The

The From the home of the codebreakers and the birthplace of modern computing, this is the Bletchley Park podcast.

Welcome to the January

2021 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast.

Oral History Special, number one.

Hello, this is Mark, the producer of the podcast.

First, can I wish all of our listeners

a very happy new year from me and all of the team.

Now, our regular listeners may be expecting the second part of our questions and answers show that we promised you for this month.

But as we record this in the third week of January, the UK is in a national lockdown to help contain the spread of coronavirus.

Unfortunately, it means it just hasn't been possible for us to record that promise second show.

I know many of you will have been waiting to see if your question's been selected,

but don't worry, because once it's safe to do so, we will bring you that episode.

For now, as we did last year, join the first lockdown,

we'll endeavour to continue to bring you new episodes of the podcast.

With that in mind, we thought back to our VE Day and VJ day episodes from last year,

which, if you remember, included dozens of very short clips from our more than 500 oral history recordings.

All of those short little clips were taken from much longer interviews. So until we can resume our normal

service over the next few episodes, it seems the perfect time to shine a light on a few of

those veterans by bringing you the full versions of those interviews in these oral history specials.

But first, before the lockdown, I sat down with Plexley Park's oral history officer Jonathan Byrne

to talk about why collecting the oral histories of our veterans is so vitally important. I'm sat here again in the archive at Bletchley Park with our oral history officer Jonathan Byrne.

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