The Mathematics Society had its inaugural trip on Thursday 23 June, when a group of 17 intrepid Lower Sixth students accompanied by Mr Vaccaro, Mr Burger and Miss Watson made the journey to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire to visit the remains of Station X, the home of Britain’s World War Two code-breakers.

The students were a ragtag mixture of Maths Society stalwarts, historians and future spies, while one came to see where his grandmother had worked during the war, and he was very pleased to find her name amongst the list of veterans.

After a somewhat traumatic train journey at the hands of National Rail we finally made it to Bletchley in time for lunch, when a well-informed guide talked us through the history of the stately home prior to its requisition by the War Office. However, the big story was of course the triumph of human ingenuity which led to the breaking of the Enigma and Lorentz Codes during the Second World War. Full credit was given to both the Polish and British mathematicians, and also to the large number of classicists, crossword enthusiasts, and amateur cryptographers who were drafted in to help. In particular the role of women was emphasised, for example the corset-stitchers and seamstresses who were retrained to wire the first electrical computers.

The highlight of the trip was undoubtedly the National Museum of Computing which housed a fully functional rebuild of the first ever programmable computer – the aptly named Colossus. An extraordinary mixture of the mechanical and the electrical, the machine consisted of a huge Heath-Robinson style contraption passing rolls of punched paper tape through a giant electrical processor containing over 2000 thermionic valves. It is almost incredible to believe that this huge machine is several million times less powerful than a micro-chip in the smallest mobile phone.

Our eccentric guide talked us through the function of the various components and he recounted the dramatic story of how mathematician Max Newman and Engineer Tommy Flowers built the machine, which was able to crack the formidable Lorentz cipher used to encrypt the messages between Hitler and his Generals. Most importantly it confirmed the fact that the Germans had been tricked by the decoy landing at Calais, information which allowed the D-Day landings to take place in Normandy on 6 June 1944.

Our guide would have made a perfect extra as a mad computer scientist from Monty Python. Extremely sprightly but ancient it would not be much stretch of the imagination to picture him working there during the war. He spiced up the technical aspects of his talk with various bits and pieces of wartime slang – referring to the need of the code-breakers to get inside 'the orderly mind of the Hun' and explaining how a fateful error made by a tired Radio Operative, referred to throughout as 'Fritz', led to the discovery of the secrets the Lorentz code.

After the end of the tour we had free time to explore the museum, including the atmospheric half-dilapidated huts where Turing and the other code-breakers worked. The, similarly Monty Pythonesque, display about the heroic carrier pigeons from Bletchley (Winkie and Paddy) who received the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross, The Dickin Medal for Valour, was particularly popular, as was the collection of genuine Enigma machines and codebooks housed in the main museum.

It was a fabulous day out and although we could have done with a great deal more time to explore all the exhibits fully it was a wonderful demonstration of the applicability of Mathematics to the real world. Several of our students have already been inspired to look at the various code-breaking challenges at the museum's website: www.codesandciphers.org.uk, and hopefully it will be the first of many similarly successful Maths Society away days.