Meetings and Events Reports
13 Jul: Ian Currie - Droughts, Deluges and Dust Devils. 300 Years
of SE Weather
What an enthusiast! Ian has an encyclopaedic memory for facts and figures relating
to all things meteorological. His love of the subject started in 1956 when as
a boy he witnessed an amazing lightning storm. He now writes books and articles
for magazines and papers, broadcasts, gives talks and forecasts especially for
farmers and vintners.
His talk was illustrated with photos, both recent and not so recent, of extreme weather situations such as the floods in Lynmouth, caused by a very heavy downpour onto already saturated moorland; the East coast floods in the 1950s when many lives were lost due to a combination of high tide, wind and a tidal surge; a bus driving through snow in Tunbridge Wells in high summer; floods in Boscastle when an incredibly large volume of water fell from a relatively small cloud onto this small west country town in a narrow valley; fallen trees and damaged buildings the result of the 1987 hurricane which crossed this region during the night; the dried up reservoirs in the 1976 drought when, incidentally, the aquifers were still full unlike the current situation in the South East; the London fogs which persisted until the Clean Air Acts etc. etc.
He told us about the Derby Day when 100,000 spectators were caught on the
exposed Epsom race course during a sudden storm when 15 were killed by lightning
strikes; how the Thames used to freeze, sometimes as far down as Greenwich and
Londoners could enjoy skating and other amusements at Ice Fairs. He reminded
us that the winters of 1947 and 1963 had been very cold and that hot weather
records had been broken recently; that the winters during WW2 had been especially
cold adding to the general misery; that it had only rained on the first day
of Wimbledon this year and that there had been little disruption to the Test
cricket matches against the Australians last year when we had regained the Ashes.
It came as a surprise to many to learn that, during the ice age the ice from
the north pole had extended as far south as Scotland. Eskimos and polar bears
had been able to cross over the land bridge and the English Channel had been
blocked by of iceflows. Now the ice extends only as far south as 80 degrees.
As a consequence the cold northerly winds now cross only warmer sea water before
reaching our shores thus making our winters milder. In the 1950s only 7 days
a year reached 700F or more, now we enjoy over 70 days a year above that temperature.
Ian made the audience laugh with little rhymes and weather sayings. We now know that Sussex has the greatest number of tornados per square mile of anywhere in the world, that the Snowdrop Inn in Lewes was named after an avalanche which engulfed that town and that Sussex had experienced the largest hailstones, the size of grapefruits, of anywhere in England. This talk could so easily have been dry with so many facts and figures but Ian made the whole subject come alive and everyone certainly learned a great deal about the Englishman’s favourite topic of conversation “The Weather”. Incidentally, he has predicted a ‘white Christmas’. Janet Goldsmith
30 Jul: SUMMER BARBECUE
86 people enjoyed a superb barbecue and afternoon at the home of John and Harriet
Phipson. The sun shone and the breeze rippled up the valley helping to cool
us in what turned out to be the hottest month on record. Grateful thanks go
to John and Harriet for their hospitality and to John Lamplugh for his expertise
in cooking the delicious pig, to David James and Jeremy Oldershaw the sous chefs
on the next cooker (watch out you two - you might well get a promotion), to
Des and Sheila Mansfield for manning the produce stall and Celia Turner and
Madelyn Meredith on the raffle stand, to Ian Adam-Smith and his crew who ran
the bar.
Behind the scenes thanks to those members who in all the heat on Saturday and Sunday saw to the erection and dismantling of the tents, the transportation of tables, chairs and equipment and finally to those who helped Heather and me with the food preparation. This event would not have taken place without the co-ordination and willing help of the above members.
"Beware, we have someone in our sights for 2007" !! Rachel Ring
7 Oct: Society tour of Bletchley Park
The weather could not have been better for 44 members and friends gathered at
the Greyhound for an 08:00 start on a long day, discovering the fascinating
secrets of the Government’s Code & Cypher School. En route, we heard Monica
Jones relating some of the details of her time there in 1944, when she was part
of the Naval intelligence effort. Arriving on time we split in two groups
- both with excellent guides - and began the detailed programme. First a history
of the Park, from its social heyday as the home of Sir Herbert Samuel Leon through
its chequered period until bought by Admiral Sinclair for government use in
1938 as the home of the Government Code and Cypher School.
Then followed a tour round the outside of the remaining buildings on site - the original mansion, stables and garages, the post office, the wooden huts where the decoding and message analysis was undertaken, and the later brick buildings - all of which employed at peak nearly 8000 people. Civilians and service personnel, men and women - none of whom lived on site and none of whom talked outside their own work group about what they did at the Park - not to their nearby colleagues, not to their friends and families, for more than 40 years. Indeed one married couple did not discover that they had both worked at Bletchley Park until they both received invitations to the 50th Anniversary reunion.
After a welcome break for lunch - either in the café or picnicking in the
lovely grounds - the tour resumed inside the buildings. Here we were able to
put flesh to pieces of complex equipment which for most of us had just been
words - Enigma, Colossus, the bombe, the Lorenz equipment. The commitment of
the enthusiasts who have spent 12 years rebuilding [hardly a fair description
of the task, seeing that they had virtually no drawings or pieces of the original
available to them] Colossus - the first computer and BRITISH - was mindboggling.
By the end - such was the clarity of our guide’s explanations - some of us felt
we actually understood what Turing had done to achieve the decoding breakthroughs,
which - together with the invaluable work done by the Poles - shortened the
war by at least two years. By the time we were back on the coach, we realised
we were still totally baffled! MJH
Books on Bletchley Park
Those who visited Bletchley Park this month and would like to try again to understand
how the bombe worked - and those who didn’t go and don’t even know about Colossus
- may like a bit of information and review of some of the available literature.
One of the earliest - and easily readable - came out in 1978 ‘ULTRA goes to war: the secret story’ by Ronald Lewin; this covers the collection by Service Y of messages sent using the Enigma encoding machine, their decoding at Station X and the devices used for that purpose, including the bombe, dramatically developed by Alan Turing from the original Polish ideas to cope with the additional levels of security introduced by German modifications to Enigma. Lewin then goes on to look at the way the information extracted from Enigma and other sources was used throughout the war. He briefly mentions Colossus but little information was available in the public, or near-public, domain at that time. Copies are available secondhand.
Much more recently several new books have appeared, four of which:
‘Colossus: Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret’ by Paul Gannon, Atlantic,
£25
‘Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers’
edited by Jack Copeland, Oxford, £18.99
‘The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer’
by David Leavitt, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99
‘The Binary Revolution: The History and Development of the Computer’
by Neil Barrett, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £18.99
were reviewed in The Guardian of 29 July 2006 by Georgina Ferry, herself the
author of ‘A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Teashops and the World's First Office
Computer’ (HarperPerenniat).
She dismisses Neil Barrett’s short and ill-researched book The Binary Revolution as only the latest to make the entirely erroneous claim that Colossus was a machine used to crack Enigma codes and to imply that Turing was its progenitor. Colossus was needed to decipher a totally different - and much more highly encrypted - flow of messages, sent from the German High Command not by morse like the Engima intercepts but using the Baudot code - the basis of teleprinter messaging with letters being sent as groups of 5 electrical impulses, generated by the shining of light across a strip of paper with holes punched in it:
Early attempts at decoding these messages, which were referred to as FISH, sought to find relationships between two loops of high speed paper tape using a machine which became known as Robinson (after Heath Robinson) as a way of determining the rotor settings used by the Germans for that message. This was rapidly swamped by the flow of messages and a senior Post Office engineer, Tommy Flowers, constructed largely at his own expense a machine using 1500 electronic valves to make the necessary statistical calculations to exploit the underlying flaws in the way the Germans used their encoding machine Lorenz. Flowers’ machine was certainly a world first for a programmable electronic device and by the end of the war 10 Colossus machines were at work.
Georgina Ferry comments: “Not until 2000 did the government finally declassify a 500-page document called "General Report on Tunny", written at the end of the war, which spells out in some detail how Colossus worked and what it achieved. The declassification released those involved - the few who were still alive - from their oath of secrecy, and Copeland and Gannon have independently seized the opportunity to tell the full story. Both books are formidably detailed, with many technical appendices. Gannon's is readable enough if you want a single-author treatment, though it suffers occasionally from poor editing. Copeland's has the great advantage (if you are prepared to forgive some repetition) that he has gathered first-person accounts from many of the protagonists, which provide a wealth of incidental colour.”
Turning to Alan Turing, she says: “David Leavitt also champions his claim to this title [the father of the computer]. He is more interested, however, in presenting him as a lonely maverick, isolated by his fascination with machine intelligence and even more so by his homosexuality. For anyone daunted by Andrew Hodges's magisterial 1983 biography, on which he draws heavily, Leavitt provides a sympathetic novelist's take on abi-illiant eccentric. ..... Read Leavitt for a picture of the fragility of human genius; read Gannon and Copeland to feel the collective power of human minds harnessed to the cause of defending our freedom.”
And end up as your own cypher expert by visiting the website of Tony Sale, who has built the working Colossus machine at Bletchley Park: