Visited Bletchley Park today with Valerie and Norman.  This was definitely not the best day to go, Fathers Day.  The exhibitions were busy, overflow parking was in a nearby school.

We had been to Bletchley Park, years ago.  Several restaurants have been added since then.  With lottery funding a working Bombe machine has been recreated. This was demonstrated with an explanation on how it works.  We next viewed some excellent displays which went into greater detail of the decoding process.  I never managed to get around the whole of the site.  I will be visiting again, the tickets allow free entry for a whole year. The National Museum of Computing is on the same site.  They house the replica Colossus machine along with other old computers. This is definitely on my wish list.

Bletchley Park House

Next we walked around Bletchley Park House, where there was an exhibition of the The Imitation Game film.  This is  complete with Bombe machines used in the Benedict Cumberbatch film.  These don’t work, just the dials rotate with the electric motors behind.  The sound engineers  used the recreated Bombe for sound track on the film.  Wrens who had worked on the real machines back in World War II say it does make the correct sound.

Second Visit to Bletchely Park

We did make a second visit to Bletchely Park when Richard and Andrea visited us. Rosemary, Richard and I visited the park (Andrea was off at a Conference).  It was less busy, but still busy. This time we saw a few other huts.  One very amusing one was the use of carrier pigeons for intelligence purposes.  Did you know there had been undercover spy pigeons? Each side was shooting down pigeons, or using birds of prey.