E82 - Bletchley Park & Beyond Part 1

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 10 December 2018

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

December 2018

In the first of two episodes this month we bring you three interviews of Veterans and local people from our Oral History Archive.

Our Oral History Officer Jonathan Byrne and his team have collected over 450 interviews in the last 7 years. He tells us about a new project, being run with the support of Milton Keynes Council, to extend our archive to include local people with connections to the wartime Bletchley Park.

At the outbreak of World War 2 Val Pinker was a teenager living in Wolverton Park House. She recalls her mother’s horror at the thought of having evacuees and instead had 4 members of staff from GC&CS billeted on her for the rest of the war.

Gwendoline Herbert was not only a local but after an interview with her headmistress, started work as a civilian in the Transport Section at the home of the code breakers.

Betty Lawrie’s memories of her time working for The Foreign Office at Bletchley Park are as clear as day, including her part in getting a grandmother of a future Royal pickled.

Image courtesy of Mrs Betty Lawrie.

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2, #OralHistory

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.
0:43.2	Welcome to the December episode of the Bletchley Park podcast. Welcome to the December episode of the Bletchley Park podcast, Bletchley Park and Beyond. This month, we're celebrating our oral history project. Seven years and 450
0:50.6	interviews in, our volunteers are still heading around the country, gathering new insights with each
0:55.7	veteran we interview. We sat down with Jonathan Byrne, our oral history officer, for an update on the
1:01.6	project, and the latest on the stories we're finding from beyond the park.
1:16.8	Jonathan, we're celebrating seven years of our oral history project this year.
1:23.5	We are. Time has flown and we've now recorded over 450 interviews with veterans of Bletchley Park and its outstations.
1:27.1	That's fantastic. And how many volunteers do we have working with us now?
1:28.6	We have about 20 volunteers helping me with the interviews and the transcripts. And of course, many of those volunteers
1:32.4	work in the park in other areas like stewards and guides. Marvelous. And that helps us to cover
1:37.9	all of the UK? And not quite. We have to travel a little bit occasionally, but certainly
1:42.8	the volunteers that I do have are perfectly willing to travel beyond their immediate area.
1:46.9	So we've certainly interviewed right up in the north of Scotland and the opposite end of the country at Bannon-Kornwall, so we don't do too badly.
1:53.9	That's wonderful.
1:55.0	And you mentioned we're up to 450 now, so we're still finding veterans to interview?
2:00.3	Yes, we are. Almost certainly every month now,
2:03.3	we hear from at least one veteran or their immediate family who we hadn't known about before,
2:08.4	who's still alive, wonders if we're interested in hearing from them at all. So of course,
2:12.5	we go back and say, yes, we certainly are and tell them about the recognition that veterans have,
2:16.6	such as the badge from GCHQ and Freedom of Blochley Park for ourselves. And they're usually delighted to be interviewed
2:21.6	as well when we do this. And their stories are just adding more and more to what we know about
	...

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