A vivid taste of life inside the Bletchley Park war machine
The Intelligence Factory Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes
WHidden speakers broadcast the chatter of typists or the roar of Spitfire engines
hat was it like to work at Bletchley Park at the height of the Second World War? Not all that much fun, it seems. The work was repetitive, the hours long and the offices dark and cramped. The food wasn’t much cop, either. Cabbage, potatoes and plum pudding were dished up unfailingly for the two o’clock night shift. Yet by January 1945, Bletchley Park was the largest codebreaking operation in the world, employing nearly 9,000 staff, working three shifts over 24 hours; at full tilt, 13,990 Axis ciphers were decoded a week.
“This is the missing part of our story,” says Peronel Craddock, head of programmes, who curated Bletchley’s new exhibition, The Intelligence Factory. Housed in one of the old office blocks on the sprawling site, it plunges visitors into the daily life of employees during their busiest period, from 1942-1946.
As the tide of war turned, Bletchley became the hub of a worldwide network. Intercepted enemy ciphers poured in from every theatre; here, they were decoded, translated and packaged into ultras – intelligence dossiers of the highest importance – which landed on Allied leaders’ desks, including those of Winston Churchill and Field Marshal Montgomery.
The exhibition’s approach is immersive. Hidden speakers broadcast the chatter of typists or the roar of Spitfire engines. At times, it’s almost too atmospheric – the snaggle of hunched corridors, painted an intestinal green, give an all-tooauthentic sense of being sunk in the bowels of an inescapable institution.
The interactive displays, meanwhile, are playful, rather than spectacular.
A mock-up of the naval plotting room, complete with digital displays of string and pins to map ship movements, will delight Biggles-era dads but might be a bit passé for the Fortnite crowd.
Instead, it’s the incidental, human details that delight. The museum has done a marvellous job of tracking down veterans who worked on the site and recording their memories. These young men and women – up to 75 per cent of the staff were female – signed the Official Secrets Act, and this was often the first time they had opened up about their experiences. One former Wren recalls how she was billeted at the nearby Woburn Abbey where “bats flew in and condensation dripped from the ceiling”. Another remembers how the couple she stayed with became lifelong friends, even naming their daughter after her.
My favourite display was a wall
plastered in memos. Typed out by hand, they have a medieval scriptorium’s industriousness, and capture Bletchley life in all its transportive mundanity. There are grouches about leave and the proper usage of the estate’s rowing boat. And stern warnings against asking for second helpings of pudding.
The prejudices of the era are also laid stark: one recruitment drive calls for men who “have excellent German… with health and eyesight strong enough to stand up to hard work”. The rest of the vacancies, begrudgingly, can be filled by women. Provided, that is, “they are really first-class people”.
The Intelligence Factory takes the story right up to the present day via recorded interviews with contemporary GCHQ employees. But the scale and achievement of the Bletchley war machine in those years is unrivalled. And this lively exhibition, justly, turns the focus on to those who kept its engines stoked – even if it misses the tell-tale whiff of midnightboiled cabbage.