Not Bletchley Park!

Ox and Bucks A Company drew its volunteers from North Bucks which has now been subsumed into Milton Keynes, the large new town that is the home of Bletchley Park. The Bletchley story was first revealed in a book by Frederick Winterbottom in 1974, and has continued to unfold as Milton Keynes has developed and grown. For many people now, particularly younger people, or those whose family roots are not in North Bucks, Milton Keynes and WW2 means Bletchley Park. With a few exceptions Bletchley Park people were not North Bucks people. 

The glamour, romance (and of course the success and importance)  of the Bletchley Park story has somewhat overshadowed that of modest, North Bucks working men who were a part of what has been described as one of the bravest rearguard actions ever fought by the British army. It was their bravery, together with those of a few battalions from other regiments and remnants of the French army, that enabled the successful evacuation of over 300,000 through Dunkirk back to Britain. These battalions, including the Bucks battalion had been moved into key positions that had to be defended in order to create a corridor to allow the rest of the British Army get to Dunkirk and rescue. Accounts vary, but it seems clear that no more than half of the Bucks Battalion returned in 1940. Orders were to hold the position with no surrender until the very last moment. Consequently many were either killed, wounded or taken prisoner.

Waterstones in Central Milton Keynes has lots of books about Bletchley on the local history shelves. If local history is about local people then Dunkirk by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore and The Men They Left Behind by Sean Longden on the main history shelves will tell you more about what happened to local men than any of the books about Bletchley Park.


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