E67 - In Their Words Part 2

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2017

⏱️ 53 minutes

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Summary

December 2017

Bletchley Park’s Oral History project has been running for six years, interviewing more than 400 veterans so far. These personal testimonies capture the unique and precious memories of people who worked at Bletchley Park and its outstations.

Not only are these interviews a great source of historical facts, adding to what we know about the work carried out by the Government Code and Cypher School during World War Two, they’re also a treasure trove of lesser-known details about the processes and what life was like during that time. Adding reminiscences about food, fun and uniform to the official records of how the codebreaking was done make this truly a people’s history of Bletchley Park.

In this second part of our December episode we bring you yet more of these amazing stories. We hear from Brenda Done, a Bombe Operator stationed at Stanmore, how she was told what their work was achieving. Enid Wenban of the ATS paints a picture of the long gone outstation at Beaumanor and David Bentliff tells us what it was like for a seventeen year old to break Japanese codes.

Image: ©mcfontaine

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #Enigma, #WW2

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.
0:43.3	Welcome to part two of the December 2017 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast,
0:48.6	in their words. We've been hearing some highlights of the Oral History Project, which gathers veterans' unique and precious memories of the work and the life they had at Bletchley
0:53.9	Park and its outstations
0:55.3	during World War II. We had so many highlights after six years of this project with more
1:00.8	than 400 interviews conducted that we couldn't fit it all into one episode. So here we are again
1:05.7	with a bonus episode. Let's go back to Jonathan Byrne, Bletchley Park's oral history officer
1:10.6	with some more of his highlights from this year and the whole project.
1:21.8	Often from these interviews, we learn things we didn't know about the process and about what it was like to work here.
1:27.6	We might think with more than 400 interviews in the can that we know quite a lot about the processes,
1:32.5	but there are still surprises to be had, aren't there?
1:35.3	Brenda Done's interviews, probably an example of that,
1:37.9	where she talked about being given more background information than you might think a bomb operator was.
1:43.7	Yes, that was interesting
1:44.9	because we hear generally, wherever people work, that they were not given the full picture
1:49.4	of what they were contributing to for security reasons. But Brenda Dohn, who again involved
1:54.4	quite a long journey by the interviewer this time, by Pam Wignall going to Cornwall. And as an
2:00.8	aside, Brenda was already a star
2:02.5	of YouTube before we interviewed her because her daughter produced a rather nice little film
2:07.5	which you can find, I'm sure it's linked to her role of honor entry, talking about her time
2:11.4	as a bomb operator at Stanmore. But what Brenda told us was that they did actually have
	...

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