HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-04-07T12:07:30.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: The female codebreakers of Bletchley Park
items: Your guide to Alan Turing: the man, the enigma
items: Your guide to Bletchley Park, the key WW2 decryption centre
items: Bletchley Park: Britain's wartime intelligence factory
items: The women of Bletchley Park
items: The Zimmermann telegram: the telegram that brought America into the First World War
items: The evolution of British code-breaking
items: The changing role of women in British computing
items: 7 phases of the history of Artificial intelligence
items: WW2 espionage: The spies who surprised me

The female codebreakers of Bletchley Park
type: item
date: 2025-04-01T14:50:42.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Bletchley Park
subject: Family and parenting
description: Historian Tessa Dunlop shines a light on the secret and undervalued work of the women of Bletchley Park, without whom the codebreaking successes of the Second World War could not have happened
encoded: Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire was one of Britain's most famous institutions during the Second World War, home to codebreaking triumphs that turned the tide against the Nazi regime. Britain’s codebreaking operation has been dominated by a male narrative – a star-studded cast of 20th-century brain boxes, led by mathematician Alan Turing. His outstanding role in the creation of the bombe machine, an electromechanical testing device essential for unravelling German Enigma encoded messages, was hugely significant. It is a feat perhaps only rivalled by that of Tommy Flowers, the engineer who designed the even more advanced Colossus, the world’s first programmable computer. Yet Bletchley Park depended on the heft of a predominantly female workforce, not least Turing's own fiancée, Joan Clarke. The women who worked at Bletchley have often been overlooked in this story because, with the exception of three or four female cryptanalysts, the vast majority of top-end codebreakers during the war were men. The story of how girl power – often school-girl power – turned what began as an eccentric experiment into the world’s most impressive codebreaking factory is less well known, but no less important. Who worked at Britain's wartime intelligence factory In 1938, with war on the horizon, the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS) – the precursor to the modern GCHQ – temporarily moved out of London, to avoid bombing raids, but by August 1939, its secret home in Bletchley Park had become permanent. Initially, this fledging operation was staffed by just 186 people. ‘Men of a professor type’, particularly mathematicians were targeted, with early recruits including Turing, Gordon Welchman and Alfred Dillwyn Knox. Their work, however, was supported by an expanding team of chiefly civilian women. Perhaps inevitably at the beginning of the war, Establishment Britain recruited from their own when it came to Bletchley’s secret operations. The German military must never know that Britai…

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Your guide to Alan Turing: the man, the enigma
type: item
date: 2021-05-26T13:00:03.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: General Modern
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Bletchley Park
subject: Espionage
description: We bring you the facts about the life and death of Alan Turing, who played a vital role in breaking German codes including Enigma during the Second World War and is considered by some to be the founding father of computing...
encoded: How much do you know about Alan Turing, who was portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in the 2014 film The Imitation Game? Discover more about his life, death and legacy with our essential guide... The life of Alan Turing: a timeline Alan Turing: his life, achievements and legacy The life of Alan Turing: a timeline 23 June 1912 Born Alan Mathison Turing in Maida Vale, London, the second son of Julius and Sara Turing October 1931 Turing takes up a mathematics scholarship at King’s College Cambridge, earning a first-class degree. In 1935 he is elected to a junior research fellowship January 1937 A paper by Turing is published that is later recognised as laying the foundation of computer science June 1938 At the age of 25, Turing receives his PhD from Princeton for his dissertation Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals 4 September 1939 Turing arrives at Bletchley Park to begin his wartime work on code and cipher systems. He goes on to lead the team in Hut 8 (left) March 1940 The first Bombe machine, designed by Turing, arrives at Bletchley. More than 200 machines will be manufactured 2 November 1942 Turing travels to the US to liaise on several joint US/UK projects, including an American Bombe machine March 1946 Turing produces a detailed design for an Automatic Computing Engine 31 March 1952 He is convicted of being “party to the commission of an act of gross indecency” 8 June 1954 Turing is found dead. The coroner’s verdict is that he had taken his own life Alan Turing: his life, achievements and legacy The founding father of computing played a vital role in breaking German codes during WW2. Joel Greenberg deciphers the brilliant but troubled life of Alan Turing... In September 1939, just as the Second World War was declared, a young man arrived to stay at the Crown Inn in the hamlet of Shenley Brook End, Buckinghamshire. He was fit enough – an exceptional long-distance runner, in fact – and his new landlady, Mrs Ramshaw, voiced concerns that such a clearly able-bodied youn…

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Your guide to Bletchley Park, the key WW2 decryption centre
type: item
date: 2020-12-09T07:57:48.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Bletchley Park
subject: Espionage
description: Bletchley Park housed Britain's key decryption centre during the Second World War and is credited with shortening the conflict by at least two years. Sinclair McKay tells you everything you need to know about the famous decryption centre...
encoded: Q: What role did Bletchley Park play during WW2? A: Bletchley Park was the Buckinghamshire house and estate that played host to Britain’s code-breaking triumphs – from the success in breaking the ‘insoluble’ Nazi Enigma codes to its incredible work on Japanese cryptology. Its role was so secret – everyone who worked there signed the Official Secrets Act for life – that we only really started to learn about its achievements decades afterwards. And there is still much to emerge. Q: When and how was the code-breaking centre established? A: Before it was evacuated to Bletchley, the Government Code and Cypher School – as it was then known – operated from a building near Westminster. There had been a special code-breaking department since the First World War – then, it was referred to as ‘Room 40’. In the interwar years, they analysed Soviet traffic, among other things. When it seemed obvious that war was coming once more, many of the expert cryptanalysts of Room 40 set up the new establishment at Bletchley in 1938. They recruited crucial new blood, including brilliant young mathematician Alan Turing, as well as lecturers and undergraduates from universities all over the country. Q: How many code-breakers worked there? What did an average day consist of? A: Numbers rose as the war went on; from a relatively small team in 1938 to something like 10,000 people – code-breakers, Wrens, WAAFs, posh debutantes working on the cross-indexing system etc. Read more | Bletchley Park: Britain's wartime intelligence factory Obviously, they didn’t live at the house. All these people, mainly young, were billeted around the town and nearby villages. Bletchley locals were disconcerted by some of the eccentric code-breakers, and they formed a theory that the secret establishment was in fact a special lunatic asylum. There was no average day. Code-breaking went on round the clock, in a three-shift system, and in different huts – very often the work was done in plain wooden huts. There could …

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Bletchley Park: Britain's wartime intelligence factory
type: item
date: 2020-10-20T09:10:00.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Bletchley Park
subject: Family and parenting
description: Christopher Grey explains why Alan Turing was not the only star of Britain's Second World War secret data gathering centre...
encoded: Mention the words ‘Bletchley Park’ and most people will immediately think of Alan Turing. But, important as Turing’s contribution was, he was but one of a larger group of codebreakers who were themselves but a tiny minority of what was an enormous and highly complex organisation. At its height in 1944, Bletchley Park employed close to 10,000 people, up to three-quarters of whom were women, performing a wide array of tasks. It is sometimes said that this operation shortened WW2 by two or three years, and it is certainly easy to see how reading so many of the operational and strategic signals of the enemy was invaluable to the Allies. It by no means detracts from Turing’s achievements to recall that this success would have been quite impossible without the work of a great many others. The Buckinghamshire estate of Bletchley Park was the wartime home of the Government Code and Cipher School (GC & CS), the forerunner of today’s GCHQ. Formed after the First World War from the codebreaking facilities at the Admiralty and the War Office, by 1939 GC & CS was part of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6), itself within the Foreign Office. At the outbreak of war there were no more than 200 people working at Bletchley Park. Of these, only a handful were employed on Enigma, the cipher machine employed by various elements of the German war effort, such as the army and navy. Within those services, Enigma was employed by scores of different ‘user groups’, many of which were decoded at Bletchley from 1940 onwards. It is therefore a misnomer to think of the breaking of Enigma as a single event – there were, in fact, multiple variants of the famous cipher machine, each changing their configuration daily. And Bletchley’s staff weren’t just faced with the task of decoding Enigma. Germany also used the even more complex Fish ciphers – for which the Colossus computing machine was built in 1944 – and there was also a range of Italian and Japanese ciphers to be dealt with. What were…

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The women of Bletchley Park
type: item
date: 2019-06-20T12:19:16.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Bletchley Park
description: Tessa Dunlop shares the stories of women who worked at Britain’s codebreaking centre in World War Two
encoded: Historian and broadcaster Tessa Dunlop shares the stories of women she interviewed who worked at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking centre during WW2.

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The Zimmermann telegram: the telegram that brought America into the First World War
type: item
date: 2019-02-28T15:40:00.000Z
subject: First World War
subject: Period
subject: Bletchley Park
description: More than 100 hundred years after British intelligence intercepted the Zimmermann telegram, Dr David Kenyon, research historian at Bletchley Park, talks to History Extra about how the telegram altered the course of the First World War and influenced future code-breaking operations…
encoded: In the spring of 1917, despite two and a half years of fighting, the Allied and German forces on the western front were still deadlocked. The battle of the Somme had just drawn to a close with huge losses on both sides. The Germans decided to seek victory through a different route – by unrestricted U-boat warfare in the Atlantic, which meant using submarines to sink all merchant ships heading for the UK regardless of their nationality, in order to starve out the UK population. Up to this point, the US had remained neutral – though it was supplying the Allied forces with large amounts of food and war materials from its factories. Thus there were significant numbers of US companies and ships trading with Britain. The concern for the Germans was that attacks on this trade might bring the US into the war. On 17 January 1917, British intelligence intercepted the Zimmermann telegram, leading to one of the first occasions when a piece of SIGINT (intelligence gained by eavesdropping on an enemy’s coded communications) heavily influenced the course of world events. The telegram was an internal diplomatic message sent in January 1917 from the German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann in Berlin, to the German Embassy in Mexico. It proposed a military alliance between Germany and Mexico, in the event of the United States entering the First World War in support of the Allies. When the contents of the telegram were made public in the US, it became a major factor in debates about whether the US should enter the war on the Allied side – which they did on 6 April 1917, just five weeks after the telegram’s publication. Read more: The great American U-turn (exclusive to the Library) 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about America’s entry and involvement in the First World War <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2014/12/450826423-f48e99a-ea3750e.jpg" width="413" height="413" alt="A US soldier teaching two junior 'rookie' recruits how to clean a gun d…

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The evolution of British code-breaking
type: item
date: 2019-02-06T09:00:39.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Bletchley Park
subject: Espionage
description: Bletchley Park was the intelligence nerve centre of the Second World War; but when peace came, what became of its brilliant operatives? Sinclair McKay considers the next steps of the code-breakers; while some played a part in a new age of computing, others influenced the intelligence operations of the modern day
encoded: May 8, 1945. As crowds in London danced themselves dizzy with jubilation, and as bonfires were lit across the land, celebrations were a little more discreet in one particular corner of Buckinghamshire. That warm evening, on the lawn outside the large Victorian house, young men and women gathered with drinks, the sound of gramophone music gently echoing from within. The conflict in Europe was over. But for some of these young people, an entirely new kind of war had already begun. These brilliant youngsters were the code-breakers of Bletchley Park. Their success at breaking into the apparently insoluble Nazi Enigma codes and reading the enemy’s communications had (some were later to reckon) shortened the war by two or even three years. But even before the fall of Berlin, senior code-breakers – figures such as director Edward Travis and his deputy Nigel de Grey – were looking ahead to the sort of world that was being shaped. And they saw the terrible hazards. Europe, which had regarded itself as the peak of human civilisation, had been blasted back to the dark ages. Cities were shattered. Food was painfully scarce. Millions of displaced people were harried and hounded. And deep in the forests of eastern Europe, the full horror of the Nazi genocide of the Jews had been uncovered. The continent was suffused with darkness and blood. Now Stalin’s place-men were embedding themselves, as Churchill put it in his famous 1946 ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic”. The fear of the code-breakers – listening to the faltering heartbeat of this wounded continent – was that war could so easily reignite. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/GettyImages-50501612-9b9d0b2.jpg" width="2251" height="1678" alt="British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivers a speech at Westminster College that addressed the Communist threat, and in which he uttered the now-famous phrase 'Iron Curtain,' Fulton, Missouri, Marc…

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The changing role of women in British computing
type: item
date: 2018-05-25T00:03:17.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Bletchley Park
subject: Computing
description: Historian Marie Hicks considers the role of women in the early British computing industry, their contribution during the Second World War and how their opportunities were curtailed by changing priorities in postwar Britain
encoded: Ask anybody about the history of women in computing and they're likely to come up with a few names: Ada Lovelace is a perennial favourite; as is Grace Hopper. A few folks might name other women like Katherine Johnson, Jean Bartik, or Stephanie Shirley. These were all important pioneers in a field that today we think of as male dominated. But what if I were to tell you that these women are not so exceptional as they might seem at first glance? That computing, as a field of endeavour, was feminised work for so long that most young men did not dare go into it for fear of ending up in a career ‘backwater’? This flip from a feminised sphere of work, to one solidly identified as masculine, is a change many still struggle to understand. In my book, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost its Edge in Computing, I explore the period when women disappeared from the field and how their loss affected the fortune of the entire British computing industry. Women were very much present in the world of computing in Great Britain throughout the early decades of electronic computing and the height of the 'mainframe era' in the 1960s, when massive, room-sized computers were the norm. This was the time that we normally associate with a technological revolution based largely on computerisation. During the period that British prime minister Harold Wilson famously described as the era of “White Heat”, most of the computer operators, programmers, systems administrators, and systems analysts that you were likely to encounter would have been women. Yet by the end of the decade women had largely vanished from the field – and not by choice. The gender flip of computer work was sudden and destructive. The early role of a computer programmer In 1959 a computer programmer and operator faced a very hectic year. This particular worker needed to programme, maintain, operate, and test all of the computers in a major computing centre doing critical work for the central…

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7 phases of the history of Artificial intelligence
type: item
date: 2015-11-16T10:20:02.000Z
subject: Ancient Greece
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Victorian
subject: Bletchley Park
description: Artificial intelligence (AI) is humanity's most powerful technology. Software that solves problems and turns data into insight has already transformed our lives, and the transformation is accelerating, according to Calum Chace…
encoded: My new book Surviving AI (Three Cs) argues that AI will continue to bring enormous benefits, but that it will also present a series of formidable challenges. The range of possible outcomes is wide, from the terrible to the wonderful, and they are not pre-determined. We should monitor the changes that are happening, and adopt policies that will encourage the best possible outcomes. You may have heard already of the ‘technological singularity’, which is the idea that a superintelligence will be created sometime this century, and when that happens the rate of technological progress will become so fast that ordinary humans cannot keep up. In the same way that a black hole is a singularity beyond which the laws of physics do not apply, so the technological singularity is a point beyond which the future cannot be readily understood. Well before we get to that (if we do), there may be another massive discontinuity, which I call the ‘economic singularity’. This is the point at which almost every job can be done cheaper and better by an AI than by a human. If and when that happens – and it could happen well within your lifetime – we will probably need an entirely new economic system to cope. To help us understand how artificial intelligence got us to this remarkable point in time, here are seven vignettes from its history… 1) Greek myths Stories about artificially intelligent creatures go back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. Hephaestus (Vulcan to the Romans) was the blacksmith of Olympus: as well as creating Pandora, the first woman, he created lifelike metal automatons. Hephaestus had an unpromising start in life. Greek myths often have multiple forms, and in some versions, Hephaestus was the son of Zeus and Hera, while in others he was Hera's alone. One of his parents threw him from Mount Olympus, and after falling for a whole day he landed badly, becoming lame. He was rescued by the people of Lemnos, and when Hera saw the ingenious creations he went on to build she…

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WW2 espionage: The spies who surprised me
type: item
date: 2015-11-06T15:02:17.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Bletchley Park
subject: Espionage
description: Sir Max Hastings' new book tells the story of espionage in the Second World War. Here he introduces some of the remarkable agents who captured his imagination, and reveals the momentous impact of their operations...
encoded: People who killed each other – soldiers, sailors, airmen – were the most conspicuous, yet in some ways least interesting, participants in the Second World War. Outcomes were also profoundly influenced by a host of men and women who never fired a shot. All of the belligerents waged an unceasing secret war – a struggle for knowledge of the enemy – to empower their armies, navies and air forces through espionage and codebreaking. General Albert Praun, the Wehrmacht’s last signals chief, wrote afterwards: “All aspects of this modern ‘cold war of the air waves’ were carried on constantly even when the guns were silent.” I thought I knew quite a bit about the war, but was amazed by some of the tales I encountered while researching my latest book. There was the Japanese spy chief whose exploits caused him to be dubbed by his own men ‘Lawrence of Manchuria’. And there was Karl-Heinz Kramer, a German spy in Stockholm who warned Berlin in September 1944 that the Allies were about to stage a mass parachute drop to seize a bridge over the Rhine. His forecast was ignored, and after the war it was discovered that Kramer’s supposed British informants were figments of his imagination: the Arnhem message was an inspired but wild guess. Meanwhile, one of the Soviets’ wartime spy chiefs, Pavel Sudoplatov, earned his spurs by presenting a Ukrainian nationalist in Rotterdam with a handsome box of chocolates… which blew the man to pieces minutes later. In the far east, bitter hostility between British and American secret services reached a nadir in January 1945, when USAAF aircraft shot down two RAF Liberators, apparently deliberately, because they were carrying French agents into Indochina against Washington’s wishes. The Soviet superspy Richard Sorge once said that spying should be done bravely – and that was certainly how he did it. He began his brilliant campaign to penetrate the German embassy in Tokyo in 1933 by befriending the Wehrmacht colonel who soon afterwards became Hitler’s …

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