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New museum Audio tour brings life to Second World War Secret Organisation charged with setting Europe ablaze

Visitors to the Combined Military Services Museum (CMSM) (https://cmsm.co.uk)  in Maldon, will now have the unique ability to follow our first Audio experience at the museum, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) tour.

At the CMSM, we have been working on ways to make the museum more accessible and bring the artefacts to life during your visit.  We also realise that with some of our artefacts, you could miss something that is vitally important. The experience gives you interesting information about each piece – some artefacts even have their own background story.

Working with Gary Weight (Pegasus Audio Narration), a battlefield tour guide, author and historical researcher, we have come up with a SOE Audio tour in part of the museum.  Researched and recorded by Gary, the SOE tour consists of 12 parts and will guide you around important artefacts in the story of the SOE.

To access the Audio tour, you will need to use the QR codes in the cabinets to open specific Audio files which you can listen to on your mobile ‘phone.    We took the decision about not having Audio handsets at the height of COVID and this way makes this much easier to access.

In total, the tour lasts around 30 minutes.

The 12 sections include:

  • Introduction
  • Recruitment of Members
  • SOE Training
  • SOE Deployment
  • Female Wireless Operator
  • SOE Special Duties Branch
  • Odette and Peter Churchill
  • Museum Wireless Sets
  • German RS20 Wireless Set
  • Lydd Wireless Set
  • Fairbairn and Sykes
  • Riggal Papers

To start your tour, simply open each Audio file using the QR Code. Use your Camera on a iPhone or Android device to highlight the code, then open the individual file.

A spokesperson from the museum says “The aim is to provide access to different tours across the museum to help explain some of the artefacts and collections we have  – it also aims to highlight important artefacts that visitors might overlook.  This is only available to museum visitors and is free to access.”