March 2022

Bletchley Park is synonymous with World War Two codebreaking, but the story is much bigger than just a country house in Buckinghamshire. Making, as well as breaking codes, was within the remit of the Government Code and Cypher School but is a much lesser known part of the story.

In this extended ‘It Happened Here’ episode, we not only find out about the British efforts to create codes of their own, but also German codebreaking successes and failures. 

Bletchley Park’s Research Officer, Dr Thomas Cheetham, introduces us to the section of GC&CS creating Allied codes from the sleepy surroundings of a university college in Oxford. Whist Research Historian, Dr David Kenyon, explores the numerous German ‘Bletchley Parks’ whose task it was to break those very codes.

British Codemakers and German Codebreakers, the two way traffic of the intelligence war. 

This episode features the following contributors from our Oral History Archive:

June Coppock

Sergeant Bernard Morgan

Image: Mansfield College in the mid-20th century. © Mansfield College, Oxford

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