Where Fiction and Reality Meet

Over the last few days, we have had three occasions where fiction and reality more or less overlapped.

Highclere Castle

Highclere Castle

Thursday, we went to Highclere Castle, which is the film location for Downton Abbey. The castle is one of England's most beautiful Victorian Castles set amidst 5,000 acres of spectacular grounds. The castle is in the Jacobethan style and the park was designed by Capability Brown. Located in Hampshire about 5 miles south of Newbury, Berkshire, it is the actual home of the Carnarvon family which has lived at Highclere since 1679. Alternatively, in the TV series, the castle is used to portray the fictional Yorkshire country estate of the aristocratic Crawley family and their servants in the post-Edwardian era. During the tour of the castle, we visited the fictitious bedrooms of "Lady Sybil" and "Mary" which, in reality, are some of the Carnarvon family's bedrooms. While we have lots of photos of the grounds, photography was prohibited in the castle itself. However, we got a good idea about how the real family lives and, of course, we all know the story of the Earl of Grantham and the rest of the Crawley family.

Bletchley Park

The Huts where the
Codebreakers worked

The Mansion at Bletchley Park

Work Stations in one of the Huts

Friday, we had another convergence of reality with fiction when we visited Bletchley Park. Located in Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, this was the site of the United Kingdom's Government Code and Cipher School which, during the Second World War, regularly penetrated the secret communications of the Axis Powers – most importantly the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers. The official historian of World War II British Intelligence has written that the intelligence produced at Bletchley shortened the war by two to four years, and that without it the outcome of the war would have been uncertain. The site is now an educational and historical attraction memorialising and celebrating those accomplishments.

The story of Albert Turing and Bletchley Park was, of course, depicted in the 2014 movie, The Imitation Game. Turing was a British pioneering computer scientist, mathematician, logician, and cryptanalyst. He was highly influential in the development of computer science and created the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. In 1952, however, the police arrested Turing on charges of 'gross indecency', an accusation that would lead to his devastating conviction for the criminal offense of homosexuality - and his subsequent suicide. At the time, little did officials know they were actually incriminating the pioneer of modern-day computing. The movie provides an intense and haunting portrayal of a brilliant, complicated man. At Bletchley Park, we saw the official document signed by Gordon Brown apologizing to Turing posthumously for the way he was treated. The real question is what else would he have conceived or invented if his life had not been cut short. He was only about 42 when he died.

The Black Country Living Museum

In the Village with Clair, Harriet and Esme

Saturday, while we were staying in Birmingham, we visited the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley. I'd heard about this place from my friends, Mena and Trevor, and wanted to see it for myself. It is an open-air museum of rebuilt historic buildings in. The museum occupies 105,000 square metres (26 acres) of former industrial land partly reclaimed from a former railway goods yard, disused lime kilns and former coal pits. Opened in 1978, the museum preserves some important buildings from around the Metropolitan Boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell and Walsall plus the City of Wolverhampton. These buildings are mainly in a specially built village. Most buildings were relocated from their original sites to form a base from where volunteers portray life in the period from the 1850s to the 1950s. In addition to visiting the buildings, you can ride on old trams and trolley buses, attend a lesson in a school classroom at it would have been taught around 1919, ride on canal boats into the mines, and visit a "fun fair" from the early 20th century. It was interesting to experience this "step back in time" and it showed us all the reality of how difficult life would have been in the mining villages in the Black Country at that time.