Elizabeth Marshall - A Very, Very Secret Place

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2014

⏱️ 4 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

May 2014

When Elizabeth Marshall, nee Tatham, was recruited to Bletchley Park in 1944, she was told “This is a very, very secret place. You must never breathe a word of what you do here.”

Every one of the ten thousand or so men and women who worked for the Government Code and Cypher School, a mixture of military and civilians, was sworn to lifelong secrecy. During a visit to Bletchley Park, Elizabeth recalled “We were told ‘your family and your friends must not know.’ We sat there absolutely agog, wondering what we had let ourselves in for.”

Her parents died soon before the veil of secrecy was lifted in 1974. She says “I was absolutely horrified, I don’t mind telling you. My great friend rang me up and said ‘Have you heard, they’re talking all about Bletchley. It’s all over the papers.’ I said ‘What! We were told never to talk about it.’ I still find it extremely hard to take in that everything that was locked in my head for so long is now common knowledge.”

You can hear the full interview with Elizabeth in the May episode of the Bletchley Park Podcast

https://audioboo.fm/boos/2149628-the-bletchley-park-podcast-e22-a-very-very-secret-place

The Bletchley Park Trust is dependent on Veterans themselves and their relatives to register for their rightful place on the Roll of Honour. The Trust is also in a race against time to gather Veterans’ memories first hand in its Oral Archive.

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/news/v.rhtm/FindaCodebreaker-719559.html

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #ww2veteran, #enigma

Transcript

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0:00.0	I went to Mill Hill at the beginning of November, 1944.
0:09.0	That was the basic training then, and I spent just under a month there,
0:14.0	and then I was sent to Blisley.
0:17.0	I mean, it was just P5, that's all we knew. And we came in, and I'm sure it was that room with the dome.
0:25.0	And there was an old gentleman sitting at an enormous desk, and we were sent in in twos, and we were told, this is a very, very secret place.
0:35.3	You must never breathe a word of what you do here or what you see must never
0:41.1	leave these premises. Your family must not know. Your friends outside must not know.
0:47.7	We sat there. A-cong. Yes, yes, yes, sir. What do we let ourselves sit for? We whispered.
0:54.7	Anyway, eventually somebody took us to a hut.
0:59.6	Well, I was basically a filing clock.
1:02.0	I was the youngest in the office, and there were three of us who came in,
1:05.2	knew myself and Pat Sames and Gene Webb.
1:09.9	And the head of the office, Rose Church, a formidable lady.
1:15.9	And her sort of co-head of the office was a Mr. Big, B-I-W-G. And a corporal in the
1:24.2	intelligence corps, who I think was a boffin straight from Cambridge. A corporal,
1:29.9	and I mean, he was a professor, and we only knew him as James. But he seemed to spend
1:34.4	his time in a small room rather like a cupboard, dealing with something he called the cuckoo.
1:42.3	And nobody seems to have heard of that, but I think it must have
1:45.4	been some kind of machine for, well, dealing with decoding preps or something like that. The glimpses
1:52.1	one got of it, which was really only when he opened the door and came out and opened the door and went
1:56.4	in. My memory of it was a large sort of combination between a tall fridge freezer and a large filing cabinet with a sort of open front.
2:06.6	But remember, this is 70 years ago nearly.
	...

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