The

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

Welcome to the September 2024 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast, Learning the Ropes.

The government code in cipher school employed thousands of people during the war.

These varied from Cambridge dons who'd broken codes in World War I, to machine

workers with very specific skills, to female conscripts from the three armed services. How did all

these people know what to do? As usual, at BP, the answer is a complex one. A mix of training

courses, some well-organised, others less so, developed as the organisation

grew exponentially as the war progressed. In this month's It Happened Here episode, we're

joined by Bletchley Park historian Dr David Kenyon to explore the varied experiences of new recruits

finding out how to do their job, sometimes on an organised course,

sometimes learning on the job,

and sometimes literally making it up themselves.

Many thanks to Sarah Langston for voicing our archival documents. This is Bletchley Park.

It happened here.

GCNCS, which was the government code and Cipher School, had existed since 1919, but obviously

with World War II looming, they were recruiting more and more staff as demand increased.

Can you tell us what kind of training staff were getting in those early sort of pre-World War II days? Well, the answer to that is

pretty straightforward. Basically none. I mean, what you have to imagine is that GCNCS before the war,

sort of prior to 1938 and after Denniston compiles his emergency list of staff and then you go into World War II

are two very different organisations. The early organisation from 1919, sort of for the first 20 years,

they only have 50 or 60 actual cryptographers in the organisation. And it's very much dead men's

...