Day 4 – 21 July – Travel to St. Andrew

In order to get a reservation on a train to St. Andrews (Leuchars station and a £12 taxi fare into St. Andrews) we had to leave earlier than Eirwen had originally anticipated.  She was disappointed that she wasn’t able to cook us a traditional English breakfast. We got a picture of Eirwen and Peter before they drove us to the train station to start our journey, first south to London and then north to Scotland.

We thoroughly enjoyed our time with them and Jacqueline and Gareth.  Every time we get together we have a terrific time and the time seems to fly by.  They had a number of very interesting things for us to see within a reasonable drive from Princes Risborough.  We hope we can encourage them to come and visit us sometime soon.

We took the train into the London Marylebone station and then used the Tube to get us to Kings Cross.  We’ve been in London enough times now that navigating the Tube is very straight forward ….. at least for Jeff ….. it really is an excellent way to get around this rather large city.  We settled into our reserved seats for the 4 1/2 hour train ride to Edinburgh.  The weather was overcast but as we got closer to Edinburgh the sun started to break through.  We got a some views of the English coastline but train was a little too far away to say we ‘saw the coast’.

Edinburgh was an easy change of trains and we were soon off on a train destined for Aberdeen (the former capital of Scotland).  After a quick 1 hour journey we arrived at Leuchars and caught a cab to our B&B.  We dropped our bags and headed out on foot to familiarize ourselves with the route to the Clubhouse for St. Andrews Links golf course.  Our tee time is at 7:20am so we don’t want to take any wrong turns on the way to the course in the morning.

We walked around St. Andrews and purchase some of the local holy water GlenKinchie (distilled in Edinburgh) and then had a lovely dinner at a pub just around the corner from our hotel.  Deana took a liking to a brew called Tennant and Jeff had one called Belhaven Best. ….. the GlenKinchie was for later!

Day 3 – 20 July – Buckinghamshire

We walked into the center of Princes Risborough to see an exhibition of Morris Dancing.  Although the exact origins of Morris dancing are now lost they were probably celebrating the return of Spring.  Recent research has found references to Morris dancing back as far as 1458.

Until the mid 19th centrury, almost every village in the English Cotswolds had its own team, dancing at Whitsuntide its own version of the Morris dances.  In other parts similar dances survived, such as Longsword and Rapper sword dances.  Late Victorian social change brought about the abandonment of Morris dancing in most of the country but the revival dates from 1899.  This group calls themselves the “Travelling Morrice”.  It appears that they have maintained the centuries old tradition of only including men in their dances.

They dance an intricate series of steps to the music created by a lone accordion player.  They have bells attached just below their knees and use sticks and handkerchiefs to augment their dance moves.  In this particular group it appeared they had all met at university quite some time ago and have been dancing together ever since.  They suggested that their dancing exhibitions tended to coincide with locations with pubs nearby.

At the beginning of each dance the music and name would be announced and the specific village would determine the actual steps to be used with that music.  While the dancers were concentrating on their steps and arm actions a fellow in a top hat mimicked their moves and carried on like a court jester.

After walking back to the house we discovered that Sunday afternoon is a very popular time for people to travel from London to St. Andrews (via Edinburgh).  After numerous attempts to secure a reservation for two from the “overseas” train helpdesk, including one that would have gotten only one of us to Edinburgh but both of us for the one hour trip from Edinburgh to St. Andrews (Leuchers train station), we finally got on an earlier train.  Lesson for the future, don’t assume there will always be a pair of spare seats on every train.

In the afternoon we drove to the town of Aylersbury for an authentic “pub lunch”.  We then wandered through the streets to see the local museum that featured some excellent views into the history of the local buildings.  As they started doing some restorations to the museum structure they discovered several centuries of history, actually in the walls themselves.

We then went down the street to the Parish Church of St. Mary.  The right hand side of the street was pretty modern, but the buildings on the left showed a variety of styles over many years.  You see so many churches that have been beautifully restored and maintained that its painful to see one that has fallen on hard times. It appears that the parish has had difficulty raising the funds necessary to maintain the structure of the building. 

Day 2 – 19 July – Buckinghamshire

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.

Day 1 – 17/18 July – Princes Risborough

As we waited for our flight to take off a thunder and lightning storm rolled past the airport and they temporarily suspended ground operations until the rain subsided and the threat of lightning diminished.  By the time we boarded the flight the clouds had moved off and the sun was shining brightly.  A good omen we thought.

Fast forward nine hours and we were riding the Tube in London around the northwest corner of the city to finally reach the end of the Metroplitan Line at Amersham.  There we were met by Eirwin and Peter, Jeff’s cousins who ‘downsized’ from their place in London to live in Princes Risborough, a short drive from Amersham.  Peter and Jeff aren’t first cousins, their grandmothers were sisters, so I suppose that makes them second-cousins, but “cousin” seems easier to say.

We had an easy day of it, relaxing on the outdoor patio and enjoying the 28 C weather under bright blue skies.  A little nap before dinner was the perfect way to shake off the “red-eye” flight.

Earlier in the day Eirwen had cut up a barbequed chicken and deboned it.  The scraps were spread on the lawn and we waited for the Red Kites to make their “dive bomb” attacks to pick up the pieces of meat.  Apparently these birds, with a 5-6 ft wing span fancy dead meat, but don’t hunt for live meat, except for the odd unfortunate small bird.  The Kites would spot the meat with their keen eyes and wait for more friends to arrive.  Finally, once about 8-10 Kites were circling overhead they began to make their runs to pick up pieces of the chicken without actually landing.

When you look at the feathers curled up at the end of their wings, you wonder where the airlines got the idea to add those little “winglets” to the end of their wings …..

It was great to spend some time getting caught up on all the developments in our respective families since the last time we got together during our visit to London with Jessica and Andrew in the summer of 2008.  ( http://2008europe.wordpress.com).