Bletchley Park

Year 9 solve cyphers and discover the home of British codebreaking

On the 25th of January, Year 9 went on a trip to Bletchley Park, a vital site during World War 2 due to people decoding secret messages sent from countries that opposed Britain. Bletchley Park is situated between Cambridge and Oxford which are the homes of the two best Universities during that time. In our Workshop, we had to solve enigma cyphers through different methods, enigma cyphers were used by Germany to get messages across different locations.

At Bletchley Park, we were sent on a guided tour where we got told about the cryptologists that used to work there, mainly all the cryptologists were females, because of the war all the men had to go out and fight. While we were told about the cryptologists, some of us were given hats and scarves to represent people from that time. There were two Navy seal hats, one army general hat and a scarf that would usually be worn by a professor at Cambridge.

Lastly, we were shown the Bombe machine which was a machine used by Britain to decode the enigma cyphers that Germany sent. Before the Bombe machine was created British cryptographers worked around the clock to solve the Enigma cyphers so Alan Turning created the Bombe machine to speed up the decryption process. The Bombe machine was developed from a device known as the “bomba” which had been designed in Poland by cryptologist Marian Rejewski.

We learned so much on our visit to Bletchley Park!

Maja P