Day 2 – 19 July – Buckinghamshire

by The Travel Guy

After a great sleep we were awakened to the sounds of bird singing and what promised to be another hot day.  Peter and Eirwen had put together a number of local sites that they felt we would enjoy within the surrounding area.

First stop was St. Dunstan’s Church which is reputed to be the oldest recorded parish in the UK.  The church as been kept up wonderfully although there are signs that the internal design has changed over the years.  The name St. Dunstan’s also had special meaning for us as we were married in St. Dunstan’s church in Fredericton in 1986.

Outside there was work being carried out to expand the cemetery.  However, before that could be done an archaeological dig was being carried out to learn more about the inhabitants from the 10th century and possibly as far back as the Bronze Age as there are many monuments from this era on the hill above the site of the church.

The following statue was situated inside the church showing St. Dunstan using a blacksmith’s pliers to pinch off the nose of Satan.

A short distance from the church we came upon some excellent examples of thatched roofs, that reminded me of a bowl haircut.

In the afternoon we learned about more recent history at Bletchley Park.  This area was recently dubbed “Home of the Codebreakers”.  In 1938 the British Government bought part of the much larger Bletchley Park Estate with the most notable feature being “the Mansion” pictured below.

It was at Bletchley Park and its associated out-stations that the British government employed up to 10,000 people at its peak.  It was interesting that this work began in 1938, before the start of WW II.  A wide variety of people were hired from various backgrounds.  Cambridge and Oxford, being quite close by were a good source of recruits.  They also utilized the local newspapers to run competitions to find people who could solve their crossword puzzles in under 12 minutes.  As this work was highly secretive, the ability to keep one’s mouth shut was also an important attribute.  They recorded the signals being sent by the Germans to their bases all over Europe and N. Africa and then the code breakers were responsible for cracking the code being used in order to decipher important transmissions.  Later the work done here also led to breaking Japanese codes and affected the outcome of the war in the Pacific.

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/hist/worldwartwo/captridley.rhtm

In some cases a small team might work on a single transmission for 6 weeks in order to break the code.

The German’s originally created the Enigma prior to 1932, when the Polish army broke the code.  However, in those days the cipher was only altered every few months, but in July 1939 the Poles were worried that Germany was going to invade them so they met with the British and gave them the information they had.  With the start of the war it was learned that it was being changed at midnight every day.

The core of the Enigma was 5 cylinders that contained a series of numbers and wires connected to each number.  By rotating the cylinder to a different number the wiring would change the signal that would be created by selecting a given character. Connect up three of these cylinders in series and the signal will get changed 3 times from the original letter selected and therefore the number of possible outcomes becomes larger.  Then select only 3 of the 5 available cylinders on a given day and the chances of breaking the code become even smaller.  The three-rotor Enigma was capable of generating 158,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations.

To help break the Enigma code in a timeframe that was useful for the armed forces they built an electromechanical device (starting to sound like a computer) that could run through the possible Enigma combinations and reduce the number of probable solutions to a number that could be examined by hand. They called it the Bombe and over time there were many of them running to cover each of the branches of the German military, Army, Navy, Air Force, etc.

These Bombe machines were literally invented by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman shortly after Turing joined the Codebreakers in 1939.

The Colussus was a semi-programmable computer that was developed to break the more difficult codes produced by the Lorenz cipher used for communications between Hitler and his top field commanders.  The invention of the Colussus was effectively the first programmable computer, instead of what is more widely thought of as the first computer, the ENIAC, which was announced to the public in 1946.  It could be argued that the ENIAC was ‘programmable’ whereas the Colussus was ‘semi-programmable’ but due to the secrecy around the Codebreakers the Colussus has never really received it’s rightful place in history.  The breaking of the Lorenz has a Canadian connection as the design of the Lorenz was deduced by Bill Tutte, a Cambridge professor who later taught at the University of Toronto and then later at the University of Waterloo.  It was Tutte’s work that provided the basis for Tommy Flowers design for the Colussus.

After a very enlightening afternoon we went to visit Peter & Eirwen’s son Gareth, his wife Jacqueline and their 11 month old son William.  Jeff first met Gareth in 1982 when he stayed with Peter & Eirwen and we met Jacqueline in 2008 when we visited London with our family.  William had just come back from swimming lessons and was a little bit tired at first. After some dinner and more than a few strawberries he came to life and almost took his first steps.  It was a terrific visit with our extended family and an excellent chance to get to know them better.

From top:  Jacqueline and William; William and Gareth, Eirwen and William, Jeff – William – Gareth.