UPTON Bishop WI’s April meeting was an open meeting which attracted many visitors to hear the talk by Bob Skelt on “The People of Bletchley Park”.

Bob had worked at GCHQ for many years and had experienced training at Bletchley Park. First he explained how the mansion had been owned by the Leon family, who had entertained lavishly, and extended the original building somewhat eccentrically using architectural styles that they had seen and admired on their European travels. The Leon children didn’t want the mansion on their parents’ deaths and eventually it was sold for £7,500, originally to a builder who planned to build houses on the site.

However, in 1939 a team of British government codebreakers visited, pretending to be a shooting party and decided it was the ideal base for their work outside of London.

There was very high security and it was known as Station X, it employed decoders, translators, bombe operators, analysts and reporters, the majority of staff being women. There were 100 staff in 1940 rising to 10,000 in 1944 and the number of messages at its peak was 18,000 per day.

The Enigma machine was introduced, designed by Arthur Scherbius, which had 158 trillion combinations and the combination was changed each day. A team of Polish codebreakers proved invaluable in helping Britain decode messages using duplicate machines and bombes (computer forerunners).

The first message was decoded in 1941, in 1943 the Lorenz Teleprint Machine was introduced which had 1.6 quadrillion possible settings and by 1944 there were 220 bombes in use. Many highly intelligent people, such as Mavis Batey and Alan Turing, were based there and became famous for their work.

The work was very intensive and top secret and working conditions were unpleasant. By 1952 work had moved to GCHQ and by 1982 everything was declassified.

The vote of thanks was given by Christine Jones and the evening closed with refreshments.

UBWI meets on the second Tuesday of each month at 7.30pm in the Millennium Hall.