Antiques Roadshow expert amazed by Enigma machine at GLT Show

Mark Smith was one of the seminar speakers at the 2025 Group Leisure & Travel Show which took place on Thursday 2nd October at Arena MK. 

After his talk about battlefield tours, during which he shared several moving stories, Mark spotted the replice of the incredible Enigma machine on Bletchley Park’s stand. 

He told us: “I didn’t expect to come to the Group Leisure & Travel Show and see the machine that probably helped us win the Second World War. It has been a real treat because Enigma really was the key to what we did.

“Without Enigma, and the way that we cracked it, we would never have landed on D-Day in the way that we did and the Second World War genuinely would have seen a completely different outcome.” 

Bletchley Park was one of many exhibitors at the GLT Show promoting visits and offers to groups. They also had a competition for visitors to win a cuddly code-breaker bear. 

Top secret for so long

Mark added: “Bletchley Park is a fantastic museum; it’s so fascinating and so complicated that you are in awe of people like Alan Turing who took a row of letters and turned it into a proper message and the thinking behind that is just incredible.

“When you actually start to learn the story of how they did it and the girls who took down the messages and the fact that they changed the code at midnight every night, it’s incredible. The girls copied it down and Alan Turing had cracked it by about 4am. It is just phenomenal what they did there and so secret.

“There’s that wonderful story of the lady in the 1970s who said to her husband that she was going out for dinner on Friday night. He said ‘oh, so am I’ and they wished each other a nice time and off they went. They both went to the same dinner at Bletchley Park  because they both worked there but neither of them had ever told each other that they were working there.”

So what was the value of the machine? Mark said: “The replica one is still going to be expensive because it is an incredible piece of equipment but I was told earlier in the year that there was a real one up for sale and it was half a million euros.”

Our opportunity to tell the story of people who worked there

Christina Farley, marketing and communications officer at Bletchley Park, said the Enigma replica machine had received a lot of interest throughout the show and told us: “Mark was clearly interested in it so he decided to come and have a proper look. 

“We were talking about the complexities of the machine; how many different settings there were on the machine that the people of Bletchley Park were decoding using pencil and paper.

“They had to invent a computer to break the code so we were talking about how amazing the story of Bletchley Park is and how people should come and find out more about what happened. Almost 9,000 people worked there and kept the secret for so long and this is our opportunity to tell their story.”