Tues 29 Aug - Ilmer

OK - if you are in the UK and anywhere near Buckinghamshire I can't recommend a trip to Bletchley Park highly enough. It is fascinating!! We spent 4 hours there and could easily have stayed another 2.

 

The Bletchley Park Mansion and bottom right - our tour guide

By the time we got kicked out a 5pm my brain hurt with trying to understand the Bombe - the ultimate code cracker that tackled - and succeeded - in unravelling the Enigma gibberish used so widely by the Germans in the second world war.

As our guide put it, the decoding process was like looking for a needle in a haystack - not by looking for the needle itself, but by examining and eliminating each strand of hay!

I soooo wanted to understand how the Bombe worked, but pfft, it defeated me. I got that each column of 3 cylinders represented a different enigma machine and that each colour represented one of three rotors, The bit I didn't / don't understand is the Plugboard and why it seemed to only swap 10 (instead of 13) pairs of letters. More research required!!

 

Dad and Skip chatting to out tour guide and hot dogs for lunch!!

Bletchley Park, Alan Turning, Gordon Welchman, Tommy Flowers, the Bombe machines and about 8000 other employees worked tirelessly throughout the war to decode hundreds of thousands of encrypted German messages and once the code was cracked the tables started turning. What the outcome wold have been without the assistance of this effort may have been vastly different!

The Enigma Machine

Our guide was a little less than complimentary about the Imitation Game, but I'm a keen bean to watch it again. And - possible true story - Alan Turing committed suicide in 1954 after being found guilty of homosexuality. Much of his post- war work was in Manchester. The city has adopted him and he has become a symbol of gay pride. The story goes he drank cyanide and then took a bite out of an apple immediately afterwards to get rid of the taste. Apparently the apple was found next to his body and became the inspiration and logo adopted by Steve Jobs for his Apple empire.

The Bombe and Alan Turing

Bletchley Park tuckered out all of us - but in the best possible way. And as a thank you for having us - Dad treated Richard (aka Skip, aka Dick) to dinner at the Thatch in Thame. I chose well and had a delicious 3 course meal, but unfortunately Dad was not happy with his £35 steak and sent it back!! He said the second one wasn't much better! Eeeek! And then to top it off his dessert was less than stellar whereas mine was brilliant! Damn damn and double damn!! BUT good news! The wine (see label) was EXCELLENT. But strongly doubt I'll be able to find it in Oz. Sigh.

All in all a fabulous day!!