E183 - 'Ladies & gentlemen, go your ways!'

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

September 2025

In 1945, Britain celebrated VE Day in May and VJ Day in August, as the war - first in Europe and then the Far East - came to an end. For the staff of GC&CS and its larger worldwide network, this meant that the vital and exhausting work they'd been doing suddenly stopped. The lives of all of them had been changed forever, but each person's experience was different.

Bletchley Park's Oral History archive is a treasure trove of Veterans' testimonies. In this It Happened Here episode, we will be digging into our sound archive to focus on how the workers reacted and what happened to them once peace was declared, in their own words. Our guide through these stories is Bletchley Park’s Research Historian Dr David Kenyon.

This episode features the following Veterans’.

Nora Copleston
Miriam Myland
Mary Kenyon
Ron Unwin
Betty Lawrie
John Statham
Betty Flavell
Fay Gold
Joan Smeaton
Gwen Page
Dot Tuffin
Kenneth Nicholson
John Moseley
Jimmy Thirsk
Rena Stewart
Mary Every
Daphne Canning
Betty Webb
Lady Marion Body
Margaret Thomas

Image: ©Bletchley Park Trust 2025

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2, #Enigma, #VEDay80, #VJDay80,

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.
0:39.0	Welcome to the September 2025 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast.
0:45.4	Ladies and gentlemen, go your ways.
0:49.9	In 1945, Britain celebrated VE Day in May and VJ Day in August, as the war, first in Europe
0:58.4	and then the Far East, came to an end.
1:01.3	For the staff of GCNCS and its larger worldwide network, this meant that the vital and exhausting
1:07.5	work they'd been doing suddenly stopped.
1:10.6	The lives of all of them had changed forever,
1:13.0	but each person's experience was different.
1:16.4	Bletchley Park's oral history archive
1:18.3	is a treasure trove of veterans' testimonies.
1:22.2	In this It Happened Here episode,
1:24.4	we'll be digging into our sound archive
1:26.4	to focus on how the work has reacted
1:28.6	and what happened to them once peace was declared in their own words.
1:33.8	Our guide through these stories is Bletchley Park's research historian, Dr David Kenyon. David, our previous episode
1:48.5	This is Bletchley Park.
1:55.6	It happened here.
2:00.0	David, our previous episode covered the events that led up to Vijay Day and the final surrender
2:05.8	of Japan and the end of World War II.
2:09.2	Now, if we take ourselves back to September 1945, there's going to be a lot of changes to a lot
	...

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