E55 - Unique and Precious Memories

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2017

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

February 2017

This month we celebrate the unique and precious memories being gathered in Bletchley Park’s Oral History Project.

Jean Kotchie was a Royal Navy Wren who worked on the noisy, smelly Bombe machines which helped speed up the daily race against time to find the Enigma settings on hundreds of networks, so that messages could be deciphered in enough time to make the intelligence operationally pin-sharp. Hers is a story of oil stains, monotony and exhaustion in the rural outreaches of the home counties; hardly what she had in mind when joining the Navy to do her bit for the war effort. It wasn’t all fun for Jean, and she looks back on a dark chapter in her young life to help future generations understand what happened.

Also in this episode, the baton of celebration is passing down the generations as more and more families of Codebreakers visit Bletchley Park to absorb the atmosphere and learn more about what their ancestors achieved.

One such proud family is the Hinsleys, whose parents met there during World War Two. On 7 June 1940, Harry Hinsley warned the Admiralty that German battle cruisers were about to emerge from the Baltic. His advice was ignored, and the next day the Scharnhorst sank the carrier HMS Glorious. This was but one moment in a highly distinguished career at Bletchley Park and beyond, including becoming the author of the official history of British Intelligence during World War Two.

Image: ©mcfontaine

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #Enigma, #WW2,#Veteran, #History

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.
0:38.5	Welcome to the February 2017 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast, unique and precious memories.
0:47.5	I'm Charlotte Webb, a Bletchley Park veteran, and I'm joined by the podcast host and producer Catherine White and Mark Cotton.
0:57.3	Welcome Betty. In fact, that's the name we know you by, although Charlotte is your proper name.
1:02.4	Is Betty a nickname? Is that from childhood?
1:04.4	It's because I was actually christened Charlotte Elizabeth, and then my mother noticed
1:09.4	on the family tree in 1700 something that there
1:12.5	was a betty and she thought it was rather nice to use that as a well. Oh wow. Why have one name
1:17.4	when you can have tea? So we're talking today about Bletchley Park's oral history project.
1:22.5	It's recorded now nearly 400 veteran interviews and these are quite in depth. Each one is unique and precious.
1:29.6	Everybody has their own set of memories and of course they cross over, they intertwine and
1:33.7	they build a jigsaw puzzle, if you like, of what happened at Bletchley Park and its outstations
1:38.7	during World War II. And it's important to mention when we talk about this that it is still going strong and we want
1:45.9	it to keep going strong. So if you know anybody who might have worked at Bletchley Park or one of
1:51.3	its outstations do encourage them to get in touch and register for their oral history interview.
1:57.1	Mark, oral history really is what got you into this in the first place and made you want to start
2:01.1	this podcast. Yeah, we're doing exactly what the core story of Bletchley is, isn't it,
2:06.0	which is to tell the story of the people who worked at Bletchley Park between 1939 and 1945,
2:10.9	and what better way is there than have the people tell their own stories in their own words,
2:16.3	you can't get better than that,
2:17.5	can you? It's going back to primary source, isn't it? If you're talking about research and you're
	...

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