Bletchley and Blenheim

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Friday 6th June

We awoke to fine weather and warm sunshine but the day started frustratingly when we decided to send some parcels of souvenirs, presents, booklets, etc. home. The post office gent shook his head when we showed him the 10kg box we wanted to send back to Australia. After a rather long-winded conversation he explained that sending 5 x 2kg packages would be much cheaper than sending a single 10kg package. (Don't ask me why, and he couldn't explain why either.) As a result we unpacked the box we had carefully filled the night before, bought 5 large padded postage bags and, using his scales, put just under 2kg in each one. By the time we had finished all the re-packaging and filled out all the documentation for each individual parcel the morning was well advanced.

Our first stop was at Blenheim Palace. Blenheim Palace has its beginnings in 1704 when John Winston, the Duke of Marlborough, when helping to defend Holland against the French, won a war-deciding victory at Blenheim. As a reward Queen Anne granted Marlborough "the Manor and Honour of Woodstock and the Hundred of Wootton." On this land Marlborough (after various problems) built a house as a monument to his famous victory.

The Palace is situated in 2000 acres of parks and gardens. When we arrived the whole grounds where a hive of activity as the UK triathlon season was about to kick off with a number of events staged on the Palace grounds over the weekend. As a result temporary stands were being erected, the central courtyard was off bounds while its gravel surface was being covered with matting, which is a little kinder to the skin (and doesn't cause as much skidding from bike wheels).

In spite of this there was plenty to see. The grounds are even equipped with a miniature train which will take you from the car park to the distant "Pleasure Gardens". There is also an Italian Garden, a secret garden (which isn't very secret since it's on the map) and a rose garden. In addition there is an Arboretum and quite a lot of light forest providing pleasant walks. We were giving all the gardens and the parks a miss today, and concentrating on the building itself.

The entrance court and the front facade of the mansion are quite arresting by themselves. Entering the portico before the main doors, I looked up, and saw number of eyes, painted on the ceiling, staring down at me. The Palace runs a series of tours and exhibitions within the house. We started with the Winston Churchill exhibition. (Winston Churchill was a cousin to the Dukes of Marlborough and was born at Blenheim palace. He also spent his early childhood there).

We gave the exhibition a quick run through, for, although being eminently quotable, Churchill is not one of my heroes. He was a great orator, leader and the epitome of the British bulldog, but as the designer of the Gallipoli invasions, he was far from a military genius.

At the end of the exhibition we gathered for a guided tour of the state rooms. These were quite opulently decorated and as with the state rooms at Buckingham Palace, each room tended to be named after its main colour scheme; so we had the Green Writing Room, the Red Drawing Room, etc. A feature, in almost every room, were the tapestries displaying the Duke of Marlborough at various battles.

The ducal family still entertain in the state rooms sometimes, and dine on special occasions in the saloon. During our visit we saw the great silver centrepiece, depicting the 1st Duke of Marlborough on horseback, which graces the table during these occasions. It comes apart into more than 60 pieces (the head of the household has a plan showing how to put it back together) and it takes an entire day to disassemble, clean and polish and then reassemble it.

The 9th Duke married one of the American Vanderbilt daughters (named Consuelo). He married her for money and she married him to gain status for her family. The two apparently hated each other. Consuelo Vanderbilt liked to call the silver centrepiece her cache mari {hide husband} because it conveniently concealed her detested spouse, across the table, from view.

The most arresting room was probably the Long Library. This room runs the whole length of the palace. The stucco decoration of the ceiling includes two false domes and one end of the library contains a full-size working organ. The walls are literally lined with books. At the far end from the organ is a very flattering statue of Queen Anne. The queen was very short and in later life became seriously obese; eventually being buried in a square coffin as she was as wide as she was tall. The statue shows her taller and slimmer than she was in reality. The Library has been put to many uses during its lifetime including serving as a hospital ward during WW1, as a dormitory (duly boarded and protected) for Malvern College boys during WW2, and in more recent times, has been used for fundraising balls and dinners by charity organizations.

The tour of the state rooms ends at the back of Blenheim at the edge of the Italian garden. We wandered back around to the front and re-entered the palace and went up the stairs to experience "Blenheim Palace: The Untold Story". This is a series of rooms that you walk through that include audio visual effects and animated mannequins to bring to life some of the "behind the scenes stories" in the palace's history. Each room has its own programmed vignette that presents part of the background history of Blenheim Palace. When the presentation is complete the next door automatically opens and you are ushered into the next room. After about 3 of these presentations you enter an information room. This acts as a holding room until the next set of rooms are ready to begin their sequence. The information rooms have large boards with text, pictures and interactive screens that allow you to investigate some of the background data in an interesting way. One screen I used ran a video whereas another Marion and Owen used returned data in text. These rooms were well set up and very interesting. If we had enough time we certainly could've chewed up a half or two in these rooms.

All up I think there were about 10 animated rooms and a couple of info rooms. The early rooms were generally more interesting than the later ones. The stories ranged in period from the construction of the palace through to the late 20th Century.

If you intend to visit Blenheim, give yourself a whole day, there is plenty to see.

Leaving Blenheim Palace we headed for Bletchley Park, this stately residence was the home of the English codebreakers during World War 2.

The background story to this is that the Nazis in World War 2 used a series of codes for radio communication that they believed were unbreakable. At Bletchley Park the best minds in England,-a motley assortment of mathematics nerds, translators, electrical engineers and winners of crossword-puzzle competitions - were assembled with the aim to break the German codes.

The high level command messages were encrypted using one machine, while most of the Nazi armed forces used the Enigma machine. The Enigma machine could be set up in 158 million million million ways, surely this produced a code that couldn't be broken without knowing the settings.

The Enigma machine had one Achilles heel that seemed minor, but was essential in allowing the allies to decipher German messages; the coded letter could never appear as itself. So for example the word "code" might be encoded by Enigma as "dffv" or "abcd" but it could not be encoded as "zzdf" as the d in "code" could not appear as a d in the cyphered message. This allowed the codebreakers to make intelligent guesses and test then by seeing if they got a letter match; if they did, then their guess was wrong.

Checking each guess by hand was time consuming so Alan Turing, or "The Prof" as he was known at Bletchley, invented a rudimentary computer, which he called a "bombe" which could process thousands of guesses quickly. An intelligent human first guess was still required.

The decoded intercepts were known as Ultra and, amongst other things, were used to help Allied shipping avoid the U boat wolf packs, predict targets and the sizes of bombing raids, and foreknowledge of German military movements. One of Churchill's nightmares was that he knew of the mass bombing that flattened Coventry before it happened, but was unable to evacuate the city as it would've revealed that the German messages were being decoded; which most probably would've resulted in an even larger loss of life in the remainder of the war.

The high level commands were also broken due to the genius of Tommy Flowers who built the first electronic computer to help do the job.

What do you mean; you've never heard of Tommy Flowers?

He built Colossus; the first semi-programmable electronic computing machine, which used over 2,500 valves (if you are under 35, you may have to ask your parents what a valve was. In short it's a bulky and much slower type of transistor, which, itself, is a much slower (and bulkier) version of a silicon chip). So how come he's not famous? At the end of the war his work, including the two versions of Colossus that he built, were covered by the official secrets act and he had to disassemble them and lock away all the information about them. His work in computing was not even known about, let alone acknowledged, until the late 1970s

We arrived too late for the free guided tour and so had to make do with audio guides. I enjoyed seeing the bombes, the Enigma machine and other exhibits which were on show. They also had a "home front" display to show what the kitchens and classrooms of England would've looked like in the late 1930's, early 40's. There was also plenty of other war memorabilia on show.

I also discovered another great quote from Winston Churchill.

The group at Bletchley wore civvies and were somewhat eccentric, to say the least. Here are a few examples...

Turing was once detained by the local constable for bicycling around in a gas mask, which he claimed alleviated his hay fever.

Turing wanted to protect his modest savings from expropriation, as much by the British government as the enemy, so he invested in two bars of silver and buried them in a nearby wood. He had written down the precise location, translated it into code, and buried the code at a second location. However he was never able to find the silver again.

Another story tells of how he enrolled in the Home Guard with the aim of learning how to use a rifle. Once he had was able to shoot straight enough to satisfy himself, he ceased to attend parades. When told that this was an offense under military law, he pointed out that, on the enrolment form, he had answered "No" to the question: "Do you understand that you will be liable to military law?" The bureaucrats had failed to notice.

Dilwyn (Dilly Knox), had been known to accidently stuff sandwiches into his pipe instead of tobacco. Mr Batey recalls that his favourite question to new recruits was taken from Alice in Wonderland: "He would ask 'Which way does the clock go round?'. If you were stupid enough to answer 'clockwise' he would always answer 'not if you're the clock!'

Whether it was one of these behaviours that Winston had observed is not known, but he apparently came across some eccentric activities during a visit to Bletchley. He turned to the general to whom he had given the assignment of setting up the code breaking team and said "When I told you to look under every rock to obtain codebreakers, I didn't mean you to take me literally!" Winston, however, was quite proud of the crew at Bletchley and referred to them as his "geese that laid the golden eggs, but never cackled."

By the time we had finished exploring Bletchley it was approaching 5pm. We had completely forgotten that we had been given a complementary tour of The Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon at 5.30. Well there was no way we were going to make that; indeed if we didn't get a move on we'd miss "The Merchant of Venice".

We had just enough time to unload our luggage at our B&B in Warwick and race off to Stratford. We managed to consume a quick sandwich before the show started. (I was going to say "before the curtain opened", but there was no curtain!)

The stage was rectangular with the audience on three sides. We were in the balcony at "the front" of the stage, excellent seats obtained by Marion. The performance started quite strangely with some group Irish dancing (it also ended in a similar vein, and I'm not sure that it really worked.) In addition to the actors there was also a small orchestra who produced a "soundtrack" when required.

The play was performed in modern dress (which I generally don't like) except, strangely for Portia's suitors, who appeared in ceremonial military garb from the 1800's. The actors also interacted with the audience by picking particular audience members as displaying various of the unfortunate aspects of some of Portia's admirers, even going so far as to sit alongside one of the audience members.

I found that the Royal Shakespeare Companies actors were of differing abilities, the leads playing Antonio (James Garnon), Shylock (Angus Wright) and Portia (Georgina Rich) were excellent, but Bassanio (Jack Laskey) seemed a little hesitant and was not very convincing in the role. The support actors also ranged in ability from excellent to average.

The stage set was pretty bare, but the props and lighting used were quite clever. Whenever one of Portia's suitors had to choose from the boxes the boxes rose out of the floor and a part of the backdrop was raised showing a long line of 30 plus wine glasses with differing amounts of liquid. Hands would then appear from above the glasses, their fingers sliding around the rims, producing high pitched notes to increase the tension. When Bassanio chose the correct casket, they all exploded into fragments (They turned out to have been made of ice.)

Doors would appear in the backdrop at need, and other pieces of furniture also rose from the floor when required.

We all enjoyed the performance very much, even though it meant a very late night.

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Photos

Blenheim Palace
Blenheim Palace, seen from the driveway!

Blenheim Palace
The front entrance to the extravagant rooms of Blenheim Palace.

Pillar of Victory
The Pillar of Victory, erected by John Winston, in glory of his victory over the French.

Blenheim
The portico over the entrance to Blenheim Palace.

Silver Server
A silver table centrepiece, comprised of more than 60 separate pieces!

Long Library
The immense long library in Blenheim Palace (complete with organ)!

Long Library
Another photo of the aptly named long library, complete with function going on.

Bombe
The Turing Bombe machine, designed by Turing to aid in de-coding the Enigma Code.

Bombe
Another photo of a reconstructed Turing Bombe, this time showing the inner workings of the machine.

Enigma Machine
A complete, working Enigma Machine.

Turing
A statue of Turing, comprised of flat slate pieces.