Easter week saw me with some time off (for a change) and Andrew invited me to visit Bletchley Park with him. For those who have spent most of their lives either glued to endless reality ‘celebritydancingjunglecooksgottalent’ shows or are under the age of 15 (what are you doing reading this?), Bletchley is where the British code breaking team broke the German Enigma code in WW2.
It is remarkably interesting place to visit with several nice quirks like the invisible tennis players and the bell ringing bike shed. Now given the history of the place when I first heard the tennis game I thought they were putting on a costume theme game, but not so. When I caught site of the tenis court it was empty. Had I not been aware of motion sensor trigged recordings I might have been a bit freaked out by this or the bike bell ringing as we walked past. Just part of a well thought out and displayed museum.
There was plenty to see and do including a demonstration of Turings Bombe
Nice point to note is they had over two hundred working by the end of the war yet the rebuild of the current machine in the 1990s took about 17 years. I found the concept that a group of mathematicians could build a machine to crack a code with 17 million,million combinations astounding. Sadly they have now moved ‘Colossus‘ to a seperate computing museum (within walking distance, but at extra admission costs).
Nevertheless, there was still plenty to see and we were quietly reminded we had to leave 15minutes before they clossed for the day. All in all another grand day out thanks to Andrew’s driving skills. Oh. nearly forgot, I managed to stay awake for the two hours journey in both directions 🙂
The only disappointment was that dispite all the lovely displays of uniforms and equipment, everything was firmly fixed in place so I could play dress up with the bits of uniform. Nevermind.