Wrens billeted at Wavedon Manor near Bletchley Park ©Bletchley Park Trust

At a casual glance, Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire resembles any other sprawling country Victorian house that might have been owned by a wealthy businessman: in this case stockbroker Sir Herbert Leon. When Bletchley was purchased in 1938 by the Head of Secret Intelligence Service, the estate quickly went from outdoor country pursuits, to become the nerve centre of Britain’s war: the top-secret headquarters for Britain’s Government Code and Cypher School. Bletchley quickly developed into a place where the nation’s most brilliant mathematical minds toiled alongside cryptographers, debutantes, dons, and factory workers on complex problems with world-wide resonance. Historian Sinclair McKay will reveal the day-to-day life at Bletchley, and the activities of the extraordinary men and women who toiled in secret on the estate—secrets they kept for the following decades. Winston Churchill told them proudly, on a visit to the Park in 1941, that they were “the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled.” Based on first-hand interviews of surviving code-breakers, Mr. McKay will also describe the entertainments and furtive Bletchley romances that helped ease the pressures faced by operatives as they worked to decipher German coded messages. Finally, he will chronicle how the estate was abandoned, nearly demolished, and almost became a supermarket, before being heroically saved as a museum.

Sinclair McKay writes for the Daily Telegraph, the Mail on Sunday and The Spectator. He is a literary critic for the Telegraph and the Spectator. He has published extensively on Bletchley Park and codebreakers in his books, The Secret Life of Bletchley Park, The Secret Listeners, and Bletchley Park Brainteasers. Among his other books include Dresden: The Fire and the Darkness (2020) and Meeting Churchill: A Life in 90 Encounters (2023). His upcoming book St. Petersburg: Sacrifice and Redemption in the City That Defied Hitler, is due to be released in October 2025. He lives in London’s East End and can – in theory – walk along the Grand Union canal towpath without interruption to Bletchley Park some 48 miles north.

Tickets: $15 members*; $25 non-members
*Membership discount applied automatically when logged into your Royal-Oak.org account