Unthinkable Wings

Today I had a remarkably interesting day out, visiting the museum at Bletchley Park, the site at which the German Enigma (etc) codes were broken in WWII, and where the world's first computer was developed in 1944, and the site of a remarkable intellectual endeavour in breaking what appeared to be unbreakable ciphers, without which who knows what might have happened? At any rate, a much longer war. Despite the destruction of the Bletchley teams' data, ENIAC, the first American computer, was designed by people who knew the Bletchley work - and I must admit that I do wonder if the documents, taken off in sacks to an industrial incinerator (and not, as in the documentary "Station X", burnt on the lawn) really were burnt, or if they were merely seen to be burnt...

Anyway: a trip to the museum - which in our case was suggested by rustica, and participated in by - among other worthies nineveh_uk, parrot_knight, and crazy_scot is fascintating, both in terms of the sheer geeky detail (though I must admit that there was a lot I didn't understand), and rather moving in the glimpses one catches of the vanished lives of men and women who worked extraordinarily hard, on an extremely difficult problem, for the reward of one week's notice at the end of the war, a thank you, and an injunction never to talk about it. And, of course, the satisfaction of having done one's duty and a good job. But it must have been extremely hard - so much of the work was sheer drudgery, whether having to spend six hours taking down encrypted Morse, or replugging the bombes, or working out the predictable bits of encrypted messages. And yet some of the most interesting details on display related to how people made their lives more enjoyable - the performance of Dido and Aeneas, or revues staged in aid of the Merchant Navy Comfort Fund, Scottish country dance classes, tea with the Yanks from the nearby airbase, even the anecdote about poor brilliant Alan Turing cycling to work wearing his gas mask in order to fight off his hay-fever... The whole thing leaves one not just with a sense of the magnitude of their achievements (which are pretty astonishing) but of something of the texture of wartime life, and a period at once remote, and more like today than we think (I never realised that they had swivel chairs in the forties, to take a really stupid example).

( Some Photos )