Bletchley Park

February 2021    As we did last year we have decided to release extra content again during the current lockdown and so for at least the next couple of months we will be bringing you a new show every two weeks. These will be a mixture of Oral History Specials and also our regular content as and when COVID restrictions allow us.    Last year we featured short clips from dozens of our Veterans tellin...

January 2021    As we release this episode Bletchley Park Museum is currently closed as the UK is in a national lockdown to help contain the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19). Our staff and volunteers like so many around the world are in lockdown, self-isolation or working remotely from home. Unfortunately it means the promised second part of our Q&A’s from our listeners is on-hold for now, but...

December 2020    At the end of each year we like to focus on the important work that our Oral History Officer Jonathan Byrne and his team of staff and volunteers carry out. As with so many around the world, COVID-19 has had a huge effect on the work of Jonathan’s team in 2020.   In this episode we catch-up with Jonathan for an update on the Oral History Project and he shares four more highlights f...

November 2020  For the first time since January 2020 the podcast team were able to be physically in the same room together, even if socially distanced. So to mark this return we decided to ask our listeners on social media for their questions about Bletchley Park.  In this, the first of these shows, Exhibitions Manager Erica Munro, Research Historian Dr David Kenyon, Research Officer Dr Thomas Che...

October 2020    For over 8 years the podcast has been privileged to receive help and support from the modern day version of the wartime Government Code and Cypher School, GCHQ, both as an organisation and from their Departmental Historian.    Previous listeners will know that GCHQ has a new Historian and in Podcast Episode 98, we had the honour of being able to exclusively reveal his identity when...

September 2020    This is the last of three special episodes to mark what would have been our Annual Veterans Reunion.    It was due to COVID-19 restrictions and with huge regret that Bletchley Park Trust had to take the difficult decision not to hold this year’s reunion on-site. But here at the podcast we can still celebrate our Veterans with these special episodes.   At a reunion we like to capt...

September 2020    As we explained in the last show, due to COVID-19 restrictions and with huge regret, Bletchley Park Trust had to take the difficult decision not to host our Annual Veterans Reunion onsite this year.   To continue to mark what would have been this year’s reunion, this is the second of three special episodes we will be bringing you this month, to still pay tribute to our Veterans....

September 2020  Each year, to mark the arrival of the Codebreakers to their war station in 1939, we hold our Veterans Reunion.  This is the highlight of our calendar year, and a really special occasion for all involved. Veterans can meet up with friends old and new and share stories of their vital and once top-secret wartime work. These events have taken on even more meaning in the past few years,...

August 2020 Nearly 3 months after VE Day, the war against Japan still continued. Its end would be drawn out over 6 weeks between the Potsdam Declaration in July and the final signing of the surrender on-board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September the 2nd.  During those weeks the world saw the use of a new weapon, the atom bomb and both Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be totally destroyed before...

July 2020    As COVID-19 struck we decided to start releasing these extra episodes to give you our listeners something extra each week while you were in lockdown. We are glad we could share so many previously unheard recordings that we just hadn’t been able to before and hopefully these shows have helped you through these extraordinary times, if even in a small way.    Over the next few episodes w...

July 2020    Bletchley Park is an independent charity and so we rely on the ticket sales of our visitors for 95% of our operating costs, but another way to support the museum is to become a Friend of Bletchley Park.    As a friend of Bletchley Park you not only get our normal free unlimited year-round access to our heritage site and museum, but a range of other benefits including exclusive events,...

July 2020    In this episode we are staying with Dermot Turing & his wider family. First we go back to a very cold day in March 2015 when more than twenty members of Alan Turing’s family gathered at Bletchley Park to pay tribute to their famous ancestor. The Imitation Game had been released only a few months earlier, so to have so many Turing’s in one place, at the same time, meant the worlds...

June 2020    This week we return for the second and final time to the 2018 launch of Dermot Turing’s book, X, Y and Z: The Real Story of How Enigma Was Broken. It’s a story of international cooperation, spanning many years and for the first time tells of how the French, British and Polish secret services came together to unravel the secrets of the Enigma machine.   At the launch Dermot was joined...

June 2020    The breaking of the German Enigma machine wasn’t just down to the Codebreakers at Bletchley Park and it didn’t start with the outbreak of World War Two. It’s a story of international cooperation, spanning many years and who better to tell it than the nephew of Alan Turing.    In this, the first of two episodes, we return to 2018 when Bletchley Park hosted representatives of the Polish...

June 2020    This week we return for the last time to the Bill Tutte symposium that was held at Bletchley Park in 2017, the centenary of his birth.    In this episode we bring you the closing address of the day given by our then Chairman, Sir John Scarlett. But before that we have the final speaker of the day, the BBC’s Security Correspondent, Gordon Corera, here for the first time in full.   The...

May 2020    We return in this episode to the Bill Tutte symposium that was held at Bletchley Park in 2017, on the centenary of his birth. Again we bring you one of the many talks given that day, but for the first time in full.   Bill Tutte’s breaking of the Lorenz machine led to the Codebreakers at Bletchley Park being able to read the messages being sent between Hitler, the German High Command an...

May 2020    In this episode we stay with the attack on the Lorenz code that Bill Tutte played such an important part in, with a first-hand account.   Captain Jerry Roberts worked with Bill Tutte in The Testery cracking, what they called Tunny, the German High Commands code, used by Hitler & his top Generals. Jerry tells us what it was like to work in The Testery, why breaking Tunny was so impo...

May 2020    In this episode we again return to the Bill Tutte symposium that was held at Bletchley Park in 2017, on the centenary of his birth.    As a member of the Bill Tutte Memorial Fund Claire Butterfield had by 2017 spent 4 years campaigning for more recognition for the little-known mathematical genius. For the first time we can bring you Claire’s entire talk that opened the day and in it sh...

May 2020 After more than 5 and a half years of fighting, 75 Years ago today the war in Europe officially finally came to an end.  To commemorate the day we present this special It Happened Here episode. Using archive recordings and interviews with our Veterans from both our official Oral History Project and nearly 8 years of podcasts, we hope to take you back to the heady days of early May 1945. 2...

May 2020 Since first marching into Poland on the 1st September 1939, the German army had conquered most of Europe. But the tide had turned and, as April 1945 began, they were caught between the Western Allies and the vast Red Army of the Soviet Union. The inevitable end was finally in sight, but not before multiple surrenders were signed. For the Codebreakers of Bletchley Park, after more than 5 a...

April 2020    Many of Bletchley Park’s senior early war staff had cut their codebreaking teeth during World War One. In 2015 we opened an exhibition called The Road to Bletchley Park which looked at the work of Room 40 and MI1B. So following on from our previous Intelligence Insight we will be sharing again some interviews with the families of these famous Codebreakers of both conflicts.   Dillwyn...

April 2020    Over the years we have been very fortunate to welcome the families of some of our more famous Codebreakers for a visit to Bletchley Park. The families always have such an immense pride in their ancestors and the work they did for GC&CS and it’s always an honour for the podcast to sit down with them for our listeners.   Following on from our last podcast, Invasion Norway, where we...

April 2020  In early 1940, as winter turned to spring, the world waited for the ‘Phony war’ to end with the expected German attack in the west. But the leaders of both Allied and Axis forces were looking in another direction, to the north, to the snow and the steel, to Scandinavia. Meanwhile in a wooden hut at Bletchley Park, recent recruit Harry Hinsley was certain a German fleet was preparing to...

April 2020    2017 was the centenary of a relatively little-known genius who went straight from studying mathematics at Cambridge to codebreaking for the Government Code and Cypher School. The crucial role that Bill Tutte played in the attack on the system used by Hitler and his high command, Lorenz, not only broke it but also helped paved the way for the creation of the world’s first large-scale...

March 2020    Bletchley Park Museum is currently closed as a precautionary measure to help contain the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19). Our staff and volunteers like so many around the world are in lockdown, self-isolation or working remotely from home.   Bletchley Parks CEO Iain Standen said “This isn’t the first time that Bletchley Park has operated at unprecedented times of national crisis and...