Comments on: Monday, 29 August 1938

By: Investigations of a Dog » Fables of the Reconstruction

Investigations of a Dog » Fables of the Reconstruction — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 19:09:00 +0000

[...] isn’t something that only applies to early-modern print culture. Brett at Airminded mentioned in his excellent series of posts on the Sudeten crisis that British newspapers in the [...]

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 08:28:44 +0000

That’s what I assumed too. Maybe Rothermere preferred to keep it that way because it was posh? Or maybe it was just because of the advertising revenue.

By: Airminded · Wednesday, 31 August 1938

Airminded · Wednesday, 31 August 1938 — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 08:24:26 +0000

[...] new news. As the above headlines from The Times, p. 10, show, the meetings which were announced on Monday and which took place on Tuesday have, er, taken place, but no public statements have been made [...]

By: Alan Allport

Alan Allport — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 10:45:35 +0000

The Daily Mail actually didn’t switch until 4 September 1939.

Interesting - I didn’t know that (I’m more familiar with the papers of the Forties). I assumed that since it was aiming for a mass middle-market the Mail had made the switch long before 1939.

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 07:15:11 +0000

Andrea:

Thanks, hope it continues to interest you.

Alex:

That could make sense. About the folding, I mean, not about the Craven Herald and Pioneer! Why did it stick to that format so long? Stubbornness?

Alan:

Yes, quite right, I was a bit imprecise there. I think the Daily Herald was always like that, in fact, or at least the 1913 issues I looked at years ago were. But the Daily Mail actually didn’t switch until 4 September 1939. (So readers could immediately see the important news, according to its own explanation, and also because it was dropping down to 12 pages to conserve paper. Hopefully advertisers would understand …)

Jon:

I can hardly wait for the next posting - but I will have to won’t I - this is in real time!

Exactly! It’s easy to skim over an event like this when it’s a paragraph or a page in a book, which makes it seem smaller than it was to the people who lived through it. Not that I pretend that I’m in any way recreating the real experience of the Sudeten crisis (whatever that would mean), it’s nothing more than a nod towards that.

By: Airminded · Tuesday, 30 August 1938

Airminded · Tuesday, 30 August 1938 — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 06:41:22 +0000

[...] Subscribe to feed ‹ Monday, 29 August 1938 [...]

By: Jon Burne

Jon Burne — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:45:25 +0000

Great first post. Even though may know how this issue we play out I expect to get a very real feeling for how leaders of the day grappled with the “Czech Crisis” as it unfolded.

What caught my interest in this first posting was the word “Czech” rather than the “Sudeten” in the headline.

I can hardly wait for the next posting - but I will have to won’t I - this is in real time!

I hope this experiment in replaying history is a resounding success.

By: Alan Allport

Alan Allport — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:47:03 +0000

Compared with those of today, British newspapers of the 1930s and before seem to be inside out.

True for the posh papers, but not the Mail, Express, Herald, Mirror, News Chronicle, etc., which were in a modern format by the 1930s.

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:15:05 +0000

The Craven Herald and Pioneer in Skipton, North Yorkshire had a classified-ads front page, Victorian style until very recently.

Presumably, people would fold the paper open at the centre spread so as to read the news and also get the broadsheet down to an easier tube-reading size, from where it was only a small step to do it permanently.

By: Andrea

Andrea — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 10:42:28 +0000

Good post! I guess the world is much striker now when having to cope with such tactics. This is one of the cases in which we’ve learned from experiences