Bletchley Park
In the summer of 1939; a small group of code breakers travelled to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire where the British Government had set up a top secret code and cipher school. The code breakers were based in a somewhat dysfunctional Victorian mansion and a series of wartime huts that had been rapidly built in the grounds. Their task was to break the Germans’ military communications that were enciphered using a mechanical Enigma machine. The Germans boasted that their Enigma was unbreakable and that the odds of anyone being able to crack it were 150 million, million, million to one!
When Poland was invaded on 1st September 1939 and Britain and its allies declared war, the Poles passed on their knowledge of how Enigma worked. A weakness in its design was that no letter could ever be encrypted as itself. Bletchley Park’s mathematical genius Alan Turing exploited this weakness and designed an electro-mechanical code breaking machine called a Bombe. It enabled the allies to read top secret German messages that helped to foil military activities such as bombing raids and submarine attacks.
When Hitler and his High Command began using a very sophisticated cipher called Lorenz, it took code breakers at Bletchley many weeks to read the messages. They realised that it was necessary to invent an electronic computing machine. Dr Max Newman designed that machine and asked Tommy Flowers, a brilliant Post Office electronics engineer to build it. The first of these machines, to be known as Colossus, arrived at the Park in 1943. It was the world’s very first practical electronic digital information processing machine – a forerunner of modern computers.
The success of the highly secret Bletchley Park operation allowed Allied commanders to plan more effectively and it is estimated that the war in Europe would have lasted another two years without Colossus and the first atomic bomb could well have exploded over Berlin rather than Hiroshima. War time Prime Minister Winston Churchill referred to the thousands of workers at Bletchley Park as “the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled.”
Many of these workers were motorcycle dispatch riders who carried transcripts of encoded German transmissions from radio receivers dotted around southern England to Bletchley Park. Bikes were considered a more secure way of sending messages than radio or telephone transmissions that could be intercepted. Once decoding had taken place at Bletchley, riders sped down the A5 to the War Office in London. At one time over 400 dispatch riders were entering or leaving Bletchley Park every day.
This year bikes are returning to historic Bletchley Park when motorcycles will again pass through the gates and come to rest outside the mansion for the 76th Anniversary of the also historic National Road Rally. Riders will park on the tarmac in the extensive parkland setting set between the mansion, world war two huts the hub of war time decoding operations and the beautiful American Garden that incorporates a lake. Final Control check-in takes place inside the mansion where Alan Turing, Tommy Flowers, Dr Max Newman together with Denis Parkinson and his dispatch rider colleagues made history. It’s somewhat ironic that the Rally, often jokingly called “England’s best kept secret,” should have its Final Control this year at Bletchley Park - once “Britain’s best kept secret.”
