensely clever people, it was, we were told, a series of lucky breaks, by way of poor German code practise, that their painstaking work identified and ultimately helped them crack the codes. 

One of these code breakers was Alan Turing who played a vital role in deciphering the Enigma messages. and in developing what would become the forerunner of modern computers. He took the lead in a team that designed the 'Bombe' machine which successfully decoded German messages. He became a well-known and rather eccentric figure at Bletchley!

Made from slate

Turing was a genius. After the war, he and a former undergraduate colleague, began writing a chess program - for computers that did not exist at the time - which has since been tested and proven! Turing was also gay which, at the time, was illegal. In 1952 Turing was convicted of gross indecency which led to the withdrawal of his high level security clearance and effectively ended his career. He was given the option of either jail or 'treatment'. He opted for the latter which basically involved chemical castration. In June 1954, after two years of 'treatment' he died, most likely by his own hand. 

Turing memorial

After years of campaigning by his supporters a government apology was issued in 2009 by then Prime Minister Gordon Brown. In part, the apology said:

"....thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him ... So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better."

The Lorenz was an even more complex cipher machine used exclusively for the most important messages passed between the German Army Field marshals and their Central High Command in Berlin. John Tiltman, another great cryptanalyst at Bletchley, broke the first messages in 1941 using hand-methods and statistical analysis, but by 1944 the Germans had introduced complications making it virtually impossible to break by hand alone. Max Newman and his team were given the task of building machines to break the codes.

The first machine designed to break the Lorenz was slow and unreliable but ‘Colossus’, a much faster and more reliable machine, was then built with the help of Tommy Flowers, a brilliant Post Office electronics engineer.  Colossus, the world’s first practical electronic digital information processing machine and a forerunner of today’s computers, could do the huge amount of mathematical work  needed in hours, rather than weeks. The first Colossus was working in time for Eisenhower and Montgomery to be sure that Hitler had swallowed the deception campaigns prior to D-Day in 1944.

Flowers, like Turing and others at Bletchley, was not recognised for his enormous contribution after the war because of the secrecy surrounding what had been done and concerns to keep others, particularly the Russians as the Cold War developed, from knowing Britain's code breaking capability.


SKY-DIVING!!

No doubt Bletchely Park (LINK) was enormously fascinating for the kids..... but we had also built our Milton Keynes trip around another 'kid surprise'!

Despite its reputation as being possibly not the most exciting of places, Mark had found an indoor skydiving centre there!! Basically it is a huge blower in an enclosed chamber with a wind tunnel speed of about 150km. Although the time spent skydiving was very short it seemed the kids enjoyed it a lot. Whether Mark actually enjoyed it remains to be decided. Sally opted out completely!

The video below shows a little of what the kids did as well as the instructor showing just what is possible after lots of 'air ' time.

Hmmmmmm.

SPEED DEMONS

Back in London, Mark took the kids and a couple of their friends go- karting. While it was not the best track they have been on( their first track in Denmark probably takes that title. click here and scroll down to see their first karting.) they still had fun.

BIG WALK

Towards the end of the holidays we decided to replicate a walk that Sally did a year earlier from her work on the Strand back to East Finchley. It took just over 2 hours and helped give us a different perspective of the city we call home. 

FEATHERS, FEATHERS EVERYWHERE

As part of the Olympic/Paralympic festivities, London put on a large number of amazing and fun activities. We stumbled across this one (hats on iconic figures) after going to a west end performance of the Monty Python inspired 'Spamalot' (hilarious). 

Patriotic Nelson

After collaring one of the leads, Jon Culshaw of Dead Ringers and Tony Blair impersonations fame....  

and having dinner, we were walking towards Leicester Square to take the tube home but ended up following the sound of music to Picadilly Circus, where we found a growing crowd watching some inflatable characters and high wire performers. It all seemed fairly interesting but then some of the performers started to throw feathers around. Soon industrial air blowers were turned on and the amount of feathers grew and grew and grew and just kept on growing! Feathers blew around for nearly 20 minutes. The joyous reaction of the crowds was as if it were snow and, in fact, it was almost like snow as in the end there were 1.5 tonnes of feathers laying ankle deep for several city blocks. Once the feather blowers had stopped the crowds then had 'feather fights' and continued the celebration. The street sweepers who were poised to move in once the crowd had left certainly had a big job ahead of them. It was one of the most incredible events we have been a part of.  

In the next overdue post .....

• a summer festival with a little bit of Rio coming to London. 
• we all go to BrownSea island
• Mark and kids go to Brighton
• a visitor from Baghdad