listen ..... do you want to know a secret?

I’m reading a book about Bletchley Park and having visited recently I am even more astonished about what went on, than I was already. Does that makes sense? I was quite astonished before but now …

Two things stand out; at one time there were around 9,000 people working there. They were told not to tell anyone what they were doing - parents, children, spouses etc. And no one did. I cannot imagine a contemporary setting where that number of people would keep quiet about what they were doing.

Not only that - they all had to be billeted in local houses, hotels etc. None of the locals seem to have raised much of an eyebrow about their little town suddenly playing host to a vast number of incomers.

This Pentode valve (five electrodes) came from the Park. It was presented to Anniemay a few years ago when she took a group of school children for a visit. She in turn presented it to the school, but to our utter amazement (or even astonishment) they rejected it. They didn’t know what to do with it. So duly presented it back to Anniemay.

It now sits on a bookshelf as a tribute to the extraordinary work that went on in Bletchley Park; the bravery of the Polish and French mathematicians who got hold of early Enigma machines; the people who smuggled them back to the UK. And the ‘bright young things’ - because they were mainly young and all exceedingly bright, who managed to crack the codes.