The acclaimed Living Archive Band performs a selection of their original local songs with snippets from the Bletchley Park archive, to celebrate the code-breaking, computer-creating achievements of the people who worked at ‘BP’.
The Living Archive Band plays Bletchley Park!
A special benefit concert to raise funds for Bletchley Park
Sunday 21st March 2010 8pm in the Bletchley Park Ballroom
A special fund-raising performance for Bletchley Park by the Living Archive Band made possible by the Heritage Lottery Fund project New Communities delivered by Living Archive, Milton Keynes.
To book tickets for this event please visit our online ticket office
The acclaimed Living Archive Band performs a selection of their original local songs with snippets from the Bletchley Park archive, to celebrate the code-breaking, computer-creating achievements of the people who worked at ‘BP’.
The concert includes songs about the local railway – so important for BP workers with Bletchley on nationally crucial railway crossroads, as the particulars for the sale of Bletchley Park Mansion recorded in 1937:
‘The Mansion adjoins the Railway Station for Bedford and Oxford and is an important Railway Junction on the London Midland & Scottish Main Line from London to Rugby, Birmingham, Crewe and the North.’
There are also songs about the local villages, the farming communities, the unchanged lives of the people with whom BP workers were billeted – in and around nearby Wolverton, Newport Pagnell, Stony Stratford and beyond. They reported:
‘All the little red houses looked the same and were very drab.’ ‘Haversham… had absolutely nothing except a minute pub frequented by elderly farm labourers and railwaymen. When we entered, silence fell - everyone glared at these strange middle-class young women who dared to show their faces in THEIR pub...’
Some songs focus on the hardship of lean times:
‘I was told that I could have a bath on Mondays but discovered I had to carry upstairs pails of stinking hot sludge from the boiler in which my landlord’s railway overalls had been washed’...
‘The loo at the bottom of the garden shocked me to the core.’
Other songs deal with the unique demands of wartime:
‘A lot of concentration was needed and speed was continually impressed upon us - thousands of lives could be saved. This constantly hung over one’s head, which made for a great deal of pressure… ‘There was no room for slipshod work’..
And there are songs about Bletchley’s renaissance just after the war, following the Abercrombie Report of 1944 which identified locations around London for new homes.
The Songs have all been composed by local musicians inspired by the dozen or so large-scale community musical documentaries devised by Roy Nevitt, Roger Kitchen and Rib Davis, and produced by Living Archive. As well as brand new songs receiving a first airing in this concert, also featured are songs from these documentaries:
All Change: the coming of the railway to the Milton Keynes area
Bigger, Brighter, Better: the story of post-war Bletchley’s expansion
Sheltered Lives: inter-war life in Wolverton and New Bradwell
The Jovial Priest: the life and times of an eccentric local priest.
Worker By Name: the life of a Stony Stratford man in the early 20th century
The Readings come from the vast archive of documentary material collected by Living Archive recording the lives of local people since the middle of the 19th century: letters, photographs, newspapers, journals, log-books, diaries, taped reminiscences from over 1200 hours of interviews (
www.livingarchive.org.uk). There are also extracts from the book based on the BP archive, Bletchley Park People by Marion Hill.
The Band has consisted over the years of a shifting assemblage of local musicians coming together to write and perform music for plays, concerts and radio broadcasts. The present line-up has performed together since 2004 and features :
Kevin Adams: guitar, mandola, vocals
Brad Bradstock: vocals, guitar
Paul Clark: bass, vocals
Marion Hill: vocals
Sue Malleson: vocals, spoons
Don’t
miss this unique opportunity to support Bletchley Park
… and to enjoy the special heritage of Milton Keynes people
in song!
