THE 172nd luncheon meeting took place on October 24.

Birthday wishes were extended to John Bolton and notice of the skittle night on November 16 was given.

After the meal and Loyal Toast, speaker Lesley Hare began his talk. He explained he had kept the title of his speech secret because the subject was a Government secret for many years.

It concerned his wartime activity centred on code breaking at Bletchley Park, principally the breaking of the German Enigma machine code.

He explained that the Enigma was the invention of a Dutch man in 1909 and used a series of gears that gave hundreds of millions of alternatives.

The English tried without success to break the code in 1936 and the Poles also tried in 1939.

At the outbreak of war, the British assembled a team of university dons and they were stationed at the Bletchley secret location with the task of breaking the Enigma.

Listening posts were set up around the world to send information for analysis and one of their successes was the location of the Bismarck's destination in France.

This was uncovered when the Germans sent a message to a German general in France about the loss of one of his relations.

The code was finally broken when German submarine U559 was sunk.

Two brave Royal Navy men entered the sinking U-boat and retrieved the code book.

These two men had no chance to survive the sinking boat but were able to pass the codebook to a young sailor who swam back to his ship.

By breaking the code, British Intelligence was able to remove the danger of the U-boat packs in the North Atlantic and opinion now is that this success shortened the war by two years.

Finally, Les gave a demonstration on the Morse keyboard by thanking members in Morse code for their attention during his talk.

The next meeting will be on Wednesday, November 28.