2022 - A Trip to the United Kingdom
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The Hendersons 2022 - A Trip to the UK - Milton Keynes |
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2022 - A Trip to the United Kingdom |
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6 August 2022 Saturday A very long
drive today, from Linlithgow to
Milton Keynes, so nothing particularly interesting to record. We had booked a
hotel called the Pear Tree, which was next to a marina connected to the Grand
Union Canal. Our neighbors were a family of swans, mom,
dad and three teenagers. We walked to a pub,
Ye Olde Swan. Dinner was fine except it was really noisy. 7 August 2022 Sunday We spent the day at Bletchley Park. What an amazing place.
We had a guided tour led by a very well informed Yank who now lives in the UK.
When it became clear that war with the Nazis was inevitable the government
assessed their ability to monitor communications and concluded they were ill
prepared to deal with the needs of the nation, so they consolidated code breaking
at Bletchley. They started with a few hundred code breakers, but by VE Day there were
up to 9000 people who worked shifts so there was work 24 hours a day. Code
breakers lived in the towns nearby, not at Bletchley.
Working conditions were pretty bad as the huts that had been built were
crowded, hot in the summer and cold in the winter. The attention to detail was
amazing. For example there were motorcyclists whose riders collected transmissions from
other locations and brought the papers to Bletchley. The odometer readings were
recorded and the guards knew how many miles the cycles should have taken and any
deviation was investigated.
Bletchley was instrumental in planning for D Day, including
trying to convince Hitler that the invasion would take place at Calais, not
Normandy. The allied troops had very good intelligence of the defenses employed
by the Nazis which undoubtedly saved many lives, although the casualties were
horrifying. There was an excellent film explaining the efforts at
Bletchley during the D Day preparations. As it was Sunday there was some entertainment on the Green,
singers in WWII uniform singing popular tunes from the age. Tom and I enjoyed
singing along with them.
Our guide recommended a couple of books which I noted for
future reading. We asked one of the staff when Bletchley had been set up as a
museum and were told that the property had been unused for many years after the
war, but in the late 1990s a group of veterans of Bletchley had raised the idea
of reviving it. Doing so took some finagling such as having the trees declared
essential so the estate couldn't be developed into a housing development. To
some extent this reminds me of what happened with the canals – they were
abandoned and fell into disrepair until citizens became aware of how important
they had been to the development of industry in this country. We returned to our hotel and walked to Ye Olde Swan for
dinner. The hotel was OK but I found the signage irritating, ‘don’t
do this, make sure you do this’. It was very institutional. 8 August 2022 Monday Originally we were supposed to turn the car in by about 10
am, but Tom called Enterprise and they agreed to let us keep the car until the
late afternoon, so we went to Oxford for the day. We had booked a walking tour
but when we saw how many people were on the tour we concluded that we wouldn’t
be able to hear and understand the guide who was masked and had a heavy accent,
so we walked around the very busy town for a while, saw a few things and then
drove to Heathrow and checked into the Thistle which is close to Terminal 5, our
departure terminal. We had dinner in the hotel then prepared for the long flight
to Houston. 9 August 2022 Tuesday Not much to say except that the plane, a 787, was packed –
not a spare seat. The flight was almost all in daylight hours, but Tom asked a
crew member about the windows – turns out that the crew have the means to darken
the windows through some sort of magic so they can darken the cabin without
having to lower the shades. Back to Houston, heat and humidity. |
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