37. Bletchley Hall

Bletchley Hall in Buckinghamshire, England, was the heart of cryptography during World War II. It is now a highly documented site, and also a preserved museum honoring the “codebreakers” of the German Enigma machine, and many other types of ciphers. I was able to visit Bletchley Park on July 15, 2010.

In 1996s Robert Harris’ book Enigma was published. [New York: Random House. ISBN-13: England 1943. Much of the infamous Nazi Enigma code has been cracked. But Shark, the impenetrable operational cipher used by Nazi U-boats, has masked the Germans' movements, allowing them to destroy a record number of Allied vessels. Feeling that the blood of Allied sailors is on their hands, a top-secret team of British cryptographers works feverishly around the clock to break Shark. And when brilliant mathematician Tom Jericho succeeds, it is the stuff of legend

Wartime codebreaking caught the public interest on both sides of the Atlantic. Hugh Whitemore wrote a play about it, Breaking the Code, produced in London’s West End, and it was soon made into a BBC TV production. A number of other books, many excellent, have been written about codebreaking and Bletchley Park. The common theme is that it was thanks to the brilliant codebreakers at Bletchley Park that Britain managed to read Nazi Germany’s most secret messages.

Perhaps the best book written about Enigma and Bletchley Park is Enigma: The Battle for the Code by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore [New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc, 2000.] One of the compelling reasons for Sebag-Montefiore to write this book he tells in his book’s introduction.

Bletchley Park, the house in Buckinghamshire where the Enigma code was broken by Britain’s codebreakers, used to be owned by my great great grandfather, Sir Herbert Leon. … He and his second wife, Fanny, lived at Bletchley Park from the early 1880s until his death in 1926. The house and its surrounding estate was eventually sold off by the Leons, following Fanny’s death, in 1937. My father, Stephen Sebag-Montefiore has often told me about the strange Victorian time warp he entered when, as a young boy, he was taken to Bletchley Park by his parents to visit the Leons.

Bletchley Park became Britain’s best kept secret, but today the Park is open to the public as a heritage site and museum. One can explore the wide range of exhibitions and learn how its codebreaking successes helped to save countless lives by short3ening World War Two by around two years.

Bletchley Park was Churchill’s secret passion; he called its codebreakers s his “geese that laid the golden eggs but never cackled.”

The story of Bletchley Park is also the story of one of the most eccentric mathematicians of all times, Allan Turing. He was able to visualize the inner workings of the Enigma machine and design a method for decrypting German messages almost before they read them themselves. It is also the story of Tony Sale, a brilliant engineer who built the Lorentz decrypting machine, the world’s first analog computer. Tony then, years later after the Lorentz machine had been destroyed, recreated it by scrounging discarded vacuum tubes and switches from decommissioned telephone exchanges. He began his work with seven pictures of the Lorentz machine. By chance he met some NSA people at a meeting and they revealed they had the original plans for Lorentz. Today Tony can exhibit how the machine works in reality.

For exploring Bletchley Park online, see http://bletchleypark.org.uk

For further information on Tony Sale see http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/