Bletchley Park
It’s been a wish of mine for a long time to visit Bletchley Park and the National Museum of Computing. Yesterday my wish came true. At 8am, myself and a few friends left Sheffield for Bletchley Park.
For those of you who may not know, Bletchley Park is the home of the WWII code breakers led by Alan Turing. The code breakers worked on breaking the codes of the German, French, Italian and Russian armies, amongst others, during the second world war. The work performed at Bletchley brought the end of the war forward by an estimated 2 years and paved the way for the modern computers.
Our day at Bletchley started with an introductory video presentation which explained a little of what was done at Bletchley and what was available to be seen around the site. After the 10 minute video we made our way over to Hut 8 where we joined a guided tour. The guided tour is provided as part of the entry fee (£10 adults, £8.50 if purchased in advance, children under 12 free). The guided tour took about 2 hours and was worth every minute. Our guide was extremely knowledgable, had a way with words and made the whole thing come alive and also gave a bit of a maths lesson along the way. The tour starts off with a background talk on code breaking and the work done at Bletchley followed by a walking tour around the site pointing out the major items that should be visited along with some great stories and facts along the way. Who knew that there was a secret post office at Bletchley? PO Box 111 and that one of the ladies who worked there used to like going skinny dipping at night in the pond (there was a blakcout so no one could see her).
The site hosts many other exhibitions as well as the information on the cracking of Enigma and Lorenz cyphers such as national museum of cinema, an exhibition on Sir Winstion Churchill, a large collection of 40’s memorabilia including clothes, toys and all sorts of household items. There is a great setup of model railways and loads of other things to see.
The other main attraction that was of interest to all of us Geeks that made the trip was the National Museum of Computing. This opened last year and is not fully open yet but is still great to see. They have everything from Sinclair ZX81 to IBM PC’s with everything inbetween and much more. This was a real step back to my childhood and early days of working with mainframe computers. (Yes I do remember having to manually load magnetic tapes when they would not load and 8″ floppy disks, although I never worked with punched cards). The museum is housed at Beltchley but receives no government funding at all so to be able to do what they have done up to now purely from donations is great. All our eyes lit up when we saw that they sold ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 mugs (of which we bought plenty). Looking at the first notebooks and old machines really made me want to get hold of a BBC and start to play again.
I really can’t convey how much of a great day out a visit to Bletchley is. There is so much to see. We arrived at 10.30 and left at 5pm and still didn’t manage to see everything. I really can’t wait to go back again. Another thing of note is that the entry price is for a season ticket and lasts for 12 months so you can go back as many times as you want for the price of a single entry.