Bletchley Park. Spies and Computers.

So, the day dawned for the last of the many and varied home-education trips and activities that I'd foolishly agreed to organise for this term. All the usual things had happened. People were recalcitrant about getting their cheques in, they fussed about which groups they were allocated, some sent me rude emails, they whined about the start time, they were late and some didn't show up.{sigh} There were 100 people there that day.

However, we had a good time eventually.

Bletchley Park, the National Codes Centre, was THE centre for intelligence-gathering during World War Two. Its very existence as such was kept secret until the 1980's when MI5 finally admitted what went on there during the war and all its activities were finally removed to GCHQ.

The main house. There were dozens of other buildings and huts all over the park. We had 4 workshops that day:

'Codes and Cyphers' led by A Very Intelligent Bloke. Most of that session went right over my head.

A 'Walking Tour of the Park', which was a little like a treasure hunt.

'The Churchill Exhibition' and the one on 'Diplomatic Wireless'. (Basically- Spying.) That was most people's favourite. Especially the boys. And the Dads.

This is what happens when I ask to take photos for my blog these days. People cough, sneeze, duck and hide.

Jack in the library area. All those books are biographies of Churchill.

Jack was excited to be there, as you can tell.

The parents enjoyed the exhibition more than the kids.

I'm so sorry, Winston.

Bletchley Park had 1,000's of people working there during the war, most of them mathematicians trying to decipher the Enigma Code. Which they did. It's estimated that the War in Europe was shortened by at least 2 years as a result. Hundreds of thousands of lives were saved.

If you want an idea of the way BP looked and operated during the war, you can see the film, Enigma, starring Kate Winslett. There are 4 f words and a brief sex scene which we skipped. It's a 15 rating.

It even had its own post office.

Some of the kids were excited by the treasure hunt. Most of them male. Some of them just sat and ate sweets, most of those were female.

Lots of the mathematical heroes of Bletchley Park were Polish. Here is the Polish War Memorial.

And here is Hut 1. This unassuming hut is where British spies' messages came in from all over the world. The chap who gave the talk in here had been a member of MI6. Of course, the teenage boys had lots of questions about James Bond.

Why do people duck when they see a camera? I have a computer full of photos with people ducking in them. They always look as though I took them during an Air Raid.

In an old,crumbling tennis hut, we found part of The Bombe. It was an exciting moment for some of us, mostly the male contingent.

And even better was when we found a rebuild of Colossus. The first Colossus machine arrived at Bletchley in December 1943. This was the world’s first practical electronic digital information processing machine - a forerunner of today’s computers.

You won't find it in most history books about the history of computing, because it was kept secret for so long after the War. Most of us thought this was the best part of the trip. Especially those of us who were men.

Right next to this ancient calculating machine, there was an employee of the museum working at his laptop. And this sign, which I thought was cute.