Catherine has kindly offered to organise this event in memory of her mother, who would have been 100 this October. She worked 3 years, night duty, in The Mansion at Bletchley Park, and used her French & German language skills along with the decoding training they gave her.
This Zoom talk, lasting one hour, will be given by Dr David Kenyon, Research Historian at Bletchley Park, the Second World War code-breaking site in Buckinghamshire, now a museum. He will talk generally about Bletchley Park and will include the importance of language skills in the code-breaking effort.
Dr Kenyon is responsible for historical research in support of all public content at BP – exhibition material, tours, web information and broadcast items. He also appears as a spokesman on TV and radio. His latest book, Bletchley Park and D-Day was published by Yale University Press in 2019.
He has worked on and appeared in many historical TV and film projects such as the Trench Detectives series on History channel, and the Spielberg film production of Warhorse. He also worked as an archaeologist and is a leading UK expert on the archaeology of the First World War. His book Digging the Trenches was published in 2008.