Today was Bletchley Park (BP), there has been much written about BP since information about its vital work started to surface in 1975, and of course movies made about it and the people involved most famously perhaps being the recent Imitation Game.

It is also sometimes known as Station X, however this was the MI6 radio station which only existed for a couple of months at BP. Station X was moved to anther site as it was determined radio aerials would make the site a target for German attacks.

BP was selected as the site for this activity due to its great transport and communications links, it was on one of the main train lines north out of London, it was on the Cambridge to Oxford train line, enabling easy access to both of those great universities, and perhaps most importantly of all just down the road was the A5 road, up which ran one of the main telecommunications cable routes of the time.

Before BP was rescued to become the museum it is today for many years it was a training school for British Telecom and it was during this time I spent many weeks studying here. A story which stood me in good stead for the latter part of my career obviously, however during my time there, there was no mention of what had taken place during WWII.

I briefly visited BP 3yrs ago, however only spent just over an hour on site, this time I had decided to ensure I had the full day, and to do it properly I would suggest this is only just enough time.

Thanks to the movies much is made of Alan Turing, and whilst his work was obviously immensely significant, there were many others whose stories are also significant and much is made of the others during the tour including Gordon Welchman who was equally as important as Turing. At the end of WWII Welchman moved to the US where he became a citizen and worked to create a lot of the communications networks still in use by the US and allied forces.

For me one of the highlights was seeing the Bombe in action, this of course is a recreation of a wartime Bombe as all were destroyed at the end of WWII, however it is a fully working unit such that when GCHQ hold open days and events, they will use an Enigma machine and send a message with the key to be cracked by the Bombe.

In recent years it has also come to light BP had also broken the Lorenz machine protected network, this was used by Hitler to communicate with his direct reports. It was the breaking of this machine which resulted in the Colossi being produced, they were the first real computers and were also destroyed at the end of WWII. The release of information on the Lorenz was not made public until the end of the cold war. This was because the bulk of the machines were in Berlin and were captured by the Russian Army, not knowing the allies had broken this machine the Russians used them for many years following WWII.