In 2008 Dr Sue Black led the online campaign to save Bletchley Park, the top-secret WWII code breaking site. She has since met with many of the Bletchley veterans and crowdfunded her book Saving Bletchley Park. Along with her co-author, Stevyn Colgan, Sue has been busting the myths from The Imitation Game* and shedding light on what really happened at Bletchley.
Myth: The machine that Turing built was called Christopher.
Fact: It was actually called the Bombe machine. There are several explanations for this, it’s thought that it was named after a similar machine built by the Polish to help break Enigma.
Myth: The Bombe machine was built by Turing.
Fact: Turing produced the design for the Bombe, building on the design of the original Polish Bomba which had been produced by Marian Rejewski in 1938. The Bletchley Park Bombe designed by Turing, was refined by another Bletchley Park code breaker Gordon Welchman and actually built by engineer Harold Keen who was based at the British Tabulating Company, not at Bletchley Park.
Myth: There was only one Bombe machine.
Fact: In reality there were hundreds of Bombe machines across the UK and also in the US. Most of the women that worked at Bletchley Park worked in admin roles and as Bombe operators.
Myth: The mansion house in the film is at Bletchley Park.
Fact: The mansion house in the film is Joyce Grove in Oxfordshire, which is larger than the actual Bletchley Park Mansion. Some of the filming did take place at Bletchley Park however — the bar where Turing goes drinking with Joan Clarke and others is the billiard room at Bletchley Park.
Myth: A small team of code breakers did the main work at Bletchley Park.
Fact: The story running through the film of one main codebreaker, Turing, with a team of four or five, producing a machine that won the war, is a ridiculous oversimplification of what actually happened. More than 10,000 people worked at Bletchley Park. We didn’t really get a flavor of that coming through at all from the film. There were many teams of code breakers working on different areas of code breaking.
Myth: Enigma alone shortened the war by two years.
Fact: In the film the war being shortened by two years was completely attributed to Turing and his work on Enigma, which is not true. The shortening of the war by two to four years was attributed to “Ultra” by historian Harry Hinsley; Ultra was the codename for all of the top secret code breaking work carried out at Bletchley Park by the 10,000 people that worked there.
Myth: Most of the people that worked at Bletchley Park were men.
Fact: The film gives the impression that Bletchley Park was staffed mostly by men. Nothing could be further from the truth. At its peak, BP had over 10,000 staff of which more than 8,000 were women. There were also over 300 Americans on site too and a series of ‘out-stations’ where additional code breaking was done.
Myth: Turing committed suicide.
Fact: Although a verdict of suicide was issued, there is no direct proof that Turing took his own life. There was no suicide note and Turing had cyanide at his home and was known to be clumsy and not always as careful about handling dangerous substances as maybe he could have been. Oh, and the story that the Apple logo is based upon the part eaten apple that contained the cyanide is completely untrue.
Myth: Turing was suspected of being a spy.
Fact: This is entirely fictional, as is the film’s storyline of Turing’s relationship with John Cairncross, an actual spy. Turing’s biographer Andrew Hodges says that it is ‘ludicrous’ to say that two people working on separate projects at Bletchley would have ever met. The staff at Bletchley Park tended to work in isolated teams and didn’t discuss their work with other teams.
Myth: Enigma was broken by Turing.
Fact: Enigma machines were used by banks and other organisations before the war. It was adopted by the German military but not before a group of Polish mathematicians had cracked it. With invasion imminent, the Poles passed all they knew onto the British. Even though the Germans subsequently changed their working practices, rendering the Polish work obsolete, it had given the Allies all of the skills they needed to break Enigma. The first breakthroughs were made by Dillwyn ‘Dilly’ Knox, Mavis Batey and their team. Turing’s brilliance was in finding a way to automate decryption so that many more messages could be decoded per day.
If you liked this then why not pre-order the book Saving Bletchley Park on Unbound and get your name in the back.
*Don’t get them wrong — they loved the film and completely understand the need for poetic license. You can read Sue’s review of the film here.
