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Bletchley Park

  1. Describe the organisation and work of people at Bletchley Park.

Bletchley Park was a small estate 50 miles outside London. Bletchley Park, codenamed ‘Station X’ was an evacuation site for MI6 and the government code and cypher school (Gccs). This location was chosen, as it was far away from London that the Germans would not consider it a worthwhile target to attack. It was founded in 1939 after world war two had started and aimed to break encoded German Messages that were sent using ‘Enigma’. Station X was so important that when several code breakers wrote a letter to Winston Churchill asking for more money (because of coming under intense pressure) Churchill’s immediate respond was that ‘make sure they have all that they want extreme priority and report to me that this has been done’.

In Britain there were ‘Y stations’ where the messages were intercepted. Once a message had been intercepted it would appear as Gibberish. This was because the enigma changed every letter. The German operators of the Enigma had to change the rota settings every day. These rota settings were what the code breakers of Bletchley Park had to figure out. Once they had figured out the settings they could then read all the messages for that day. They had to figure out the new rota settings every day of the war. These were Seventeen thousand five hundred and seventy six different combinations of rota settings and when added to the switchboard there were one hundred and fifty nine million million million different combinations.

The type of people at Station X were recruited from all walks of life, there were Oxford and Cambridge professors and mathematicians. When there was a need of more recruits, Bletchley Park recruited crossword competition winners. Most of the code breakers worked for the G.C.C.S in the 1920s and 1930s. At the beginning of the war (1939) there were around 1000 people working there however by the end (1945) there were around 7000 people working there. The people that were recruited often arrived knowing nothing at all about the work they were about to undergo.

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There were two main groups of people at Bletchley Park. There were the code breakers such as Alan Turin and Dilly Knox. Then there was the administrative staff that was mainly girls aged eighteen to twenty-two. However when the bombes and colossuses were installed women, known as wrens, were recruited from the navy to operate the new machines. The way Bletchley Park got encrypted messages were from ‘Y centres’ which were set up all-over England, who intercepted the German messages and sent it to Bletchley Park. In Bletchley Park the messages would be sent to Hut 3 where they ...

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