Most of the endeavours at Bletchley Park were devoted to the decipherment of messages encrypted by machine – most famously the Enigma; but others were more imprortant to crack

An Enigma machine:-

Enigma machine with explanation:-

A cabinet of Enigmas:-

Remains of a Hungarian Enigma machine dug up from the earth somewhere in Europe:-

4 Rotor Enigma machine:-

Enigma + diagram:-

Hagelin Encryption Machine, Italian Naval cypher machine. Plus a German hand cypher sheet:-

The enigma was cumbersome to use, requiring three operators, the typist, the noter down and the telegraphist – and required a similar number of personnel at the receiving end.

The Germans began to produce more complicated machines – with more encryption rotors and a faster transmission system.

Lorenz T 32 Encryption Machine. Amazingly Bill Tutte managed to work out how this machine worked only from the form of the messages it encrypted:-

Siemens & Halske T52 Cypher Machine. Messages were typed in and encrypted automatically then transmitted by teleprinter to be decoded by the reverse machine at the other end. (The use of ordinary teleprinter letter encoding in this system was a weakness that the decoders were able to exploit):-

One of the rooms here had an exhibition devoted to Bill Tutte, whose mathematical expertise helped to crack the fiendish Lorenz cypher (called Tunny by the codebreakers.) Tutte managed to describe how the Lorenz encryption machine worked without ever having seen an example of one.

The mansion is really lovely inside.

Entrance hall:-

Library:-

Ornamental plastered ceiling:-

Another ornate ceiling:-

One of the rooms has some lovely wood panelling:-

Tiling on wall:-

Windows onto park:-