E26 - Walking Among Them

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2014

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

September 2014

This month we bring you a special episode of the Bletchley Park Podcast, from the Annual Veterans' Reunion.

2014 is a landmark year for Bletchley Park, marking not only 75th anniversary of the Government Code and Cypher School getting its vital war work underway, but also the completion of £8 million worth of much-needed restoration, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. At this year’s reunion many of the Veterans saw those renovations for the first time.

Bletchley Park's CEO, Iain Standen, brings the Veterans up to date on the work that's been carried out in phase one of the restoration of Bletchley Park and answers their questions about the future of the place that's so precious to them.

We also talk to the official Bletchley Park photographer, Shaun Armstrong, about capturing history in the making. He's documented the entire restoration, Project Neptune, over the last two years and photographed one or two members of the Royal family along the way.

Podcast Producer Mark Cotton and Roving Reporters Kerry Howard and Astrid Specht were also at large at this year's Reunion, talking to visitors as well as the most important guests, the Veterans themselves.

Picture: ©shaunarmstrong/mubsta.com

See more about Shaun's experience of photographing the Duchess of Cambridge and work at Bletchley Park at https://mubstablog.com/2014/06/24/hrh-the-duchess-of-cambridge-bletchley-park/

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #ww2veteran, #enigma, #Turing

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The From the home of the co-breakers and the birthplace of modern computing, this is the Bletchley Park podcast.
0:37.4	Welcome to the September 2014 edition of the Bletchley Park podcast.
0:42.3	Quite a special episode this month, we join you from the annual Veterans Reunion.
0:46.9	And it's been more popular than ever before, reflecting what a bumper and landmark year this has been at Bletchley Park.
0:54.3	In this special episode, we'll take you right inside the veterans' experience of this annual reunion.
0:59.6	Producer Mark Cotton and roving reporters Kerry Howard and Astrid Specht have been walking among the veterans,
1:05.4	as they see the transformation of Bletchley Park for the first time.
1:09.3	And as always, when veterans visit Bletchley Park, the memories come flooding out.
1:13.6	The memory's coming flooding out. I'm Geoffrey Pidgeon. During the war, I was in MI6. I joined MI6 at Wadden, late
1:43.1	942, early 43, and I served in MI6 until it became in Singapore.
1:49.3	It was handed over to the Foreign Office and called diplomatic wireless service.
1:53.8	The whole unit broke up.
1:55.7	It became really divided into Her Majesty's Government Communications Centre, and that was at Handslope,
2:03.2	and the rest of the chaps went down to GCHQ at East Coat.
2:06.8	So you were working with the people in MI6, who were setting up the wireless station here
2:12.5	back in the beginning of the wall?
2:14.7	No, I knew the people, simply because they live with us in 1939, but I wasn't
2:20.9	here. But I do know from them and first-hand knowledge how this was originally set up. And it started off
2:28.4	with some of these naval chief petty officers that were in my book and some of the Philco wireless people who had worked with
2:35.7	Richard Gambier Parry. Richard Gambier Parry was head-hunted by Sinclair some months before
2:42.0	he bought Bletchley Park. And his role was to head up a new communication unit for SIS. And first and foremost, he upgraded their places at Barnes.
	...

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