E33 - Rescued and Restored

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2015

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

April 2015

This month we take you into our new Hut 12 Exhibit; Rescued and Restored, showcasing historical treasures found during the transformation of the Huts and Blocks. When conservation specialists were brought in to rescue fragile, derelict buildings as part of the much needed first phase of restoration, little could they know what they might find. In the cracks between roof beams in Hut 6 they discovered folded pieces of what appear to be scrap paper, with mysterious notes scribbled on them. Among them were the only known examples of used Banbury Sheets ever found. The system invented by Alan Turing was used to help deduce the daily Enigma settings, before the process was mechanised by the development of the Turing Welchman Bombe.

Maths comes to life at Bletchley Park and that’s why the 2015 Milton Keynes Maths Challenge final was held there. Students from secondary schools pitted their wits against each other in a series of timed challenges. At the sound of an air raid siren, the groups dashed from one puzzle to the next, winning prizes including chocolate eggs, scientific calculators and shopping vouchers. The podcast takes you inside the minds of the competitors with members of Bletchley Park’s Education team.

Pat Davies joined the Wrens in 1942 at the age of 19, in a bid to avoid being sent to join a ‘crowd of jolly girls’ from the Foreign Office at a place in Buckinghamshire called Bletchley Park, where her mother thought she should go. Pat wanted to go to sea, but it wasn’t to be as she was given the task of intercepting naval messages from a key vantage point on the south coast. Pat stopped for a chat with the Bletchley Park Podcast in the Block C cafe when she brought some old friends for a visit. Pat talk’s about her wartime service and her post war career working as a television producer.

Picture: ©Bletchley Park Trust

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #AlanTuring, #Enigma, #WW2Veteran, #History

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

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.
0:43.5	Welcome to the April 2015 edition of the Bletchley Park podcast, rescued and restored.
0:52.0	This month will take you behind the scenes of the new exhibition showcasing historical treasures found during the transformation of the huts and blocks.
0:55.9	We'll test your grey matter along with that of local math stars as they take up the Milton Keynes Maths Challenge.
0:59.4	And we meet a woman whose mother wanted her to join a jolly crowd of girls
1:02.9	from the Foreign Office at Bletchley Park,
1:05.1	but she wanted to go to sea.
1:07.3	Pat Davies ended up intercepting vital messages at listening stations before going on after the war to produce a very well-known quiz show.
1:15.9	But first, when conservation specialists were brought in to rescue fragile derelict buildings as part of the much-needed first phase of restoration of Bletchley Park,
1:25.8	little could they know what they might find. In the cracks
1:29.1	between roof beams in Hutt 6, they discovered folded pieces of what appeared to be scrap paper,
1:35.1	with mysterious notes scribbled on them. Among them were the only known examples of used
1:40.2	Boundbury sheets ever found. These, along with other treasures, are now showcased in a new
1:45.8	exhibition in Hutt 12. I had a look round with Bletchley Park's Director of Learning and Collections,
1:51.6	Victoria Warpole. Approaching the original entrance to the site that leads out to Wilton Avenue,
1:58.2	you'd never notice Hutt 12, I think. It sort of nestles in the trees.
2:02.6	But now it's home to a fascinating new exhibition. Let's go inside and have a look.
2:11.5	Vicki, what can you tell me about what we're looking at? Well, this is an exhibition put together by
2:16.1	our curator, Gillian Mason, and we decided we needed to tell the story of the restoration because as we say quite often, we treat our buildings as part of our collection.
2:28.5	And so how we restored them was really important. But interestingly, along the way, we found all sorts of items which we thought
2:35.3	would be of interest to our visitors because they show the growth and change of this site over
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Bletchley Park, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Bletchley Park and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.