The Secrets of Station X cover art

The Secrets of Station X

How the Bletchley Park codebreakers helped win the war

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The Secrets of Station X

By: Michael Smith
Narrated by: Patrick Molyneux
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About this listen

Bletchley 1945: a place where nearly 10,000 people would contribute decisively to the Allied war effort. Their role? To decode the Enigma cypher used by the Germans for high-level communications. It is an astonishing story. A melting pot of Oxbridge dons, maverick oddballs and more regular citizens worked night and day at Station X, as Bletchley Park was known, to derive intelligence information from German coded messages. That they succeeded, despite military scepticism, is testament to an indomitable spirit that wrenched British intelligence into the modern age, as the Second World War segued into the Cold War.

©2014 Michael Smith (P)2014 Oakhill Publishing Europe Great Britain Military World War England Imperialism Air Force
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I am particularly interested in what went on at Bletchley Park and GCCS during the Second World War and there have been many books written in recent years by those involved. As a subject, cryptography can be a daunting matter to make understandable to most readers, but this factual book manages to do a pretty good job of it. The social dynamics are just as interesting as the cryptography - how amazing that several thousand people could keep such a secret over so many years. Also interesting is how some lauded reputations are effectively debunked, for instance Fieldmarshall Montgomery's. So far so good, but my enjoyment was considerably curtailed by this performance I'm afraid. For me, the frequent mispronouniation of familiar place names, and the amazing running together of consecutive paragraphs often left my head spinning. A description of events in Europe, for instance, running without punctuation or pause into the next chapter about events in the Pacific is one example, sadly a frequent non-sequeteur in this performance. I did wonder whether English was the reader's native language at one stage, as the words flow out in a monotonous stream on and on, without imparting sense by suitable changes of intonation,but that's too harsh. I suggest that you buy the paper book, it's much more enjoyable than this tepid offering.

Such a poor reading of a fascinating book

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great factual account but the accent of the reader was distracting. as were the unwritten pauses in the narrative.

station x

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This book was written superbly but spoilt by the narration. Patrick Molyneux is an outstanding actor who sounded far too chavvy in this particular story!

Excellent book spoilt by bad narration

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Patrick Molyneux has the reading skills of a 7 year old. One would have expected that he practiced his German pronounciation before he started reading. His voice and diction did not do justice to a great story .

Badly read

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The Bletchley story is worth reading/listening to again and again - the content of the book is great.

The reader, however, is dire. No German at all - he is painful - perhaps must strikingly by Goethe as ‘goat.’ Unbelievable that this recording was allowed into the open!

Poorly read version of a timeless story.

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