E147 – Oral History 2023

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2023

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

January 2023

The Podcast Team wish all our listeners a Very Happy New Year.

To start the 2023 season of the podcast, producer Mark Cotton sits down with Oral History Officer Jonathan Byrne to catch-up on both our Roll of Honour and our continuing Oral History Project.

For the rest of the episode we have highlights of 3 selections from our Oral History Archive. As with previous years we have a theme … but this year the theme is unusual, they are all from people who didn’t work at either GC&CS or its Outstations. We hear from the 14 year old girl who made vital deliveries to the Codebreakers, a member of S.O.E., the Special Operations Executive and finally a Luftwaffe Radio Operator.

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

Jean Barratt
Lois Barefield
Rudi Schoberl

The Bletchley Park Roll of Honour can be found at:

https://bletchleypark.org.uk/roll-of-honour/

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

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The From the home of the codebreakers and the birthplace of modern computing, this is the Bletchley Park podcast.
0:40.7	Welcome to the January 2023 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast
0:44.5	Oral History Catch Up
0:46.5	I'm sat here
0:48.9	on a very blustery day at Bletchley Park
0:52.3	upstairs in the mansion
0:53.9	and we thought to start off
0:56.2	the 2023 season of podcasts, we'd sit down as we did last year with our oral history officer
1:03.9	Jonathan Byrne and have a bit of a catch-up with Jonathan on how everything, role of honour and
1:09.8	oral history is going. Happy New Year Jonathan.
1:12.5	And you Mark, thanks. Good to be back. Now, this time last year, we were sat, I think, down in
1:18.7	Block A, weren't me? I think we were upstairs, weren't we? That's right. I remember it well,
1:22.8	yes. It's been a big year for Bleckley, obviously. The Intelligence Factory opened.
1:26.9	Great for your role,
1:28.7	because so much of that has come from what you've been doing for the last 10, 11 years, 12 years.
1:34.5	That's right. It was very gratifying, I think, with the right word, to see so much of the work that
1:39.2	my volunteers and I have done reflected in the exhibition where the visitor can actually listen to the voices of the veterans talking about their work and life at Bletchley Park and elsewhere.
1:49.9	And it's that contact that you and the volunteers have with the veterans that then brings in those other items, isn't it?
1:56.0	You know, documents and the number of times I've listened to interviews where, you know, they'll say, oh, I've got this.
2:01.4	That's right. Yes. Veterans have been very generous at some case donating or maybe loaning,
2:07.4	allowing us to copy photographs and documents. So we're still very much interested in those
	...

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