Birmingham Day 4 - Bletchley Park, The Imitation Game exhibit featuring Benedict Cumberbatch

11/10/2014

We went back to Bletchley today, as one day is really just not enough to explore all the exhibits. Also, today was the opening day to The Imitation Game exhibit at Bletchley. We were the first visitors ever to the exhibit! That’s pretty thrilling (yeah, dorky I know). Mainly because when Bletchley opened this morning, we were the first people inside…and it’s a Monday, so not a lot of tourists in this neck of the woods.

These outfits and the props were actually used in the movie!

Benedict Cumberbatch’s outfit (portraying Alan Turing)

The desk and outfit worn by Charles Dance (aka the Head Lannister, according to Baby), portraying Commander Denniston:

Baby with her idol…Tywin Lannister, the general who stays behind the front lines.

Angel: Tywin came to the front lines at the Battle of Blackwater! Mua!

Jen: He only came to the front lines once he knew his side would win. He arrived just in time to slaughter Stannis’s army.

The “Ultra” stamp of Commander Denniston’s

The identification card of Alan Turing, portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch:

The filmmakers reproduced a lot of documents based on archives of Bletchley Park. They reproduced the crosswords that were used as a successful recruiting tool during the war. The heads of Bletchley couldn’t advertise that they were recruiting people as that would give away the ultra secrecy that Bletchley even existed. At first, they tried to ask different government departments to allocate admin staff to Bletchley, but most departments needed their admin staff so that was a no-go. Bletchley was really hurting for people, so they recruited using the old boys’ network, going to Oxford and Cambridge where the most brilliant young minds were at during the day, and recruiting debutantes because they thought debutantes were more likely to keep secrets.

Since they couldn’t advertise recruiting, they would send letters to potential “candidates” (who had no idea what Bletchley was). The letter would merely say that if you wanted to do your part for the government (which everyone wanted to do during the war), please attend an interview. One of the tests used was crossword puzzles, and Joan Clarke (played by Keira Knightley) completed hers in under six minutes. Wowza.

I think I’d figure out 3 of the words before I gave up. Always hated crossword puzzles. Angel brightened up though, because she’s always loved doing crossword puzzles. I remember her doing them every morning during breakfast when we were in high school…I don’t think I knew any person besides her who would spend time on those things.

The bar

We went to the National Computing Museum adjacent to Bletchley in the afternoon (more on that later), and the tour guide said that The Imitation Game took a lot of creative liberties with the facts. He said the movie was all in “good fun,” but not to take The Imitation Game as a history lesson. Hehe good tip, as I tend to believe just about everything people tell me. So when the filmmakers said that they tried to recreate everything as authentic as possible—down to the documents—I guess they’re talking about set design?

Alan Turing’s desk in the movie

 the bar used in the set design is located in Bletchley’s ballroom

The Bombe machine (recreated by movie set production):

It was here that we first read about the tragic chain of events that led to Alan Turing’s suicide. Outside a cinema, Turing met a young 19-year-old man and asked him to lunch. A few days later, Turing’s house was burglarized and he called the police to report the burglary. When the police interviewed Turing, he admitted to having sexual relations with another man, which was a major no-no in those days. It was illegal. So, he was tried for indecent behavior (Regina vs. Turing—“Regina,” we learned, is the Latin word for “The Crown.” Kinda like in the US, where it’d be State vs. whoever. If it’s the king, it’s Rex vs. whoever). Turing put in a plea of “guilty,” because he didn’t think he did anything wrong. He was convicted, and given a choice between prison or chemical castration. He chose chemical castration (injection of female hormones for a year), but shortly after, he took his own life by cyanide poisoning.  

Angel got a kick out of this picture of Benedict Cumberbatch. She says he looks like Sherlock. In summer.

Bletchley mansion staircase

The Library at Bletchley was actually operational during WWII. They’d stock it full of books for Bletchley workers who wanted to read during their downtime. For the movie The Imitation Game, they located Commander Denniston’s office here.

The Library

But the real Commander Denniston’s office was here:

I guess they thought the Library was more imposing than this airy, white scrumptious room? I completely fell in love with this room when I entered. I wish it was my room!

As we were staring in awe of this beautiful room, a Bletchley worker came in to pose a question to us—could we tell what the difference was between the passport in the glass display case and the poster passport:

The passport is Commander Denniston’s. He was going to Poland to meet with the Polish mathematicians who’d broken the Enigma codes back in 1932.

We noticed that the dates were different--one dated July 28, 1939, the other dated July 19, 1939. The worker said that to find the answer, we should go on the 12pm tour. We’d been on this tour already the other day, but the tour pretty much explained everything that we’d already read in Block B. The worker said, “No, you should really check out this tour. The Chief Tour Guide will be giving it and it’s very informative.” Angel and I looked at each other and shrugged, why not? Give it another go—maybe we can learn something new.

Turns out, the worker was sooo right. I’m so glad he told us to go (you have to get tickets to reserve your seat for the tour. It’s included in admission, but they want to make sure each tour is limited in number).

Our tour guide, Robert Lovesey, was extremely funny and entertaining. He was dressed up in a proper suit (could be because today is November 11^th, Remembrance Day for WWI) and really reminded us of an older James Bond-type. We were really glad we decided to do the tour again because this tour was nothing at all like the one we experienced on Saturday. He added so many interesting tidbits and personal anecdotes about Bletchley – for example, that his father was a dispatch rider. Many years after the war, when Bletchley Park was opened up to the public, Robert and his wife decided to go to Bletchley Park for a day out (similar to what we were doing today). When he mentioned this to his father, his father exclaimed “Bletchley! You can’t go there! It’s restricted!”

Another really cute story he told us was one of an elderly couple who came to Bletchley years ago and during the demonstration of the reconstructed Bombe machine, the wife (who by then was in a wheelchair) pointed out that the demonstrator wasn’t running the machine the way the Wrens would’ve run them back in WWII. This shocked her husband, who exclaimed that he worked in Hut 6 during the war. After all these years, husband and wife never even talked to each other about what they did during the war!

Our tour guide paused to make sure everyone had walked over to the next spot on the tour, and said “Hope I haven’t lost anyone. I shall be sacked!” We all laughed and one woman said “Oh no, you can’t be sacked – you’re too good!” He chuckled and said “Now I shall blush.” And when he actually did blush, “How quaint! Delicious!”

We had passed by the car park on the first day but hadn’t had time to go in. We made it a point to check it out after the tour, as Robert told us that one of the cars was used in the WWII movie, Enigma (which Dad loves). The way he told this to us was: “A lot of the men get a kick out of knowing that Kate Winslet’s bottom has graced the seat of that car.”

Another interesting tidbit we learned from Robert was that the stone lines in the grass were the actual outlines of the original huts which were torn down after the war. They were discovered when the grass was being restored.

Tower of Station X (so named because it's the 10th radio tower established, not because of the letter 'X')

Bletchley Park is also known as “Station X” since it was the 10^th radio station in Britain. However, to avoid being detected by the Germans as a point of transmitting radio messages, the radio station in the tower above was taken down in 1940 and a separate radio station was established 5 miles away.

Bletchley was never the target of a direct bomb attack, although the stables were hit by a bomb that fell and didn’t detonate. Another fell next to the canteen. The Germans never knew about Bletchley and what was going on at the park; the above-mentioned bombs were most likely dropped by mistake and no one was hurt.

Cottage 3 where Dilly Knox, Alan Turing, a lot of brilliant minds came together to break codes:

Robert cheekily mentioned that only one type of code breaker was allowed in cottage 3 with Dilly Knox. Can you guess? Female! =P

The tennis court Winston Churchill ordered to be installed to help alleviate stress at Bletchley. He’d visited Bletchley and saw some of the BP workers playing a game of rounders. He asked why they weren’t playing tennis, and one of the BP workers said they didn’t have a tennis court. So, Churchill promptly installed a tennis court for them.

Commander Denniston was keen to provide a lot of entertainment for the young workers at Bletchley (most were 22-30 years of age). He knew the value of alleviating stress, and boy, was working at Bletchley stressful. If you missed one letter, the whole code might be off and you’d have wasted a lot of other people’s time and efforts, so everyone was keen to concentrate 110% 24/7.

The huts were recently returned to their former states as part of an 8 million pound restoration project.

Hut 8 is where Alan Turing led his team into breaking codes. There were at least 3 chess grand masters who’ve worked in this hut. It was in this hut that codebreakers broke the German naval Enigma ciphers, which was a major feat, considering the German navy’s codes were more secure than any other unit. They not only had a revolving codebook, they had 4 Enigma rotators instead of 3. The achievements of Hut 8 allowed the admiralty to reroute British ships around U-boats to deliver much-needed supplies to Britain (the U-boats were sinking every merchant ship they could find in the English Channel so to cut off Britain’s supplies).

A re-creation of Alan Turing’s desk in Hut 8:

Wowza. I hate these kind of questions. Angel said they routinely use these types of questions as interview questions at Google. Guess I’ll never work there. Ha!

In Hut 8 is a tribute to the pigeons of WWII. The pigeons had a 95% success rate at getting the messages to the proper recipients. No way! That’s crazy high! Germany knew the importance of pigeons and several years before WWII broke out, they began establishing secret pigeon lofts in England to do reconnaissance work. The Brits only figured this out because someone saw a man carrying a pigeon very secretively onto a train. So they followed this man off the train and ended up finding out about the German lofts.

During WWII, anyone found with a British pigeon would be immediately executed by the Germans.

Hut 3 & 6 were less than 5 feet away from each other. Hut 6 was run by Gordan Welchman, another brilliant mathematician. He improved the Bombe’s design.

All around Bletchley are posters warning the workers to not gossip. One middle-aged woman on the tour was talking to the tour guide and she said that during WWII, everyone was taught to not talk about what they were doing in the war effort, to keep things hush-hush in case enemies were listening in. It was a vastly different culture back then. Townspeople knew something was going on at Bletchley—I mean, c’mon, 8000 people commuting in every day to work here. But no one asked, and the townspeople never told the outside world of these massive commutes. It’s very different, especially when you consider nowadays with Facebook and Twitter. Or as Robert put it, “Nowadays with ‘Twitmail’ and the like, people wouldn’t last 30 seconds [without spilling a secret]!”

Angel wants to take our tour guide home. But she’ll settle for a teddy bear and call him Lovesey. A Bletchley Park bear costs 13.99 pounds, so Angel’s resolved to go home and make her own…complete with the plaid suspenders that Porgy, Alan Turing’s teddy bear, wears. Oh, and a red poppy.

Alan Turing’s bear, Porgy:

Alan Turing’s mother wrote a book about her son after he died. She details his childhood, and as I read it, I kept thinking that Baby’s a lot like Turing.

Indeed, some of the women (2/3 of the staff at Bletchley during WWII were women) commented that the engineers and mathematicians who worked here may be geniuses, but they were quirky, eccentric characters. You have John Cooper, who’s sitting next to the lake bench and all of a sudden, jumps up, throws his mug into the lake and shouts, “I’ve got it!” He’d just broken a German enigma code.

You also have Dilly Knox, who would only allow the female members of his team to go into Cottage 3 with him to break codes. The men had to do it somewhere else.

There’s two Typex machines in Hut 6:

Hut 6 is where they decoded the Enigma messages. Hut 3, right beside it, is where they translated and analyzed these decoded messages to make sense of what the Germans were actually saying.

Whereas the messages of Hut 8 had to be sent to Hut 4 for analyzing via an armored escort, the messages between Hut 6 and 3 were sent via a little wooden chute:

Video 2714

Genius.

Hut 11 is where the Bombe machines were kept. WRENS were enlisted to keep them operational 24/7. They worked in 3 8-hour shifts and what really sucked is that the 8-hour shifts they worked changed from week to week. So you might work 8-4 this week, then midnight to 8 the next week. It threw off the human internal clock and some of the women couldn’t cope with this. The hut was poorly lit and drafty (my God was it chilly when we went in there! I could feel icicles forming between my toes!). Coal was rationed, so the fires they lit were very weak. Imagine standing there from midnight to 8am, trying to operate the machine in the dead cold of winter! I don’t even think my brain works below 7 degrees C.

Angel: Here’s Jen playing a WREN. Oh, that rhymes. Teeheehee.

Jen: Yeah, it’s really hard work. You had to be very fast linking the letters up to each other, and damn, just trying to cram in the wires was tough.

Most of the BP workers didn’t have cars because fuel was rationed. There were a lot of buses of various shapes and sizes transporting the workers to BP. A lot of them walked, trained in or rode bikes to BP. Alan Turing was one of many who liked riding his bike to work:

the bike garage

Here’s me listening very attentively to the volunteer demonstrating how to use the Bombe machine:

Angel: Actually, what the picture fails to show is that the rest of the audience is standing and listening intently. Jen was standing and actually took the time out DURING the lecture to walk all the way around the back of the Bombe to grab a seat. Yeah, real attentive.

By this time, it was already 3pm. The National Computing Museum is open daily from noon to 4pm, so we needed to get a move on. It’s situated on Block H that’s part of the BP campus, but rented out by the National Computing Museum. This is where you go to view the Colossus. The original ones were dismantled right after the war so that the Russians wouldn’t learn of Bletchley’s existence (and that the Brits had figured out how to break German Enigma codes), so the Colossus on display is one that was recreated by a group of dedicated, passionate engineers. Tony Sale led the effort. He interviewed postal workers who directed him to salvage yards, and at those salvage yards, he was able to pick up whole slates of original pieces of the Colossus. Some of the postal workers were quite crafty. They’d been ordered at the end of WWII to destroy any papers relating to Colossus’s design. Some kept a few of the papers, which is why they have been able to use the these to recreate the Colossus.

Why postal workers, you might ask?

Because during WWII in Britain, the Post Office Research Labs was a place of total and complete innovation. The post office was responsible for telephone wires as well as the post, so the research center is where all these new technologies of how to improve telecommunication speed and such were being developed. 

Max Newman, Alan Turing’s mentor and good friend, had designed the Heath Robinson, a codebreaking machine that was used to find the wheel settings of the Lorenz. But it relied on two strips of tape churning at incredibly high speeds, and the tapes would often break in the middle of a run. Which meant the run would be rendered useless, wasting valuable time.

Heath Robinson

Newman got together with Flowers to brainstorm ways to improve the Robinson. The design Flowers came up with? The Colossus:

The thing is massive. Seriously.

The Bombe that Alan Turing designed was used to codebreak the Engima, which operated with 3 rotators (4 in the case of the German Navy). But Hitler and his higher-up generals were using a completely different machine that stumped BP for a long while. They had no idea what Hitler was using.

Until a German operator typed up a 4000-character long message to send from Athens to Vienna. Vienna didn’t get the message and asked for the message to be sent again. Probably irritated by this time (I mean, it does take quite a while to type out 4000 characters on a typewriter), the German operator broke a basic rule of sending messages: never use the same setting. He didn’t rotate the wheels of the encoding machine.

So when BP got the intercepted messages and noticed that the two messages both started with the same 12 string of characters, they knew they had something very special on their hands. They had depth.

John Tiltman took these two 4000-character messages and went to work right away. He was the first to break some of the code…manually. He then passed it on to young William Tutte, and told him to make sense of it.

Bill Tutte didn’t have much faith that he’d be able to break the code, but wanting to seem busy, kept at it for several weeks. He finally realized that they were dealing with a machine that used 12 rotators instead of the 3 that the Engima uses. He was able to design the fundamental architecture of this mysterious German machine without ever having seen what the real machine looked like. This achievement of his is called “The greatest intellectual feat of WWII.”

It wasn’t until almost the end of WWII that the Allies captured one outside Berlin. For the first time, they were able to see what they’d been dealing with. The Lorenz SZ42.

The Enigma has 59 million million million possibilities. The Lorenz SZ42 has 1.6 million billion possibilities. Yeah.

Using reverse engineering, Max Newman used the information Bill Tutte had discovered and designed the Heath Robinson to break the Lorenz code. As you can see from above, the machine wasn’t very reliable because it broke the tapes.

Newman asked Flowers to take a look at the Robinson to see how they could improve upon it. Flowers went back home to think and design, and came back with the mammoth Colossus design. When Flowers showed this to the GC&CS headquarters, he was denied funding because headquarters thought it would be a complete waste of time and money. Just look at the darn thing—it looks so complicated, my head hurts looking at it! I can imagine that must’ve been what the heads of BP were thinking when Flowers showed them his designs.

One of Flowers’ colleagues said that, “the basic thing about Flowers is that he didn’t care how many valves he used.” The first Colossus had 1500 valves. The second, 2500 valves. Crickey!

When one of the workers telephoned the Ministry of Supply to request several more thousand valves (they weren’t allowed to say what the valves would be used for—Official Secrets Act, remember?), a Ministry official asked, “What the…hell are you doing with these things, shooting them at the Jerrys?”

So Flowers went to the Post Office Research Labs where he worked and he was approved funding there. After Flowers and his team assembled it at Bletchley (it was too hard to transport otherwise), Flowers gave the heads of BP a demo. The Colossus went off without a hitch—it broke the Lorenz relatively fast. There was silence and a noncommittal “We’ll get back to you on that.”

Flowers had asked them to give him advanced notice if they required more Colossus to be made, but he didn’t get any answer. Instinctively, he knew they’d be wanting more of these machines, so he ordered the parts with lead times in advance. He was right.

In all, 10 Colossus machines were ordered by BP.

The Colossus is considered to be the first electronic programmable computer in history.