KALLAWAY HELPS BLETCHLEY PARK REVEAL NEW WARTIME SECRETS
30 June 2019
Ticket sales to Bletchley Park increased by 91% following our first PR campaign since appointment for the heritage attraction the to launch its new D-Day exhibition.
The new exhibition reveals how Bletchley Park’s Codebreakers played a pivotal role in D-Day, providing vital intelligence to Allied Commanders to plan and then deliver the liberation of Europe.
The exhibition was launched during the 75th anniversary of D-Day. To secure cut through we introduced the media to its oft-unreported side of Bletchley Park: its astonishing teamwork.
When people think of Bletchley Park they tend to think of the famous Alan Turing, the man who broke the Enigma machine code. In fact, Bletchley Park was home to an unseen army of almost10,000 Codebreakers and others working around the clock on different codes and ciphers. This triumph of teamwork saw men and women of all ages, brought together from all walks of life to create an entirely new and top secret organisation. They worked in small teams or individually and almost all were unaware of how their work contributed to the wealth of intelligence provided by Bletchley Park to Allied commanders.
This tale of teamwork helped us generate 26 news and features throughout the national print media as well as live onsite broadcasts with BBC Breakfast TV and interviews across ten regional radio stations.
Examples included full-page feature in the Observer on ‘king of calm’ Eric Jones, the son of a Macclesfield textile manufacturer. When Eric joined Bletchley, he spotted the team’s in-fighting, not helped by the factory-like conditions. He made it his priority to ease tensions, knowing that team morale and collaboration was crucial to getting the job done.
At the heart of the exhibition is Bletchley Park’s new immersive film D-Day: Interception, Intelligence, Invasion. This uses newly declassified information to tell the unknown story of how one of the War’s most important turning points was won behind the scenes. Hailed by The Times as “superb”, the 12-minute film is being shown in the newly restored historic Teleprinter Building, where Bletchley Park Codebreakers received tens of thousands of enemy messages intercepted at secret listening posts across the UK.
Codebreakers honoured the secrecy of the operation for years after the war. On their first day at work, they were made to sign the Official Secrets Act 1939 that forbid them from speaking about their work to anyone outside of their own division within Bletchley Park. Deborah Lamb, who was interviewed by BBC Breakfast about her cryptanalyst parents Mavis and Keith Batey, had no idea what her mother did during the war until the Act was lifted in 1973.
You may also like...
