Speaker David McVeigh talked to Bishopsteignton Probus Club about Bletchley Park – Home of World War Two codebreakers

David McVeigh talked to Bishopsteignton Probus Club about Bletchley Park, the home of our World War II codebreakers. He started by reminding us of this country’s legacy of spying, including the work of William Cecil, the highly successful spymaster of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth 1st, whose spies identified and took action against the spies of the Roman Catholic King of Spain and those of Mary Queen of Scots, the Queen’s sister.

By 1938, spying had become far more sophisticated and the Government purchased Bletchley Park, an estate of five hundred acres near Milton Keynes, and made it the new base for our spy headquarters. Then the Government increased the number of people at Bletchley Park involved with intelligence gathering and codebreaking, recruiting mainly from Oxford and Cambridge universities. By the end of World War Two, there were over 9,000 people working at Bletchley Park, most of them working in wooden huts on the estate. Everybody working at Bletchley Park was forbidden from talking to anybody about their work, including husbands and wives. As a consequence, many people kept silent about their contributions until they were in their eighties before they were given the recognition and credit they earnt by working so hard and successfully to save millions of lives during the war.

Before the war, Germany invented the Enigma machine for banks to send confidential coded messages. Once the war had started, the Germans used these machines to send top secret encoded messages to their armed forces. However, Alan Turin at Bletchley Park built his Bombe machine, a device which deciphered the encrypted messages produced by the Germans’ Enigma machines.

Attached photograph shows John Stevenson (left) who gave the Vote of Thanks to David McVeigh.