On Friday 4th March a group of students from Year 9-12 went to Bletchley Park for a tour as well as taking part in some activities in the afternoon. Below are two accounts from Year 9 students.
I have always been really interested in the work they did at Bletchley Park and loved reading about all the different things they did there. I took a particular interest in Alan Turing, a famous mathematician who was part of the team that created the BOMBE machine that cracked the enigma coded messages day in day out, so I was very excited to see the actual BOMBE machine when we went to Bletchley. I also really enjoyed the guided tour and learning about how many women were working at Bletchley Park and how it functioned in secret for so long and its lasting legacy.
I. Garrett Y9
When we arrived at Bletchley station and had a short walk to the former code-breaking centre, we looked around a short exhibition on some of the codes that were broken there (like the Enigma and Lorenz codes) before being led on a very informative guided tour.
I learnt that the majority of the people working at Bletchley were women, about three quarters because most of the men were at war and had an insight into how crucial the input was from the codebreakers in Poland – as they provided Bletchley with a lot of prerequisite research on breaking Enigma. We also looked around the huts where the codebreakers worked and even went inside the one that Alan Turing worked in. Before the trip, I had some knowledge about Bletchley Park and the code-breaking going on there mainly based on watching The Imitation Game movie, but actually going there really broadened my knowledge of what they were doing there and how during WW2.
We all enjoyed the afternoon of code-breaking trying out the different ways of encrypting and decrypting information.
E. Van Den Hondel Y9
