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Bletchley Park


Pembroke

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We are planning on heading south on the Grand Union over Easter and one idea we had was to spend a day at Bletchley Park

From what I can see it looks like it is about a mile from the canal

But

Has anybody got any experience of what the moorings etc are like in that area

 

Thanks

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Moorings are fine - regular towpath stuff. It is a bit of a walk from the canal to Bletchley Park but well worth the effort, the place is amazing! The big main museum in the park is excellent but be sure not to miss the less obvious and unconnected museum of computing which is in prefabs behind the main site. There, they have an absolute treasure trove of computer things - including the working rebuild of Colossus!


I forgot to say - you can't walk to Bletchley Park directly (bee-line) because of the railway line. You need to walk towards the station to cross under the rail line. From memory, the walk could take half an hour.

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Agree, the moorings at Fenny Stratford are fine. The walk to Bletchley Park is a bit dispiriting through a lacklustre town, but worth the effort. If it's not Sunday, there's the occasional train from a station right by the canal to Bletchley station, which is just across the road from BP. The prefabs contain all sorts of other things too, such as a model railway.

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Agree, the moorings at Fenny Stratford are fine. The walk to Bletchley Park is a bit dispiriting through a lacklustre town, but worth the effort. If it's not Sunday, there's the occasional train from a station right by the canal to Bletchley station, which is just across the road from BP. The prefabs contain all sorts of other things too, such as a model railway.

Yep. Moor at Fenny Stratford and take the local train, about one an hour I think, it's London Midland I believe, Bletchley to Bedford line.

 

 

Or you could go to Gulliver's Land if you have small children, not far from Cambell Park in Milton Keynes.

Edited by Hawthorn
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Yes, as suggested, an obvious choice is to use excellent Fenny Stratford visitor moorings, then one stop on the train into Bletchleu on the Bedford to Bletchley line.

 

As Adam says, though, this service does not operate on Sundays.

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One thing worth recording is that you buy a ticket and it entitles you to visit as many times as you like for 12 months. There's definitely too much to see in one visit.

 

The amateur radio society (RSGB) are also based there and will demonstrate what they get up to. They were talking to someone in the Falklands when we visited.

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I thought this was going to be a thread about the rather excellent film about Mr Turin, but I have it on my list to visit said place so will take note.

 

 

Daniel

That movie was a disgrace - it contained almost no facts, it was almost entirely fictional. Given that the true story of Turing and the other code-beakers was so fascinating I thought it so sad that the filmmakers decided to tell an invented story of pure fantasy.

 

Some of the howlers - cracking the Enigma machine was neither difficult nor significant to the outcome of the war. Enigma machines were commercially available before the war and were used only for very routine and mundane communications. The device used to crack Enigma was not invented by Turing but was the creation of a Polish team who named it 'Bombe', a Polish type of ice-cream. That this film renames it after Turing's lover is baffling, and factually insanely wrong. Turing and the other code-breakers would never have had access to the actual decrypted messages. They only emerged much later in the process after the code had been cracked and handed on for decipher, translation, and analysis. So the scenes portraying Turing and Co discussing German naval movements is preposterous garbage. As was the idea that at midnight you could no longer crack the codes - a code is a code, it can be tackled any time - and they were, sometimes for many weeks after they were transmitted

 

And Turing's biggest codebreaking achievement gets no mention whatsoever in the movie. The Germans developed an infinitely more complex code system called Lorenz. This was used exclusively by senior generals and Hitler himself for the highest level of secret communications. Using nothing but streams of intercepted encrypted characters, they somehow managed to imagine what the Lorenz machine looked like, and how it worked and then crack it. And they were right. After the war when the Bletchley team finally had sight of a captured Lorenz machine they had guessed it's workings perfectly. Now that was stunning - and that is where the Colossus machine comes in.

 

I thought the movie verged on insult to the magnificence of what really happened.

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Oh, and I believe Turing lived in the Lock Cottage at Fenny Stratford. There is no mention of the location in the movie but at least they haven't put him lodging with the Queen at Windsor Castle. That level of bullsh1t would be in keeping with the rest of the fantasy!

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The film is great "Grand Theft CodeBreaking", Good film/TV. But don't let the truth get in the way of a good story. The film of Robert Harris's book Enigma, was another programme based on some facts and made into a fair story. Robert Harris included a well chosen bibliography in the back of his book.

 

One day someone will make the film of the Colossus project from intercepted signals through to 2500 valve computer, or perhaps the maths is too relevant to modern usage still.

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Put the movie in the bin and spend the day at Bletchley instead!

 

 

The film might be based on the "incredible" !! true story of Alan Turin, my need to be entertained, regardless of the pure fiction, is based on the 11 quid it cost. I shall forgive them the inaccuracies, if the film is as good as it is promoted to be.

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. As was the idea that at midnight you could no longer crack the codes - a code is a code, it can be tackled any time - and they were, sometimes for many weeks after they were transmitted.

This bit was correct- you have to know the daily rotor settings that are used before you can encipher a message- which rotors to choose (I believe there was a choice of 5 to start with, of which the operator would choose three according to the daily settings book) and which positions they started at, along with the positions of the plugs on the plugboard. These did change at midnight, and at times during the blackouts of various traffics (Shark/Triton naval enigma in 1943 for example, when the fourth rotor was activated, and during periods of 1942) it was impossible to discover the daily settings within the 24 hour period.

 

They did get a couple of other things right, too, such as using the weather reports as cribs, and knowing that most messages signed off with "Heil Hitler", and the importance of the use of the intelligence (albeit not by Bletchley, but by Winterbotham, the Ultra organisation and the SLUs to senior officers) to keep the a Enigma secret.

 

That said, I agree with the rest of your post. The sacrifices of the three Polish code breakers, who were reading Enigma in 1926, but who chose to smuggle the Bombes and their papers out of Poland before the invasion rather than themselves are completely ignored; Deniston is painted in completely the wrong light, when in actual fact he was one of Turing's greatest supporters (his relatives are apparently fuming) and completely ignoring Tunny and the Lorenz machine, and Colossus- and Tommy Flowers- is pretty unforgivable.

 

It is a good film and it gets its message about the treatment of Turing across well, but it is certainly not historically accurate.

This bit was correct- you have to know the daily rotor settings that are used before you can encipher a message- which rotors to choose (I believe there was a choice of 5 to start with, of which the operator would choose three according to the daily settings book) and which positions they started at, along with the positions of the plugs on the plugboard. These did change at midnight, and at times during the blackouts of various traffics (Shark/Triton naval enigma in 1943 for example, when the fourth rotor was activated, and during periods of 1942) it was impossible to discover the daily settings within the 24 hour period. True, you can still crack them later, and find useful things for strategy, but tactically it can be useless and tragic e.g. Losing track of where the U Boat packs were during the '43 blackout.

They did get a couple of other things right, too, such as using the weather reports as cribs, and knowing that most messages signed off with "Heil Hitler", and the importance of the use of the intelligence (albeit not by Bletchley, but by Winterbotham, the Ultra organisation and the SLUs to senior officers) to keep the a Enigma secret.

That said, I agree with the rest of your post. The sacrifices of the three Polish code breakers, who were reading Enigma in 1926, but who chose to smuggle the Bombes and their papers out of Poland before the invasion rather than themselves are completely ignored; Deniston is painted in completely the wrong light, when in actual fact he was one of Turing's greatest supporters (his relatives are apparently fuming) and completely ignoring Tunny and the Lorenz machine, and Colossus- and Tommy Flowers- is pretty unforgivable.

It is a good film and it gets its message about the treatment of Turing across well, but it is certainly not historically accurate.

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