Forbidden wartime footage

[Nick Salmon]

Interesting footage of Bletchley Park etc. I spy a Ruby at about 1m 18s.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-52136986/mi6-world-war-two-workers-in-rare-forbidden-footage

[Phil Kingdom]

I did a couple of training courses at Bletchley Park, but don't get to exited it was when the Post Office was in control of the site and used it as a training school, amongst other things we learned how to find underground cables using electronic devices and would you believe divining rods! Rather a strange course for a rigger who spent most of my working life a couple of hundred feet above the ground. I did however manage to have a good nose around the site whilst I was there.

[jansens]

The footage isn't of Bletchley park, it is of Whaddon Hall. They were connected to Bletchley as they were a communications station. The footage was donated to Bletchley Park Trust. All the reporting on this just likes to throw Bletchley in the headlines to grab attention. As far as anyone knows there is no wartime footage of Bletchley at all, they took their secrecy VERY seriously!

Simon

[Jamie]

I did a couple of training courses at Bletchley Park, but don't get to exited it was when the Post Office was in control of the site and used it as a training school, amongst other things we learned how to find underground cables using electronic devices and would you believe divining rods!

I did the same thing there on training courses in the 1981/82. The instructor also hid keys under gass mowings behind one of the huts. I was amazed at how effective the wire diving rods were.

Jamie.

[Duncan Grimmond]

For me it put faces to the Radio 4 comedy "Hut 33"...

[Hugh Barnes]

Taking their security seriously... My father served at Bletchley Park and to the end of his days, even after so much of it was in the public domain and films had been made about it, he point blank refused to talk about it. It has always been a huge regret of mine that he didn't spill the beans. He was in the Signal Corps and spent much of the war on the west coast of Scotland making radios for the French underground and was transferred to Bletchley Park later on. He worked for the GPO before the war, hence the Signal Corps. I like to think he helped Tommy Flowers build Colossus. If any of you ever went into a telephone exchange before the became solid state, you will recognise the mechanisms...

[Robert Leigh]

I visited Bletchley Park on business a couple of times around 1974. I was working for Drayton Controls and the fuel crisis had led to the development of 'optimum start' for commercial heating systems. Through the PSA who operated heating systems in government buildings I went to survey what were then mostly unused buildings on the site to assess their suitability for the new control idea, but I had to inform them that all the plant was too old fashioned, being solid fuel with gravity circulation. I think most of the systems were drained anyway to avoid frost damage. I was only told that the Post Office used part of the site which previously had been developed during the war. I was not told what its purpose had been, and probably my PSA contact did not know anyway.
Robert Leigh

[jansens]

I visited there a few years ago right around New Years. Was one of the first in the door so go to walk across the lawn covered in frost while it was still quiet. Very atmospheric place. It's a shame there is the whole kerfuffle with the national computing museum next door (where the recreation of Colossus is). I don't know if they ever solved all of that. Although I quite liked the run down feel of the computing museum, an old school kind of museum.

Inspiring places, both of them. After visiting there I worked out how to build my own desktop version of the Turing-Welchman Bombe. And I am still beavering away on a 3D printed mechanical Enigma machine based on the Polish doubles. I've done several software Enigma versions (the code is actually simple once you understand how the machine works mechanically) including a wrist watch version as well as one in a pocket watch. Have to have hobbies other than old cars right. Am glad I have them in these days of enforced stay home time, I'm never bored!

Simon

[Ian Williams]

Drayton Controls, that brings back memories I grew up in the town that company started in.....I know nothing whatsoever to do with the thread!
BTW The work Simon has done on his Enigma replicas is astonishing, and it is worth taking a look at his web pages on the subject if they are still available.

[jansens]

They are still down unfortunately Ian (but on my list of lockdown tasks to be done). But the YouTube films are still there. If you can find them among the hundreds I seem to be doing just on making flipping guards for my special! So much hammering.

Simon