Bletchley Park

September 2018

During World War Two more than 10,000 people worked for GC&CS either at Bletchley Park, it’s Outstations or connected branches both Civilian and Military. This gives us a wealth of different stories to be able to tell and in this second visit to this year’s Reunion we will bring you 3 more exclusive interviews with our Veterans.

Sergeant Stanley Clegg served from 1943 till 1945 in the RAF and with Special Liaison Unit 8 in North Africa, Italy and France. His fascinating story includes Jockeys hiding from the Germans and having to give up his nice warm palace for a tent. 

Watching London being bombed early in the war gave Pauline Lee “a huge surge of patriotism” and after an interview at the Foreign Office her prayers were answered and she found herself at Bletchley Park for the next 4 years.

Finally we hear how seventeen year old Tom Howie thought joining the RAF would be his route to escape working on a farm, but a failed medical and a visit from a man from Montrose, sent him off to London for secret work for the Radio Security Service monitoring German radio transmissions.

Many thanks to our roving reporters Sarah Langston and Kerry Howard for this episode.

Image: © Will Amlot for the Bletchley Park Trust

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2, #Veteran, #OralHistory

September 2018

Every year, close to the anniversary of GC&CS staff first arriving at Bletchley Park in 1939 we invite our Veterans and their families back to celebrate their vital war work. It’s our favourite day of the year at the Museum and it allows us to share their amazing stories with our listeners.

This year also coincides with the 80th anniversary of the formation of the Auxiliary Territorial Service or ATS, the woman’s branch of the British Army during World War 2. To celebrate, our Veterans were given a sneak peek at our new ATS pop-up exhibition.

In this, the first of two episodes this month, we will take you to this year’s reunion and listen in as Betty Webb and Mary Watkins reminisce about their time in the ATS, the gas masks, the knickers and how it changed both their lives.    

Also we hear from Doris Moss, who arrived at Bletchley in 1942 after escaping the German advance in Belgium two years earlier and went on to break both Italian & Japanese codes.

Finally actress and drama teacher Elizabeth Davies tells us how she was plucked from Balliol College Oxford to help crack Japanese Naval Codes.

Image: © Will Amlot for the Bletchley Park Trust

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2, #Veteran, #OralHistory

August 2018

This is the second of two episodes this month.

In this It Happened Here episode we’ll be taking you further back than our normal 75 years, this time to September 1938.

Twenty years after The Great War, the clouds of conflict were once again looming across Europe. Hitler threatened Czechoslovakia and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Germany to try to avert war.

At the same time in Buckinghamshire, at an unassuming, recently purchased country house, activity was stepping up. On the 18th of September, a group known today as Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party arrived at Bletchley Park. The cover story concealed their true purpose - a dress rehearsal for war. The 150-strong shooting party were staff from the Government Code and Cypher School and the Secret Intelligence Service, testing out a move to their War Station.

Our Research Historian Dr David Kenyon delves into this part of our story to reveal recently discovered facts about the origins of codebreaking at Bletchley Park.

Image: ©Bletchley Park Trust 2018

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2

August 2018

This is the first of two episodes this month.

In August 1943 at the Quebec Conference the Allies began the initial discussions for what would ultimate become Operation Overlord, the invasion of France in 1944. So it seems fitting that 75 years later Bletchley Park have released the plans for what will be an exciting new exhibition opening in spring 2019.

D-DAY: Interception, Intelligence, Invasion will tell the story of the vital role that GC&CS played in informing the D-Day invasion, it will introduce the people involved and show how different kinds of intelligence were used by the Allies to enable the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944 with precise detail.

In this episode we will take you behind the hoardings of The Teleprinter Building. Our Research Historian Dr David Kenyon tells us how the restoration has revealed a wealth of new insights into the buildings and Exhibitions Manager Erica Munro explains why this story is so important.

Image: ©Bletchley Park Trust 2018

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2, #D-Day75

July 2018

This month we swing a shoe, meet the artist exploring the layers and fragmentation of the Bletchley Park story and hear from a Foreign Office clerk who thought she was going to be a spy.

Hear what happened when Bletchley Park played host to a Guinness World Record attempt at the largest swing dance lesson. The swing dance club, JiveSwing, led the couples, many of whom who’d turned out in their best vintage gear, in a half hour lesson followed by a three minute dance, to take a crack at the record.

Mary Kenyon had visions of being a sultry secret agent when she was called up to a mysterious sounding job at the Foreign Office in 1943. But she was sent to Bletchley Park where she collected and collated messages, working alongside the luminary codebreaker Asa Briggs. Mary recalled her vital war work in Hut 6 when she told her story to Bletchley Park’s Oral History Project in 2014.

Also in this episode, we meet Sally Annett, an artist whose vision is brought to life in a new exhibition in Block B. She explores the themes of fragmentation and layers - as they apply to the way the Government Code and Cipher School was organised, and makes a nod to the people whose contribution is not recorded in the Roll of Honour, because neither they nor their families have put their names forward.

Listen and swing along to all the above, in this month’s episode.

In memoriam, Mary Kenyon (1922-2017)

Image: ©Bletchley Park Trust 2018

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #Veteran, #WW2, #SwingDance

June 2018

This month it’s all about 007. Bletchley Park has opened a new exhibition in historic Hut 12, featuring memos, letters and personal photographs of Ian Fleming, a fantastic collection of Bond novels through the decades and original, specially commissioned works by talented and innovative artists, inspired by scenes, themes and characters from Bond novels.

The Bond creator and author, Ian Fleming, worked in Naval Intelligence during World War Two, and had close links with Bletchley Park. He was the right hand man of the head of Naval Intelligence, so he had the highest level of security clearance. Not only was he allowed to know about the existence of messages intercepted and deciphered by the government’s top secret code and cipher school, he was on the even shorter list of people who were allowed to actually read the messages as well.

Fleming’s war work undoubtedly inspired his creation of Bond the character, and the dramatic scrapes he got himself into - and out of. We explore that connection in this episode with insight from the hugely successful author Anthony Horowitz whose second Bond novel, Forever and A Day is out now and he came along to help launch the exhibition. We also look into how Fleming was connected to Bletchley Park in more detail with our research historian, Dr David Kenyon and meet some of the artists who’ve helped immortalise moments from the stories.

So pour yourself a martini and immerse yourself in the story of the world’s most infamous spy ...

Many thanks to Penguin Random House UK for the use of extracts from the audiobook of Forever and A Day.

Image: Goldfinger by Magnus Gjoen

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #JamesBond, #WW2, #ForeverAndADay

May 2018

The Bletchley Park story is about more than Enigma. A different kind of traffic was also coming over the airwaves, being intercepted and mined for crucial intelligence. But it was generated by an even more fiendishly complex system than Enigma, which was itself believed to be unbreakable. Lorenz was the machine being used by Hitler and his high command to send top level, strategic messages. It was less portable and more secure than Enigma, but that didn’t defeat the boffins at Bletchley Park. They cracked this code too, code naming it Fish, and assigning individual fish names to links between different command posts and cities. The decision to establish a special section to mechanise the laborious process of cracking the machine’s ever-changing settings proved to be crucial in giving Allied commanders a glimpse into the highest-level decision making.

It wasn’t just a breath-taking achievement to break into this system and read the top secret messages; this newly gleaned information had a huge impact in the field of battle. The battle of Kursk in 1943 was a triumph of advance knowledge, courtesy of intercepted and successfully decrypted Lorenz messages. Germany planned to cut the Russians’ ability to advance, by weakening its forces significantly. But the Russians were warned, thanks to Ultra intelligence. The Battle of Kursk became Germany’s last great offensive on the Russian front.

We explore how Bletchley Park became able to share Ultra intelligence directly with US commanders in the field on the same basis as the British. American General George Patton was the first to benefit from this, receiving intelligence directly during the invasion of Sicily in July 1943. We tell this story with help from Bletchley Park’s Research Historian, Dr David Kenyon.

Image: ©shaunarmstrong/mubsta.com

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #Enigma, #WW2, #Lorenz

April 2018

A brand new exhibition telling the story of the Bombe machines has opened in Hut 11a, where they were housed during World War Two.

Hundreds of Bombe machines were made and operated at both Bletchley Park and its outstations. This exhibition tells the story of how this incredible technological breakthrough came to be, and the stories of the people whose ingenuity and hard work made them both a reality and a success.

This episode takes you to the official opening of the exhibition, by Bletchley Park’s Royal Patron, HRH The Duke of Kent KG. We met the Veteran Bombe operators Brenda Abrahams and Jean Marshall, Reg Young who built the machines and Margaret Bullen who worked in the Newmanry.

We also hear from the Polish Ambassador to the UK, Arkady Rzegocki, who was an honoured guest at the launch, along with the Polish Deputy Foreign Minister, Bartosz Cichocki and Olga Topol from the Jozef Piłsudski Institute in London. They were there to celebrate the story of the Polish mathematicians whose breathtaking pre-war achievements in breaking Enigma gave the Government Code and Cypher School a huge head start, once war broke out.

Also in this episode, we hear how important this new exhibition is in the ongoing restoration of Bletchley Park, from the staff who created the new exhibition, Chief Executive Iain Standen and Trustee, Sir John Dermot Turing, whose uncle, Alan Turing, along with Gordon Welchman, invented the Bombe.

Image: ©Andy Stagg

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #Enigma, #WW2, #Poland

March 2018

From the attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944, to orders to shoot dead any German soldier seen fleeing Riga as a cowardly traitor, the Hut 3 Headlines tell a story of World War Two in tiny snippet form. They were succinct summaries of Enigma messages sent by the German army and air force, intercepted and deciphered by Bletchley Park. These messages were then boiled down to the barest essentials to be sent to the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.

He’s reputed to have wanted to know everything that was happening, and it’s well established that he was a firm proponent of the power and importance of signals intelligence. But no one man could have waded through the mass of information flowing through the Government Code and Cypher School, let alone a prime minister in the middle of an all-out war. So the Hut 3 Headlines became regular, and sometimes frequent, digests of what he needed to know.

Bletchley Park has been digitising these precious documents and now, for the first time, has published a batch of ten, online. In this It Happened Here episode, we get the stories behind the headlines, with help from Bletchley Park’s Research Historian, Dr David Kenyon. We also meet Denis Falvey, one of the dedicated team of volunteers diligently digitising this precious archive and Florence Morgan-Richards, Bletchley Park’s Digitisation and Archive Assistant, who runs that project. We also take you inside the Archive to meet Senior Archivist Guy Revell, who explains why it’s important they’re not kept hidden away.

Special thanks go to Mr Ben Thomson for playing the part of our Hut 3 Intelligence Officer in this episode.

Image: ©Bletchley Park Trust 2018

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #Enigma, #WW2

February 2018

Is Bletchley Park about codes, machines or people? Of those, the most fascinating stories come from the people who did this incredible job, and then kept it absolutely secret, for at least another 30 years.

Their memories are precious and it’s crucial that we capture as many as we can, so that future generations can read and listen to their first-hand accounts of not only their amazing achievements, but what life was like during those defining years.

A new exhibition in the glorious Garden Room in the Victorian mansion, Veterans’ Stories, celebrates the Oral History Project by showcasing extracts.

In this episode, we meet Pat Field, who broke Japanese codes and translated messages, right at the end of the war. We also hear from Joan Ireland, a civilian who was set to work on Type X machines, the British answer to Enigma but had to dodge pigs, horses and Italian Tenors just to get home.

Image: ©Pat Field - Performing in The Importance of Being Earnest at Bletchley Park during WW2.

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #Enigma,  #WW2