Milton Keynes

Hard to believe this is my last week in Milton Keynes. Besides all the experiences and friendships gained whilst living here, there still remains a number of things to see and do right in my backyard. This week I set my aim at seeing and doing as much as possible before moving to London.

Friday, Mazars held a "Tax Away Day" where all tax professionals around the UK assembled to discuss emerging trends, strategy and results of the region. I thought it was a nice forum, an idea I will bring back to DHG.

After tax away day I was able to take in my first rugby game - the Northampton Saints are top in the premier league. Rugby players over here are known as the biggest and baddest in sports. As apposed to American football with all the pads and dancing. These guys were beasts, no doubt about it, the sport gained some respect in my eyes. We had some nice seats 2 rows off the pitch(field). You could hear the collision of bodies.

The Scrum

Following my night out, I did some exploring around Milton Keynes. I set out to see the site where the British code breakers deciphered some of the first German messages in WWII.  The site, Bletchly Park is just a few minutes outside MK. Some interesting things I learned from the day there:

-Bletchley Park was the site of the Axis powers main decryption establishment
-The site (once the estate of a wealthy London stock broker) was chosen for its proximity to the rail lines to London, and it sat conveniently between Oxford and Cambridge where it gleaned its talent
- Pigeons were dropped in battle to take the intercepted German encrypted messages back to Bletchly park(what!?) Dropped with parachutes they would return to Blechly Park to start the decoding
-The Germans used "Enigma" machines (shown below) to encrypt messages throughout WWII.  The adapted typewriter was used out in the field to scramble messages with over 100 million combinations. The key combinations to the enigma machines changed daily at midnight
-At the height of the operations at Bletchly Park, there were 8,000 people working there, mainly women.  They worked in three, 8 hour shifts, round the clock.  Around D day, they deciphered over 18,000 messages in one day
- Without the machine below, called the "Bombe" invented 1939 by Alan Turing, cracking the German codes would have been impossible. The machine, the precursor to the modern day PC, quickly went through the 100M+ combinations used in German Enigma messages



The main house at Bletchly Park

Interior at main house

Enigma Machines

The Bombe

To close my weekend I did a little more exploring around the city of Milton Keynes. I was told by numerous folks that I HAD to check out the concrete cows. I thought it was a joke. By chance, this weekend I stumbled upon the display in a large outdoor mall in Milton Keynes. It was not the Taj Mahal by any means, but the story behind it did contain some significance - Milton Keynes was an established city by the government of England to promote urban sprawl from London. The artist poking fun at the preconceived notion of the new city held by commentators who had never seen the place, that it would consist entirely of concrete pavements where once there were fields, and where its deprived children would need models to know how real cows once looked.

Look at this beautiful collection:

Concrete Cows