E85 - Drama at Bletchley Park

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2019

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

February 2019

This month we leave the code breaking behind and focus on what became an important part of the Off-Duty time for many of the staff at GC&CS during World War 2.

Working long shifts and being far from the bright lights of London and other major towns, the staff of Bletchley Park organised much of their own entertainment. As early as 1940 the management recognised that the staff needed diversions to fill their down time and encouraged the organisation of many of these.

With a staff drawn from so many clever and gifted people it wasn’t long before there was a film society, a gramophone club and various clubs for amongst other things fencing, sculpture, architecture and Scottish Dancing. One of the most successful of these was the Bletchley Park Drama Group who between 1941-1946, staged performances of established plays and wrote their own musical reviews.

Bletchley Park volunteer steward and guide, Harold Liberty, has been researching the Drama Group over the last year and we sat down with him to find out what he had discovered. Our Veterans add some colour to the story as they fondly remember the Drama Group from interviews from our own Oral History Archive.

Reproductions of original scripts performed by Harold Liberty.

Image: The cast of Saloon Bar from October 1944

#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.
0:38.7	Welcome to the February 2019 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast, drama at Bletchley
0:44.8	Park.
0:45.8	We leave the code breaking behind this month and focus on what became an important part of
0:50.1	the off-duty time for many of the staff at GCNCS during World War II.
0:55.5	Working long shifts and being far from the bright lights of London and other major towns, the staff of Bletchley
0:59.8	Park organised much of their own entertainment. As early as 1940, the management recognised that
1:05.1	the staff needed diversions to fill their downtime and encouraged the organisation of many
1:09.5	of these.
1:15.4	With a staff drawn from so many clever and gifted people, it wasn't long before there was a film society, a gramophone club, and various clubs for amongst other things, chess, fencing,
1:21.0	sculpture, architecture, and even Scottish dancing.
1:24.8	One of the most successful of these was the Bletchley Park Drama Group,
1:28.5	who between 1941 and 46 staged performances of established plays and wrote their own musical reviews.
1:35.5	Bletchley Park volunteers steward and guide, Harold Liberty, has been researching the drama group
1:40.4	over the last year, and we sat down with him to find out what he'd discovered. Our veterans add some colour to the story, as they fondly remember the drama group over the last year, and we sat down with him to find out what he'd discovered.
1:48.9	Our veterans add some colour to the story as they fondly remember the drama group in recordings from our own oral history archive.
1:57.7	So, Harold, what first got you involved with Bletchley Park?
2:01.2	I first heard about it back in the late 1970s, thanks largely to the BBC series The Secret War.
2:08.3	Yeah.
2:08.7	And that was my introduction to a topic that grabbed me because of its sheer secrecy and apparent magic.
2:16.4	So I began to read one or two books as they came out.
	...

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