Bletchley Park

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Latest Episodes:

E165 - D-Day80 Part 2 Overlord Jun 05, 2024

Show notes

June 2024
To commemorate the 80th Anniversary of D-Day, we will be releasing 3 special episodes to tell the full story of The Longest Day. This second part is a complete remastering of our original Overlord episode with the addition of much new content.
80 years ago today, more than 150,000 Allied troops were boarding planes, gliders and landing craft as they prepared to invade Fortress Europe in Operation Overlord, the Normandy Invasion. Meanwhile, 200 miles away in the Buckinghamshire countryside the Codebreakers of GC&CS were also ready and waiting.
Naval Section spent the day decrypting German messages and forwarding that vital intelligence to Allied commanders, in many cases only two and a half hours after the German operators had sent them.
Today at Bletchley Park our Archive holds hundreds of these handwritten decrypts and using a selection of these we tell the story of The Longest Day. Our Research Officer, Dr Thomas Cheetham & Research Historian, Dr David Kenyon will be your guides, with the help of 12 of our Veterans’ memories from that eventful day.
This episode features the following from our Oral History archive:
Margaret Bryant
Colette Cook
Jean Tocher
Pat Davies
Norah Brierley
Eric Dodd
Stanley Clegg
Kenneth Case
Gordon Rosenberg
Jimmy Thirsk
Aileen Hasdell
Pam Harding
Many thanks to Dr Ben Thomson for voicing our archival documents.
Image: ©Bletchley Park Trust 2024
#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2, #D-Day80,

E164 - D-Day80 Part 1 Tide of Victory May 24, 2024

Show notes

May 2024
Over the next 6 weeks, to commemorate the 80th Anniversary of D-Day, we will be releasing 3 special episodes to tell the full story of The Longest Day. This first part is a complete remastering of our original Tide of Victory episode with the addition of much new content.
This first episode takes us to the south coast of Britain which, in May 1944, resembled one huge army camp as over 2 million men waited for D-Day. In the Buckinghamshire countryside the staff at GC&CS carried on feeding detailed and crucial intelligence to the Allied forces that would play an integral part in the success of the upcoming Operation Overlord.
The Western Front Committee was established at Bletchley Park in October 1942 and for the next 18 months built up a comprehensive picture of German forces in the West, recording every unit, its location and its strength.
From February 1943 the committee began to produce reports of which over 450 pages are now held in our archives. Head of Content, Erica Munro and our Research Historian, Dr David Kenyon use these to illustrate how the various departments, using multiple sources, came together to create the vital information that the D-Day planners needed, in some cases even leading to last minute changes. Meanwhile our Research Officer, Dr Thomas Cheetham brings us the full story of a temporary Y Station set up at Bletchley Park just for D-Day.
This episode features the following from our Oral History archive:
Vera Bartram
Pat Davies
Edna Garbutt
Enid Wenban
Many thanks to Dr Ben Thomson for voicing our archival documents.
Image: ©Bletchley Park Trust 2024
#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2, #D-Day80,

E163 - The Women of Newnham College Apr 25, 2024

Show notes

April 2024
Women were the backbone of Bletchley Park during World War Two. At its peak in January 1945, the workforce was 75% female, but even at the start of the war, women comprised a significant portion of GC&CS’s numbers. Women were recruited in a variety of ways, but a significant quantity of them, particularly early in the war, were selected direct from prominent universities such as Oxford, St Andrews and Cambridge.
Over the last few years, a team of members of Newnham College Cambridge have been researching the women from their college who worked at Bletchley Park and in other wartime roles. They have discovered, astonishingly, more than 70 students and alumnae were recruited to BP. After close collaboration with the team at Bletchley Park Trust, a new exhibition presents their findings and reveals some hidden histories.
In this episode, recorded at Newnham College, Bletchley Park’s Head of Content, Erica Munro, meets the three women behind this new research and we visit the exhibition to find out more about their discoveries. Dr Sally Waugh, Dr Gill Sutherland and Newnham College Archivist Frieda Midgley share what they’ve uncovered, and what surprised them, about the Newnham women who worked at Bletchley Park.
This episode features our Oral History recordings of three of those Newnham women:
Sister St. Paul (Biddy Evan’s)
Elizabeth, Lady Reed (Elizabeth Langstaff)
Mrs Brenda Lang
Image: Reproduced with the permission of Dr John Clarke via Kerry Howard from her research into the life of Joan Clarke.
#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2, #Newnham,

E162 - Before the Codebreakers Mar 23, 2024

Show notes

March 2024
Bletchley Park is famous as the home of World War 2 codebreaking. But what was there before the Government Code and Cypher School moved in? Who built Bletchley Park, and what remains of the pre-war country estate?
In this episode, Research Historian Dr David Kenyon and Head of Content Erica Munro examine the people who made Bletchley Park their home prior to World War 2. Sir Herbert Leon and his family bought, expanded and lived in the now-familiar Mansion, stamping their individual style on the design of the building and the estate. Surviving historical records shed an intriguing light on the Leons, their philanthropy, interests and impact on the local community.
We also hear from Professor Abigail Green of Brasenose College, Oxford University, an expert on Jewish Country Houses, to discover more about the social context of the family who ‘made’ Bletchley Park.
Image: ©Bletchley Park Trust 2024
#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2,

E161 - Learning: Past, Present and Future Feb 23, 2024

Show notes

February 2024
In 2023, Bletchley Park Trust completed its biggest refurbishment project to date – a £13 million, three-phase project, to open up wartime buildings at the heart of the site for the very first time.
The final phase saw Block E, once the wartime Communications hub of Bletchley Park, transformed into two new resources – the Block E Learning Centre – which includes eight learning spaces able to accommodate learners from primary school pupils to students in higher education – and the Fellowship Auditorium, a state-of-the-art, 250-seat, presentation and event space.
In this special episode, we join Lily Dean, Learning Manager, and Vicki Pipe, Head of Audiences and Programmes, as they give us tour of the new spaces, and reveal the inspiring activities learners can enjoy as part of our award-winning learning programme. Dr David Kenyon, Research Historian, and Dr Thomas Cheetham, Research Officer, also bring to life the wartime and post-war history of this once closed off building.
Image: Learners in Block E ©Bletchley Park Trust 2024
#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2,

E160 - Colossus in Context Part 2 Jan 31, 2024

Show notes

January 2024
Eighty years ago, in January 1944, the first Colossus computer was delivered to Bletchley Park. This machine and the nine that followed it have acquired legendary status within the story of World War Two codebreaking. The machines have also been described as the world’s first large-scale electronic digital computers – direct precursors of the digital world in which we live today.
But in 1944 the computer age still lay far in the future. These machines were built for a specific and vital purpose, to assist with the breaking of the wireless messages of Germany’s senior commanders, enciphered using the Lorenz cipher machine and known at BP as ‘Tunny’.
What role did Colossus actually play in the breaking of Tunny? The Colossus machines were members of a wider family of machines, and the Newmanry – the department in which they operated - was only one of several teams at Bletchley Park, all of whom were crucial to the successful breaking of the cipher.
In this ‘It Happened Here’ episode, Bletchley Park historians Dr Tom Cheetham and Dr David Kenyon are here to place ’Colossus in Context’ and examine where exactly these machines fitted into the effort to break Tunny.
Many thanks to Dr Ben Thomson for voicing our archival documents.
Image: ©Crown. Reproduced by kind permission, Director, GCHQ
#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2, #Colossus80,

E159 - Colossus in Context Part 1 Jan 18, 2024

Show notes

January 2024
Eighty years ago, in January 1944, the first Colossus computer was delivered to Bletchley Park. This machine and the nine that followed it have acquired legendary status within the story of World War Two codebreaking. The machines have also been described as the world’s first large-scale electronic digital computers – direct precursors of the digital world in which we live today.
But in 1944 the computer age still lay far in the future. These machines were built for a specific and vital purpose, to assist with the breaking of the wireless messages of Germany’s senior commanders, enciphered using the Lorenz cipher machine and known at BP as ‘Tunny’.
What role did Colossus actually play in the breaking of Tunny? The Colossus machines were members of a wider family of machines, and the Newmanry – the department in which they operated - was only one of several teams at Bletchley Park, all of whom were crucial to the successful breaking of the cipher.
In this ‘It Happened Here’ episode, Bletchley Park historians Dr Tom Cheetham and Dr David Kenyon are here to place ’Colossus in Context’ and examine where exactly these machines fitted into the effort to break Tunny.
This episode features the following contributors from our Oral History Archive:
Jerry Roberts
Betty Webb
Image: ©Bletchley Park Trust 2024
#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2, #Colossus80,

E158 - We Shall Fight to the Last Shell Dec 22, 2023

Show notes

December 2023
Eighty years ago this month Britain was marking its fifth Christmas of the war with still no end in sight. D-Day still lay in the future and the campaigns in Italy and on the Eastern Front ground on.
However on Boxing Day 1943 the Royal Navy achieved a significant, if grim success over the German Navy, sinking the Scharnhorst, one of the few last remaining large warships in the enemy fleet. This victory would help to secure the safety of Allied convoys to Russia for the remaining 18 months of the war.
The codebreakers of Bletchley Park played a key role in helping the navy to locate Scharnhorst and were spectators on the final battle via German messages read in Naval Section at BP.
For this It Happened Here episode we are joined by Bletchley Park’s Research Historian Dr David Kenyon who’s recently published a book on the subject entitled, Arctic Convoys; Bletchley Park and the War for the Seas.
Many thanks to Dr Ben Thomson & Sarah Langston for voicing our archival documents.
Image: © Bundesarchiv, DVM 10 Bild-23-63-46 / CC-BY-SA 3.0
#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2, #Enigma,

E157 - Security & Insecurity Part 2 Nov 17, 2023

Show notes

November 2023
For our tenth anniversary episode, E141 “Security & Insecurity”, we discussed one of the most important factors in wartime codebreaking – secrecy. We looked at its effects on operations at Bletchley Park and the lives of those who worked there.
We had so much to talk about on that occasion that we didn’t have the chance to explore beyond the bounds of Bletchley Park. However, as signals intelligence travelled to the battlefronts where commanders made life-and-death decisions on a daily basis, security was a bigger problem than anywhere else.
In this follow-up episode, Research Officer Dr Thomas Cheetham is again joined by a special guest, former GCHQ Departmental Historian Tony Comer, to discuss the problems of security in the field. We’ll hear how the safe use of Ultra intelligence required good planning, flexibility and, most of all, trust.
Many thanks to Owen Moogan & Dr Ben Thomson for voicing our archival documents.
Image: ©Bletchley Park Trust 2023
#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2, #Enigma, #GCHQ,

E156 - Italian Tiebreaker Oct 20, 2023

Show notes

October 2023
The fight up the Italian peninsula involved some of the most arduous battles of the war for Allied soldiers, but they were being supported at every stage by intelligence from Bletchley Park.
Ultra intelligence helped inform Allied strategy in Italy, kept commanders constantly up-to-date about enemy forces, and sometimes proved the difference between victory and defeat on the battlefield.
In this ‘It Happened Here’ episode, Bletchley Park’s Research Officer Dr Thomas Cheetham will tell us how this difficult and inconclusive campaign can also be seen as one of the most successful of the war for Bletchley Park.
Many thanks to Dr Ben Thomson for voicing our archival documents.
Very special thanks to Lowden Jim for his recording of The D-Day Dodgers. His work can be found at www.youtube.com/Lowdenjim
Image: ©Bletchley Park Trust 2023
#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2, #Enigma,

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