England, Bletchley Park

Bletchley Park

 

Language Level, Basic

Standard: British Accent

Source: Speak up, Edition253, pags10/11

Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire looks like a typical English country house with four acres of beautiful gardens and its own lake, but then you notice several wooden huts and concrete constructions built around the house. What happened in these building...in this strange place?

THE CODEBREAKERS

During the Second World War this was the legendary "Station X" where code breakers and spies worked to defeat  Hitler's And the Enigma Machine. All this has been Chronicled in the Film Enigma (2001), starring with Kate Winslet. Bletchley Park was also the birthplace of the modern world. It was here that Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers built Colossus, the world's first "programmable, digital, electronic computing device," or computer.

A GREAT DAY OUT

There's plenty to do at Bletchley Park: you can begin with a tour of the "Station X" exhibits, then you can see the Colossus and Enigma machines and learn about their note is code breaking and military espionage during the Second World War. The work here wasn't all high technology: the "Pigeons at War" display explains the role homing pigeons played during the war.

Visit the garage to see some 1930's cars, then on to the antique toy collections, and don't miss the Churchill memorabilia exhibition. Bletchley Park offers an interesting and fun day out, but it could also change someone's life. Legend has it that Alan Turing, the mathematical genius, buried several silver bars somewhere near Bletchley and forgot the location, Turing never found his treasure can you?

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This was an electrical device which used rotating wheels to produce random code. The Germans believed The Enigma code was impossible to decipher, but British and Polish codebreakers at Bletchley Park succeded with the help Colossus and it predecessor, "The Bombe." Britain Agents then listened to German orders transmitted all over the world. This saved many lives: for example, they discovered the position and plans of U-boats operating in the Atlantic. Most important of all, in 1944 they confirmed that the Germans believed the false plans that the Allies leaked before D-Day, the Allies invasion and liberation of Europe.

Station X

In 1940 prime minister Winston Churchill moved this government's Code & Cipher School away form London's constant bombardment to Bletchley Park. There were 12.000 people working at the centre of the war many of them recruteited from Cambridge University. There were chss masters mathematicians academics experts - people like Alan Flaming, the creator of James Bond, secrecy was essential in fact no-one knew about the centre until the 1970's when documents describing wartime events at Bletchley became available.