Bletchley Park has historic links to the Jewish community which you can read about here.
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Bletchley Park has historic links to the Jewish community which you can read about here.
The current appearance of the Bletchley Park Mansion was largely the work of a prominent Jewish family from London, the Leons. Sir Herbert Leon and his family bought Bletchley Park in 1883 as a country retreat with good transport ties to London. Herbert, his wife Fanny and his four children lived here on the 581-acre estate. Bletchley Park is an example of the phenomenon later described as ‘Jewish Country Houses’ that developed in the 19th century.
Both Herbert and Fanny were born Jewish but they were not very religiously observant, and Herbert embraced the Rationalist movement. The family funded many charitable works and projects to benefit the community of Bletchley and surrounding areas including schools and the large local country fair. Sir Herbert became the MP for Buckingham in 1891 and was knighted, becoming the 1st Baronet Leon, in 1911.
The Leon family expanded the Mansion and made major alterations including the creation of the Ballroom and Billiard Room, adding the striking turret onto the roof, and moving the main entrance to the building from the south to the east side.
After Herbert’s (1926) and Fanny’s (1937) deaths, their children decided to sell the estate for development. A property developer, Hubert Faulkner, bought up much of the land and began converting it into smaller plots for housing. Whilst the Mansion and nearby land stood unoccupied in 1938, it was purchased by Sir Hugh Sinclair as the wartime base for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), later GCHQ.
Find out more about Jewish Country Houses in this article by Professor Abigail Green for the National Trust.
There was a strong contingent of Jewish Codebreakers at Bletchley Park. Many had direct family links to Germany and other European countries that fell to the Nazis.
Prominent Jewish Bletchley Park staff included Walter Ettinghausen (later Eytan) and his brother Ernest, Ernst Fetterlein, Jack Good, Harry Golombek, Samuel Gould, Peter Hilton, Michael Loewe, Max Newman, Rolf Noskwith, Jim Rose and Frank Templeton Prince. The Bogush sisters, Anita and Muriel, who worked in Block A, were local and their family frequently invited Codebreakers to share the Sabbath meal on Friday nights at their home in Duncan Street, Bletchley. There were also a number of Jewish American personnel who worked at or visited Bletchley Park throughout the war, including William Friedman, who became the NSA’s Chief Cryptographer.
You can find out more about these Codebreakers on our Roll of Honour.
Discover more about the Jewish personnel at Bletchley Park by visiting this study by historian Martin Sugarman.