Extra - E17 - Capt. Jerry Roberts MBE Full Interview

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2013

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

February 2013

In this episode we have the full interview with Captain Jerry Roberts, who was today (28/02/13) awarded an MBE by Her Majesty The Queen in honour of his 4 year campaign for more recognition for Alan Turing, Bill Tutte and Tommy Flowers.

Jerry shares with us what it was like to work in The Testery breaking coded messages from Hitler, his memories of “a great man” Bill Tutte, working as a War Crimes Investigator and setting up the first Marketing company in post war South America.

Captain Roberts was one of four founding members of the Testery, named after its leader, Ralph Tester. This team was tasked with breaking Germany’s highest-level cipher system, Lorenz, known by the Codebreakers as Tunny. Captain Roberts worked in the Testery from its inception in October 1941, after Bill Tutte made the first break into the Lorenz system, until the end of the war in 1945.

Read Katherine Lynch’s blog about Jerry’s visit to the palace http://bletchleypark.org.uk/news/docview.rhtm/686548

#Bletchleypark, #BPark, #Turing, #wonder88, #Tunny, #MBE

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.
0:37.4	Welcome to another Bletchley Park podcast Extra.
0:41.3	Senior cryptographer Captain Jerry Roberts, who worked in the testery, breaking
0:44.8	Lawrence messages sent by Hitler and the High Command, has been awarded an MBE for services
0:49.7	to Bletchley Park and to code breaking.
0:52.6	We caught up with him a few weeks ago when he reflected on his
0:55.4	war work, his career after the war and how he feels about the honour.
1:05.8	This is ITV, you understand. I have endless questions I'd like to ask you, so we'll just pick a few.
1:14.0	So let's go back to 2003 when information about Tani started to become declassified.
1:20.9	What made you sort of prick your ears up and realise things were changing and you would start
1:25.2	to be able to tell the story?
1:26.5	Well, I was quite astonished because for all that length of time, I hadn't thought about
1:34.2	blessed to bark at all. I hadn't crossed my mind. It was just something that happened in the
1:40.6	dim and distant past almost as somebody else, you know.
1:48.5	Must have taken on a sense of unreality those war years, almost,
1:53.5	within the context of the rest of your career, because it was so unusual.
1:56.0	It was very special.
1:59.4	The fact that you couldn't tell anybody about it,
2:02.2	and the fact that from what you'd seen,
2:09.5	you realised it was so confidential and so important, it was strange not to be able to talk about it, and of course I didn't. In that year 2003, my wife May knew that I'd voted
2:18.3	Blessly Park but I hadn't told of what I'd vote on
	...

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