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The Welcome from the home of the codebreakers and the birthplace of modern computing.

This is the Bletchley Park podcast.

Welcome to the March 2023 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast, Bletchley Park Poetry.

To celebrate World Poetry Day, 21st March, we've been looking into the poets and poetry

of Bletchley Park. We've chosen nine poems to feature on this episode

and they'll be read by staff, volunteers and Bletchley Park veterans. We've got Dr Thomas Chiton

with us who's been digging into the archives to give us more information as we listen. Tom.

It's about time we did poetry at Bletchley, isn't it, really?

Yes.

Anyone who knows anything about Blatchie Park knows this place had a thriving cultural scene during the war.

So we know about the drama group, the music society, ballroom dancing in the mansion and all of these things.

But alongside these organised activities, there were sort of lots of low-level individual ways that people sought to understand their lives at Bletchley.

And one of these was poetry.

And I find it really interesting how the character of the place, this unique institution and the wartime situation, of course, and often it's the absurdity of the contrast between the

informal atmosphere here and the very formal way you fight a modern war, which seems to have been

such fruitful inspiration for poetry here. And what I also find fascinating is there was definitely

a shared cultural identity at Bletchley. Even though you've got this compartmentalisation,

you're not allowed to know what your colleagues are doing in their own offices.

Certainly among the more senior and more skillful staff, like those cryptanalysts and

intelligence officers who might know a bit more about what's going on, they do have a shared

identity. They understand this was a strangely diverse organisation they're part of, and they have a

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