Our Saturday sojourn in the UK took my friend Marystephanie and me outside of London to Bletchley Park which was the site of British codebreaking efforts during World War II.  This site was so secret that, even years after the war, when one woman was asked what she did at Bletchley, she replied, “I made tea.” Not quite.

Bletchley Park was a country home purchased in 1938 by Sir Hugh Sinclair, the head of MI6 Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), as a site for SIS and the Government Code and Cypher School, since war seemed imminent. By August 1939, it was in operation. Beyond the beautiful mansion where the work first began, twenty huts were built as well as some brick buildings.

Bletchley Park was purchased started out in 1939 with 150 workers, but by the end of the war in 1945, 10,000 people worked there, 75% of whom were women.  Of those 7,500 women, sixty percent were in military service, with the remaining 3,000 civil service employees. Many women were scholars from universities who were valued for their expertise with languages and mathematic abilities.

The work of deciphering the German codes was helped enormously by the early work of Marian Rejewski, a Polish mathematician who had reconstructed the Enigma machine used to encode messages in 1932.  He and his colleagues are honored with a statue at Bletchley. Enigma used a series of gears to change the letters sent in messages and the gears were moved into a different formation every day.  As our guide told us, there were a million ways to encode a message using the Enigma, which is why the codebreakers had their work cut out for them.  The combined efforts of these Poles and the men and women at Bletchley led to the successful breaking of the Enigma code which enabled the Allies to win the war.

Codebreaking operations ended in 1946, but its work remained classified until 1974. And it wasn’t until 1992 that the government purchased the site and opened it as a museum.

Many were introduced to the work of Bletchley Park through the 2015 thriller The Imitation Game, which starred Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the British mathematician who helped create the Bombe, a code-breaking machine that sped up decryption. 

 There have also been many documentaries about Bletchley, some available on YouTube.  The Bletchley Circle is a TV series about the post-war lives of four women who worked as codebreakers who collaborated to solve crimes. Books about Bletchley Park also abound and are available online and in the museum’s large, well-stocked gift shop. (We also enjoyed coffee and a British flapjack (granola bar) at the welcoming cafeteria.) 

Bletchley Park is literally across the street from the train station, so we were able to visit even though we didn’t rent a car.  And, as always, everyone at the train station was extremely helpful, so we had no problem navigating a most pleasant 45-minute train ride from Euston Station through the English countryside.

Visiting Bletchley was truly exciting.  To see the rooms where this vital work was done and to realize the enormous amount of effort, brain power, and discretion that made it possible is inspiring. I would add it to any list of must-sees if one travels to London.