Want to know how British engineers helped steer the Allies towards victory?
Bletchley Park Week at Kellogg College Oxford is a series of events celebrating the efforts that resulted in the successful interception and decryption of messages sent by the 'impossible to decode' enigma machine used by the German military during World War II. This probability-defying feat broke major ground in the war effort leading to Nazi defeat, but also represented a major step forward in technological advancement.
Perhaps unfortunately, the telling of history leaves much room for the telling of fiction. This year's Bletchley Park Week, titled 'Fact or Fiction', aims to explore the distinction we must make between the two when representing past events, and aims to dispel some of the myths surrounding what actually happened during this important historical moment.
Bletchley Park Week will feature interactive demonstrations of the Enigma machine, a film night and Park trip for Kellogg college students, and a live discussion featuring Sir Dermot Turing (current Fellow, and nephew of Alan Turing) about the realities and unrealities surrounding our understanding of events at Bletchley Park. And this isn't the only link that Kellogg has to Bletchley Park - Jonathan Michie, President of the College, explains that:
"I should declare an interest, in that my dad Donald Michie was a cryptanalyst at Bletchley. He and Alan Turing went to the pub once a week to play chess, not because either was any good, but so they could discuss how one might create a machine that could not only play chess, but could learn as it did so – which led in time to machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Anyone who has seen The Imitation Game will know that there were very few women code-breakers, although there were certainly many women involved in the overall process – indeed, three quarters of the workforce were women. One of the women involved in the analysis of decrypted signals was Joan Thirsk (née Watkins), who went on to be a distinguished academic and Fellow of Kellogg, playing a leading role in the development of agricultural history as an academic discipline."
