Extra - E45 - Anthony and Michael de Grey - Cementing Family Ties

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2015

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

October 2015

The Bletchley Park Trust is reaching out to Veterans’ families, to create a worldwide community of people with a special link to this unique piece of British history. The Trust is inviting relatives of the Codebreakers to cement their family ties with the breath-taking achievements of the Bletchley Park operation during World War Two. Their names and the importance of what they did was once shrouded in secrecy, but can now be celebrated in perpetuity.

For the next six months Veterans, their families and members of the Friends of Bletchley Park have the exclusive opportunity to buy engraved commemorative bricks that will be used to build a Codebreakers’ Wall around naval codebreaking Hut 8. The opportunity to buy a brick in the Codebreakers’ Wall will then be made widely available from spring 2016.

Michael and Anthony de Grey have more family links than most to Bletchley Park, and indeed part of its World War One predecessor, Room 40. Their grandfather Nigel was a key figure in codebreaking in both world wars, and the family connections didn’t end there. In both these full interviews Michael and Anthony go into much more depth about their proud memories.

Picture: ©Bletchley Park Trust

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #Enigma, #WW2, #History, #WW1

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.
0:42.0	Welcome to another Bletchley Park podcast extra.
0:47.7	The Bletchley Park Trust is reaching out to veterans' families to create a worldwide community of people with a special link to this unique piece of British history.
0:52.3	The Trust is inviting relatives of the co-breakers to cement their
0:55.6	family ties with the breathtaking achievements of the Bletchley Park operation during World War II.
1:01.6	Their names and the importance of what they did was once shrouded in secrecy, but can now
1:06.3	be celebrated in perpetuity. For the next six months, veterans, their families and members of the
1:12.5	friends of Bletchley Park have the exclusive opportunity to buy engraved commemorative bricks
1:17.9	that will be used to build a co-breaker's wall around naval co-breaking hutate. The opportunity
1:24.4	to buy a brick in the co-breaker's wall will then be made widely available from spring 2016.
1:30.9	Michael and Anthony de Grey have more family links than most to Bletchley Park, and indeed part of its World War I predecessor, Room 40.
1:39.4	Their grandfather Nigel was a key figure in co-breaking in both World Wars, and the family connections didn't end there.
1:47.0	Michael and Anthony have both been speaking to podcast producer Mark Cotton
1:50.8	about their proud memories.
1:58.6	I'm very lucky now to be sat with Michael de Grey. Now Michael, who was your relation?
2:05.2	My relation, as far as the First World War is concerned, was Nigel de Grey, my grandfather,
2:12.1	a decoder, one of many Old Etonians chosen to decode. And so that was what he did.
2:19.8	Of course, I didn't know anything about that until 1973, all that, just after 1973, I think,
2:30.2	when either Mr. Khan or his representative who wrote the book, The Code Breakers, came to our house and asked us to identify his writing.
2:41.6	A bit of paper that he showed us was, as I now know, the Zimmerman Telegram, and it was in German, and there were letters written in English above a number of
2:55.1	the words and phrases and my mother and I were asked whether we recognised Nigel de Grey's writing
	...

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