Chatsworth and Bletchley!

This is Chatsworth. Technically it belongs to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. But it is also known as Pemberly to the fans of Pride and Prejudice. Scholars believe this is what Austen based his home on, and so most of the films use it as Mr. Darcy's Pemberly. There are only a few pictures, because the weather was awful.

Rachel found sheepies!

Bletchley Park.

I cannot tell you how excited I was to go to Bletchley. While I was sick this summer I watched the Imitation Game and all of the Bletchley Circle series, both of which I highly recommend. It was really neat to be able to go and see the center of British Intelligence for WWII. 

A ration book.

Kind of fuzzy, but this was a security pass to enter Bletchley. Most original documents were destroyed when Bletchley was closed, so we don't actually have that many.

Dispatch Motorcycle

 An actual fact German Enigma machine. I got to see how they worked and it is incredible that anyone could break the ciphers. Pretty much they lined up all the wires in chunks of three or four and then rotated them so that when you pressed A it might go to a wire that used to be in the J spot which might go to a wire which used to be in the S spot. Or at least that is what I think happened. The number of combinations was huge. Something like 156,000,000,000,000,000,000 possibilities.

 A different kind of code machine whose name I could not pronounce and therefore cannot remember. I think it started with a "b."

Radio

Paper code breaking helps. I can't believe they could do this. Obviously these code breakers were brilliant.

Some translators learned to speak other languages such as Japanese by studying them musically.

The manor house where the Imitation Game was filmed. They actually filmed where things happened in real life! It's pretty incredible.

The replica of "Christopher" or the Bombe that was used in the Imitation Game and donated to Bletchley afterwards.

We also got to explore a lot of the huts, many of which are set up to look like they did at the time they were being used.

Just a last picture. This is a messenger pigeon. They would put them in boxes and parachute them down to the resistance fighters, who would send the pigeons back with messages. Who knew?