The German ultimatum for the Czech withdrawal from the Sudetenland by 1 October remains. But there is a report of a new deadline: the ultimatum must be accepted by 2pm today, or else Germany will mobilise its armed forces (Manchester Guardian, p. 9). Hungary has already begun mobilising, and the Royal Navy has been given […]
From the Manchester Guardian, 29 September 1938, p. 6: We are hearing and reading so much (writes a correspondent) of people talking in the streets, in public vehicles, and wherever they meet about the international situation that perhaps “Miscellany” may care to preserve for posterity this perfectly true and unvarnished record of a conversation overheard
E. H. Carr in conversation with Collin Brooks, BBC Home Service, 30 September 1940: After 1919 we were always worrying about keeping up our naval supremacy. And, of course, we were right. But what did we do about the Air Force? Hardly anything. We just let it dwindle away. We thought air power of so
Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, speech to the Lord Mayor’s banquet, 9 November 1897: Remember this — that the federation of Europe is the only possible structure of Europe which can save civilisation from the desolating effects of a disastrous war. You notice that on all sides the instruments of destruction, the piling up of arms
Part of a BBC broadcast by George Bernard Shaw, entitled ‘Whither Britain?’, 6 February 1934: Are we to be exterminated by fleets of bombing aeroplanes which will smash our water mains, cut our electric cables, turn our gas supplies into flame-throwers, and bathe us and our babies in liquid-mustard gas from which no masks can
The BBC has put online a catalogue of recordings held of its radio and television broadcasts since about 1930! Not the recordings themselves, mind you, but details such as broadcast dates, participants, and programme summaries, in many cases. Nor is it a complete record of what was broadcast: if it wasn’t recorded (as many early
There’s an interesting article on the rise of radio news in the United States in the late 1930s, in the February 2006 issue of History Today: “On the right wavelength” by David Culbert. One thing I learned from this article was that it was the Munich crisis in September 1938 which made radio news reporting
