Wartime Britain - Dogfights & Double Agents

We spend all day exploring Bletchley Park, where we will discuss the history and the ingenuity of the code-breakers who worked in this, the centre of the Government Code and Cypher School. It is estimated that the so-called Ultra intelligence gathered in this Victorian country house, separated from the outside world, shortened the war by at least two years. With the development of Colossus, the first programmable electronic digital computer, the work carried out here also paved the way for the digital world that followed the war. We will visit the huts where the Enigma and Lorenz cypher machines were cracked, as well as the National Museum of Computing housed in Block H, the latest of the huts built in Bletchley which housed a number of Colossus computers developed by Tommy Flowers. Dinner will feature a special guest presenter.

This day is dedicated to the fateful Battle of Britain whose success helped to determine the outcome of the war. We start in Stanmore, at the Bentley Priory Museum, once an Augustinian priory, subsequently an estate designed by Sir John Soane and the headquarters of the RAF Fighter Command during the Second World War. Here we explore its role during those fateful summer and autumn months in 1940 during the Battle of Britain, when ‘the Few’, the fighter pilots under the command of ACM Sir Hugh Dowding, spearheaded the defence against the German attacks. After lunch, we travel to Uxbridge where we visit the Uxbridge Battle of Britain Bunker which housed the RAF Fighter Command’s No. 11 Group Operations Room Bunker and was the nerve centre of the Battle of Britain. We will explore this remarkable piece of living history, as well as the museum of the Battle attached to it.