bletchley park
Bletchley Park was the central site for British (and subsequently, Allied) codebreakers during World War II. It housed the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), which regularly penetrated the secret communications of the Axis Powers – most importantly the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers. According to the official historian of British Intelligence, the “Ultra” intelligence produced at Bletchley shortened the war by two to four years, and that without it the outcome of the war would have been uncertain.
Located in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, Bletchley Park is open to the public, and receives hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.
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Denniston recognised, however, that the enemy’s use of electromechanical cipher machines meant that formally trained mathematicians would also be needed; Oxford’s Peter Twinn joined GC&CS in February 1939; Cambridge’s Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman began training in 1938 and reported to Bletchley the day after war was declared, along with John Jeffreys.
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Six weeks later, having failed to get sufficient typing and unskilled staff to achieve the productivity that was possible, Turing, Welchman, Alexander and Milner-Barry wrote directly to Churchill. His response was “Action this day make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done.”
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In January 1945, at the peak of codebreaking efforts, some 10,000 personnel were working at Bletchley and its outstations. About three-quarters of these were women. Many of the women came from middle-class backgrounds and held degrees in the areas of mathematics, physics and engineering; they were given entry into STEM programs due to the lack of men, who had been sent to war. They performed complex calculations and coding and hence were integral to the computing processes. For example, Eleanor Ireland worked on the Colossus computers.
The female staff in Dilwyn Knox’s section were sometimes termed “Dilly’s Fillies”. “Dilly’s girls” included Jean Perrin, Clare Harding, Rachel Ronald, and Elisabeth Granger. Jane Hughes processed information leading to the last battle of the Bismarck. Mavis Lever (who married mathematician and fellow code-breaker Keith Batey) made the first break into the Italian naval traffic. She and Margaret Rock solved a German code, the Abwehr break. Their work achieved official recognition only in 2009
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i think the first i ever heard (that i remember) about bletchley park was in a talk Audrey Watters gave..
adding page this day:
Florence Schechter (@floschechter) tweeted at 9:50 AM – 9 Apr 2018 :
Let me tell you a story about how a typo helped end World War Two… (thread) https://t.co/HxismWwlzE (http://twitter.com/floschechter/status/983371581039763456?s=17)
They show him the enigma machine and are like “dude, you gotta help us crack it – you’re the best cryptogrammist in all of the UK!”. And poor Geoff is like “this is super awks, I’m a cryptoGAMMIST not a cryptoGRAMMIST. I’m not a specialist in codes, I’m a specialist in algae…”
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be you. 