Bletchley House

Once a year I go for a day trip somewhere different with my dear friend John Stratman. We have done a fabulous lunch at Harvey Nicholls Restaurant (not the Bistro), to a day at the Secret Nuclear Bunker, Kensington Palace and the Albert & Victoria Museum.

This year it was Bletchley House, the National Codes Centre. John having a keen interest in history took me around on a private tour, starting with the Enigma machine. A device that looked like a typewriter with ports plugged into it much like a server. These ports could be changed to change the code. Further more, across the top there were three dials which could be turned. There was a chart which indicated which setting each dial should be for each day of the year. And back during the war the Germans would send out their instructions on where their advances would be made via this machine.

It was on the site of Bletchley Park that during the war the code breakers finally broke the Germans code and thus were able to give us the upper hand. Of course, despite intercepting the messages and knowing what was going to come, they sent reconnaissance planes so that it looked like they found out that way.

Eventually they were able to use old GPO Parts as they were switching things from manual telephone exchanges to automatic so there were all these valves and switches that could be used to make a machine called Colossus which was able to read the messages intercepted from the Germans and eventually work them out. Colossus was effectively the world first computer. We also learned about Ian Flemming, who worked there and would eventually go on to write the books about a certain James Bond.

There was a huge hut that was filled to the rafters with Winston Churchill memorabilia that was all a Private Collectors exhibit. There was another collection of War Time radio’s and I got to try my hand at patching out a Morse Code Message on a Telegraphy machine.

It made me realise that these collectors, who were both present and happy to answer questions had spent their lives collecting these items. I can’t help but feel, that looking at the collections and seeing how passionate they were about them. The Winston Churchill collector said to us that it’s his personal collection, so feel free to ask any questions. Bless him.

From there we made our way to the History of Computers where I had reminisce looking at the Acorn Electron, Sinclaire Spectreme, Commodore etc. A room where they had servers as big as a washing machine that could hold 300MB. How times move on.

We had a lovely day discovering the code breaking secrets but most of all it was lovely to spend some time with John. I hope one day I can take him to a place where I know the story.