So. You thought that this weekend was all about the Jubilee? How very wrong you are, my friend. Whilst some people were standing on Westminster Bridge for six hours in the pouring rain to see a white speck which was apparently the Queen (not me, obviously – SO uncool...ahem) others were at one of the greatest events on the literary calendar: the Hay Festival.
Our very own Michael Smith, author of Six: The Real James Bonds 1909-1939, The Secrets of Station X, The Bletchley Park Codebreakers, and The Emperor’s Codes, gave a talk yesterday with Bletchley Park’s Vicky Worpole and David Cope.
They used a genuine Enigma machine to accompany their discussion on topics ranging from the creation of Enigma machines, how various codes were broken throughout World War II, including the Green Enigma broken by Dilly Knox, whose story is told in Mavis Batey’s Dilly, and how they contributed to the Battle of Britain and the D-Day landings.
As they said:
‘Bletchley Park did not win the war. The war was won largely by men fighting with the bayonet, the bullet and the bomb. But it played a critical part in ensuring that the war was won much faster than would otherwise have been the case’.
Michael even showed Billy Bragg (who, by the way, wrote the foreword for Matthew Collins’ Hate: My Life In the British Far Right) how to use a machine. Spies, musicians; it could only be the Hay Festival.