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Post by Deleted on May 28, 2018 11:53:46 GMT
Spending the day here, learning details about the UKs code breaking efforts during WW2. As it's bank holiday there's a lot of interesting additional material on show including contemporary dressed volunteers and exhibitions.
Not sunny but dry and moderately bright.
Drove down last night. Atrocious weather gave me a headache but thanks to Waze I managed to avoid jams. Wedding in Luton Hoo tomorrow afternoon, so hope the sun shines in the happy couple.
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Post by Deleted on May 28, 2018 20:58:12 GMT
Excellent, truly excellent. The place gives a great understanding of what they did here and what like was like. At £18.50 a person remarkably good value. Free audio guide, free walking tour (the human guide was clear, concise, interesting and easy to hear and listen to) and good exhibitions. The ticket means you can come back for free durinv the next 12 months.
Strongly recommend it if you have a day spare. Even on Bank Holiday when it was busy we got round most things without feeling pressured or rushed.
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WDB
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Post by WDB on May 30, 2018 9:52:15 GMT
Absolutely! We went there two years ago, amusingly with Boy1's German exchange partner. We thought it might take two hours; we were there for five and still had to drag ourselves away leaving things unseen. Deutscher Junge loved it too.
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Post by bromptonaut on May 30, 2018 20:20:22 GMT
Barely half an hour's drive from here. Just need to get around to it
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Post by Humph on May 30, 2018 21:02:15 GMT
You know what occurred to me just the other day was that a few of the oldest teachers I encountered at school ( I went to the same school from age 5-18 ) had served in the First World War and many of the others were WW2 veterans. Which, all in all, makes me feel quite old. One of them had a crooked leg because, as he put it, he'd had to get out of his Spitfire before it landed as it was getting a bit warm in there.
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Post by Deleted on May 30, 2018 21:10:19 GMT
My history teacher was also a pilot in WWII. And when he taught me he was 8 years younger than I am now.
I are depress.
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Post by WDB on May 30, 2018 21:13:57 GMT
Yes. I’m not as old as Humph - obviously. But Mr Milton - ‘Dozy’, as we unkindly called him - who taught me maths, badly, for a year, had been bomber crew 40 years before. Not sure which bit of RAF training taught him to light his pipe and put it back in his pocket, but it happened more than once.
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Post by Humph on May 30, 2018 21:36:17 GMT
Yes teachers did mostly seem to have nicknames then. Apparently not so common now. One that sticks in my mind was Mr Caw who was of course known as Rookie, and another who was known as Huck or Huckleberry despite his surname bearing no relation to the Twain character, never did find out why.
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Post by WDB on May 30, 2018 21:52:08 GMT
My favourite - nickname, not teacher, although he wasn’t bad at all - was Mr Chorley, who taught me French. He arrived when I was already at the school, and turned up on his first day in lurid checked trousers. We called him Rupert from then on.
Only years later did it occur to me that he might have done this on purpose - to prompt a nickname that he could live with rather than risk what happened to ‘Poof’ (yeah, different times) and ‘Toad’.
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Post by Deleted on May 30, 2018 22:58:18 GMT
>> ‘Poof’ (yeah, different times) and ‘Toad’.
When I think back to some of the nicknames we used to use for friends and teachers then my toes curl. We certainly meant no harm, but in retrospect I do wonder if the owner of the nickname was quite so comfortable with it - and I rather suspect that sometimes they were not.
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Post by Deleted on May 30, 2018 23:22:23 GMT
... One of them had a crooked leg because, as he put it, he'd had to get out of his Spitfire before it landed as it was getting a bit warm in there. Sounds like a geography teacher we had for a year. He rode a Norton Commando with the gearchange modified so that he could change gear by hand. It was a steel rod from the 'box ending in a handle alongside the fuel tank. I can't remember what nickname we'd given him but it was probably cruel. Our French teacher was a nasty bastard called Eustace who delighted in putting folks in detention especially if, like me, you lived miles away and would miss your bus home. He was un-imaginatively called "useless". We did however know where he lived and apparently he experienced quite a few "Free 7 day home trial" products that he hadn't ordered. One teacher who never got a nickname was our maths teacher. She was a chubby 50-something year old who drove a Triumph Vitesse ragtop and wore a pillbox type fur hat with a little bobble on top. We called it her landmine. She was such a brilliant teacher that I never heard anyone call her anything other than Mrs I'Anson.
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Post by Deleted on May 31, 2018 6:13:33 GMT
Rob, you didn't go to MGS by any chance. Sure we had a teacher called Eustace way back when....
We had a chemistry teacher called Orrell who had a large mole on one cheek. We called him Spot.
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Post by Alanović on May 31, 2018 9:41:37 GMT
I had a French teacher in prep school called Mr Boardman, who had been a WWII pilot. He had a luxurious handlebar moustache, with curled up ends, which he would twist pensively as he recited the conjugations of the French verbs with great relish. Esperer was a particular favourite. J'espère, tu espères, il espère......
Maths teachers were the main brutes in my experience, one we called "Sossie" Sanders for some reason, another called Hunt with the obvious adaptation used by many under the breath. He managed to break a boy's ribs by throwing him against an old fashioned radiator for the crime of walking down the wrong side of the corridor. In an act of protest my sister's boyfriend then rode a motorcycle down that corridor and of course got expelled. Ah, genteel Windsor. Bit of a family tradition, my Dad was expelled from the same school but he never told me why. A secret taken to the grave but I suspect it was simply for smacking someone in the teeth, being as he was the school boxing champion.
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Post by commerdriver on May 31, 2018 10:55:28 GMT
Rob, you didn't go to MGS by any chance. Sure we had a teacher called Eustace way back when.... We had a chemistry teacher called Orrell who had a large mole on one cheek. We called him Spot. We had a maths teacher who had obviously suffered badly years before with teenage acne who was universally known, not within his hearing, as "Plook". I guess for those of us educated in the 60s having teachers or family members who had seen wartime service was fairly common., the one who sticks in my mind, a quiet old lady who had trained as a primary teacher with my mother, died in her late 90s a few years ago. She had always sat quietly while others were discussing their wartime service memories. We found out about 10 years before she died that she had manned a listening station recording intercepted messages to be passed to Bletchley for breaking, she never used to discuss it all the time we had known her, since the early 60s, because "We were told in the 40s it was secret and not to talk about it"
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Post by Deleted on May 31, 2018 18:16:48 GMT
I think its fascinating how people not only kept shtum for years, but kept being shtum even after the story was out in the public domain and people were being feted for their efforts.
Also like with all things famous, the extent of the site of Bletchley is far smaller than you expect for a facility where there were at least 3,000 people working at any one time (three shifts of 3,000 people per day). You can walk briskly from one end to the other in about five minutes.
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