Leon - NEW CITY

Bletchley The Home Of The Codebreakers. Today Bletchley Park is known around the world but in 1967 when an idea for a new city was put forward Bletchley Park was an enigma.

Bletchley Park and its role within World War II, Bletchley Park and it giving the world an early computer could be considered a factor when Milton Keynes is under consideration for the award of a city charter but there is far more to Bletchley Park to consider. Within this I would offer a teenager project IN SEARCH OF THE LEONS where far more than decoding was uncovered. There will not be a town or borough anywhere in the country ambitious for a city charter that will have what the teenagers from Leon School in Milton Keynes can bring forward.

As a senior member of staff at Leon School in Bletchley, Milton Keynes in 1991 I set about running a project with the students in my charge to trace the Leon Family who had given their name to our school, the Leon Family who before it became home to the codebreakers was the Leon’s estate.

In these pre-computer and internet days we started with the work of Sir Frank Markham, delved through back copies of The Bletchley Gazette and The North Bucks Times. We met and interviewed older residents who had known members of the Leon Family.

It is difficult to comprehend just how successful this project was. We reunited the family in the person of Sir John Leon Fourth Baronet with Bletchley Park, Bletchley and the new city of Milton Keynes. Sir John actually wrote the foreword to our project when we published it in a little book IN SEARCH OF THE LEONS.

I am utterly charmed that anybody would want to find out about the Leons, and fascinated and grateful that they have.

I feel strangely detached, being mainly brought up in a theatrical family, on my mother’s side. My parents were divorced and my brother and I were made wards of court, so the Leon side was hideously neglected. I only use my title at 35,000 feet, as that is what is written on my passport !

I remember my father telling me that the family came from Spain in 1790 and were seriously rich even then. Apparently they haunted the court of the Prince Regent at Brighton, presumably the Pavilion, and hobnobbed with a pretty dodgy Royal group. I do know they lived at Brighton at the beginning of the nineteenth century and were very early members of the London Stock Exchange. The fact that my great-grandfather was an enormously caring Liberal, is more than heartening, and I am much of that persuasion to this day.

So the next time I am sent a “Who’s Who Form”, Re Sir John Leon Bart.,see John Standing , it will be a double whammy as previously I had really never known who they were, and as I have recently produced three more children, the family name will now go spinning into the next century.

Thank you very much at LEON SCHOOL, I am very honoured to be associated with you in any way. Great, great good luck to you all.

John Leon

I am still in contact, via Facebook, with Sir John. I am also in contact with so many of my former Leon School students who helped me republish the book on Amazon in January 2021.

There is far more to Bletchley Park than its wartime history, there is heritage in such a big quantity. A heritage I hope can be considered in support of Milton Keynes being awarded a city charter, a heritage given to Milton Keynes by a special group of teenagers their like I doubt will be found in any other borough under consideration.