Year 7 Bletchley Park Trip
On Thursday 26th June, Year 7 went on a captivating trip to Bletchley Park, an incredible site where the majority of the codebreaking in the Second World War took place.
After an hour-and-a-half-long bus journey, we arrived at the site, and discovered that the trip was well worth the lengthy drive!
We then split into smaller groups and took part in many fun activities, including tours, exploring huts and exhibitions and codebreaking.
In the tour, we were shown many aspects of Bletchley, such as huge buildings, and historic monuments, and a guide told us many intriguing facts about Bletchley Park.
For example, did you know that Alan Turing had hay fever, so he wore a gas mask whilst cycling home, or that more than half of the workers were female?
As well as this, we went exploring around the site, investigating different blocks and huts.
Each hut was different: some had information about the park and what took place inside; others had educational films about various topics and copies of the machines that dramatically aided code-breaking.
In fact, one of the rooms was made to look as if it was actually one of the rooms used by decoders and even had a recording of Neville Chamberlain speaking!
While we were doing this, we were also given a small booklet with our discovered information.
Finally, we had a session on codes and ciphers, which was arguably the most fascinating part of the whole trip!
First, we learnt about enigma machines, and how they were put together in different ways by the Germans – there was a shocking total of 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 different possible combinations!
We also got to try and interpret Morse code, the majority of us failing miserably then were dismayed to find out that we were only using the extremely slow training version!
After this, we were given different ciphers to solve in groups of six. Each code gave us hints to a war agent’s name.
The codes were fantastic, and every one of them had a particular method to solve it, such as Caesar Cipher, Pigpen and Train Track.
When everyone had finished, we collaborated as a whole group, put the information together and found out that the answer was John Cairncress, a real agent in the Second World War!
In conclusion, the Bletchley Park trip was highly enjoyed by everyone and made us all see Bletchley on a whole new level as we dived deeper into the history of the Enigma and the war efforts.
We left with an abundance of knowledge about codebreaking and the teamwork that made the codebreaker’s legacy so well known for, as well as how just one pledge to secrecy changed the lives of countless people working at Bletchley.
Report by Sara and Xanthe, Year 7
