Code Breakers at Bletchley

Doug and Marge are back in London.  For some reason their visit coincides perfectly with Bill's trip home so I'm hosting solo. 

Our first full day together was spent in the splendor of WWII.

This is the mansion that was converted into a code breaking campus.  It's been used in many NPPS-type shows about WWII which makes it doubly exciting. I can just picture them driving up to the front doors in Foyle's War.  

Long time readers will remember that I love these types of WWII posters.

Clearly you can tell the enemy by their cheek bones and evil expressions.

There was a lot of reading at this museum because they needed to explain the different codes and how they worked and how they were broken.  It was amazing that people could take little dots and crosses, translate it into German and then translate it into English.  One story explained how the Allies got a lucky break when one German transmitter repeated his transmission without changing his opening code letters per protocol.  I wonder if that guy knows that he is the Bill Buckner of Germany or if he doesn't even know that it was his transmission that we cracked?  

Inside the mansion headquarters.

They got down to the tiny details like a half smoked cigarette in the ashtray and a used cup of tea to make you feel like you just walked in during a busy day of war time code breaking.

A little tea and victoria sponge outside Hut 4 (the cafe). 

Then we wandered into this fantastic toy and memorabilia museum behind the house.  It's on the campus but for some reason it's not promoted as part of the larger museum.  It was terrific.  Packed to the gills with toys and artifacts of the 30's and 40's.  

A scale from Harrods that shows weight in stones and pounds.  The stone always seemed like a very awkward unit of measure in my mind.  It's  does not seem diet-friendly.  If you are trying to lose weight you have to lose 14 pound before you've lost just 1 stone.  How depressing.

We had a great conversation with the woman who runs it.  Turns out this is her collection.  She and her husband are also the people who recreated a lot of the huts and mansion displays.  Maybe that was her half smoked ciggy and old cuppa back on the desk?

This is me cracking code.  That's my "I'm thinking really hard" face.  I suspect that even if I were a genius I might not have been taken seriously at Bletchley.  There were three times as many women as there were men working here during the war.  I might have cracked code with that face but I probably would not have caught a man with those odds.  (Unless, of course, Bill was a code cracker too.  I'm sure we would have picked me over the more attractive code breakers even then, right?)

We were right up against it at closing time so we were hustling through a few more huts and found one set up with projections of people to show what life was like.  They also had recorded voices playing in each room to give you the sense that you walked in on actual code breaking in session in 1940.

This guys "thinking really hard" face might even be worse than mine.

I've had Bletchley on my list for two years so I was thrilled to finally get there.