Minerva Visit to Station X - Bletchley Park: June 7th 2006

Bletchley Park is well known today as the home of "Ultra", the wartime codebreaking operation that cracked the German "Enigma" code and, according to Churchill, shortened the war by up to two years, saving thousands of lives.

The breaking of the Enigma codes is actually only a small part of the story. Many lower level German codes were being cracked and the codebreakers went on to decipher other German codes, notably those coded on the Lorenz machines, as well as Japanese codes.

By the end of the war 12,000 staff worked at "Station X" as the site was then known, most of them women. They included many mathematicians, linguists, chess players (and crossword experts), though the majority worked on routine clerical duties.

However, because codes of a similar types were still being used well into the Cold War, the important wartime role of Bletchley Park in cracking the Enigma and other codes remained completely secret until the mid 1970s.

Some of those who worked there are reluctant to talk about their experiences even now! The maintenance of a high level of secrecy for so long is remarkable.

This secrecy almost led to the loss of this vital and fascinating part of the history of the UK and the history of computing.

After the war, Bletchley Park was used at various times as a training centre for teachers, GPO engineers, air traffic controllers and for GCHQ, the successor to GCCS. By 1991, however, it was unoccupied and proposals were submitted to clear the site for a housing development!

Fortunately, at the eleventh hour, the historic importance of the site was appreciated, and, in 1992, most of the park was declared a Conservation Area and the Bletchley Park Trust  was set up. The future of the park was only really secured 1999 when the Trust managed to negotiate a 250 year lease for much of the site.

Minerva members and guests were met outside Bletchley Park Mansion by the tour organisers and we started our visit with coffee in the Ballroom and an introductory talk by our excellent and well informed volunteer guide. We later returned to the ballroom for a finger buffet lunch. The Mansion is a magnificent, ornate Victorian building. From 1883 to his death in 1926, it was the home of Sir Herbert Leon, a friend of Lloyd George and, briefly, Liberal MP for North Buckinghamshire. His widow, Lady Fanny, continued to live at Bletchley and was very active in the local community. She died in 1937. After Fanny's death, the Park was put up for auction but bidding only reached £7,500, below the reserve price, so it was withdrawn from sale. In 1938 the Park and the Mansion, by then owned by a property developer, were acquired by MI6 to enable GCCS, the Government Code and Cypher School to move out of London. The location was considered ideal. Although well away from large conurbations, Bletchley not only had excellent both road and rail links to Oxford and Cambridge as well as to London, but was also the site of a major post office telephone and telegraph repeating station. Although the whole codebreaking site came to be known by the suitably "enigmatic" codename "Station X", we were told that the "X" signified nothing more than the fact that it was the tenth in a series of radio stations! The radio transmitter station was set up in 1938 and housed in a small, dark room in the water tower of the mansion. In January 1940 the main transmitter was moved off-site as it was feared that the signals would be detected and make the site a possible target for attack. To maintain security, communication to and from Station X was largely by means of  motor cycle dispatch rider or by teleprinter. The radio room has been restored by members of the local radio club but, sadly, due to Health and Safety regulations, it is not open to the public. The first codebreakers worked in the mansion and its outbuildings. We saw the cottage in the stable yard where Dillwyn (Dilly) Knox, John Jeffreys, Alan Turing and others worked on breaking the Enigma code. The breakthrough in decoding Enigma came in 1940, thanks to information supplied by a team of  Polish Cryptoanalysts and Mathematicians who had been working on it since 1928. There is now a monument in the stable yard commemorating their essential contribution. As more and more codebreakers came to work at Bletchley, more space was needed and from October 1939, groups of prefabricated wooden huts were constructed in the grounds. Some of these were protected by surrounding them with massive bomb-blast walls. Unfortunately the walls also cut out most of the natural light and air! Later huts were bomb-proof brick and concrete buildings. Five surviving huts can be seen on the tour. Each hut housed a different team of code breakers, working on coded messages from different sources. These teams were known by their hut numbers.  As the teams grew they kept the same names so that by the end of the war, "Hut 3", for example, actually occupied several buildings. For security, the layout of the buildings was designed to resemble a hospital complex. The codebreakers working at Bletchley were so eccentric than many local people apparently believed that it was a lunatic asylum! We visited Hut 11 which had housed the Turing "Bombes". The Wren operators who worked in this dark and airless building full of hot and noisy machines called it "the hell hole". The Bombes were electro-mechanical machines, based on machines, known as Bomby (sing. Bomba), developed by Polish cryptanalysts before the war. By setting code wheels and plugs, the laborious process of testing possible keys was speeded up. We saw a replica of a Bombe, built for the film "Enigma" and our guide explained some of the complexities of code breaking using the Bombes. (The film is fictional and does not give a realistic view of the lives and work of the codebreakers!) By the end of the war there were over 200 Bombe machines at various sites in the Home Counties. Colossus, designed and built by Tommy Flowers, is claimed by many to be  the world's first programmable electronic computer. The first machine was installed at Bletchley Park in December 1943. Eventually there were ten machines. They are considered to have played a vital role in the 1944 Normandy campaign. as they were used to break the high-level ciphers, encoded on Lorenz machines, and used by Hitler and his high command.   The information obtained from intercepted messages was passed back to military commanders but it was represented as coming from MI6 agents so that the codebreaking activities remained secret. At the end of the war the codebreakers were demobilised and all evidence of the Station X operations, including  the Colossi and their blueprints, were destroyed on Churchill's orders. The standard Post Office parts used to build Colossus were returned to stores! In 1945 the Americans took credit for the invention of the computer, when they announced the development of ENIAC. A replica Colossus is now being built by Tony Sale and his team in H Block. We were lucky enough to be able to see it and talk to them. Towards the end of our tour, we also saw a rebuilt working Bombe in the main exhibition centre, housed in Block B.  This centre also displays several Enigma, Lorenz and other coding machines, including the Abwehr Enigma famously held to ransom and finally returned to Jeremy Paxman! We had a wonderful day and can highly recommend a visit to Station X.. This account can only give a brief overview. If you would like to learn more, explore the links on this page, try Tony Sale's  virtual tour , look at the Post Office and code and decode messages with a Virtual enigma machine or download technical articles about the various machines. You can view more images from this event by clicking here. Sheila Mawby - student at South Hampstead GDST