This was a two-day festival of expert speakers including Bletchley Park veterans, demonstrations, questions and answers, rare archive, and a chance to meet like-minded people in a beautiful village in the English countryside. Visitors heard from:
• Veteran codebreakers,
• Historians researching the lives of workers sworn to secrecy forever;
• The people who rebuilt Bletchley Park’s secret code-br
eaking computers;
• Alan Turing’s nephew Sir Dermot Turing;
• ...and from a collection of authors and broadcasters who are all authorities on how the enemy’s codes were broken. Guests shared lots of stories about what life was like for the women and men, from all walks of life, who put in countless hours to give the Allies the information needed to outwit an enemy and thereby shorten World War II. The dates were Saturday and Sunday, March 19–20, 2016. To promote the event, we wrote the following:
Why come to Celebrating Bletchley Park?
• Have you DSCF0425seen the film The Imitation Game?
• Would you like to know the real story about Alan Turing and his colleagues?
• Are you interested in the wide range of roles played by women in secret codebreaking?
• Did you ever try using secret codes or cyphers at school?
• Have you heard about Bletchley Park and its codebreakers?
• Are you interested in how British ingenuity shortened World War II?
• Do computers fascinate you?
• Were any of your relatives, or you yourself, involved in the War?
• Would you like to see how Enigma machines work, and how their code was broken?
• Have you ever built, or taken apart, radios or computers?
• Would you like to meet over two hundred other people with some of these interests? Celebrating Bletchley Park is for you! You are invited to hear and meet a succession of expert speakers and Bletchley Park veterans over the weekend of 19—20 March 2016. The event takes place in a large indoor venue deep within the beautiful East Sussex countryside not far from the county town Lewes and the south coast. Stay for the weekend or, if time is limited, just come to one or more talks as you please. Find the list of our speakers in this page, or explore the event website.
