19 January 2016
"What is really fascinating about the research I have been conducting is the relationship between the subversive stations and the rumours that were circulating in Britain. It gives us a way of thinking about how propaganda can, or cannot, penetrate the minds of people at war."
- Jo Fox, Durham University
"Just the few boxes that I was able to look at were adding something really quite unique to what we know about what people in these regions were being exposed to and how the belligerent powers were attempting to vie with each other for the loyalty of people in places like Iran, Iraq, India and Malaya."
- Ashley Jackson, King’s College London
Jo Fox, Durham University: “When I was asked to come along and assess the propaganda value of the archive, I imagined that I would be looking at a few boxes. When I arrived at the archive and saw the scale, I realised that it would take a team of historians many years to even scrape the surface, so I concentrated in on the subversive radio stations. And even there, after many days of research, I was finding that I was only really scratching the surface.”
Pieter Lagrou, Université libre de Bruxelles: “So I think one of the main challenges for history of the Second World War today is to go beyond the national perspectives.”
Olivier Wieviorka, École normale supérieure Cachan: “This collection is unique. We can really make a kind of transnational history of propaganda because we can compare different countries. So it's possible to compare, for example, both the German propaganda and the propaganda made by the Nishijima, for example, which is quite impossible to, to do in France.”
Jo Fox: “I started as a historian of the propaganda of Nazi Germany and then broadened out into much more comparative work, partly through a recognition that propaganda has to be seen within a comparative environment, which is why the BBC Monitoring Archive has been so crucial to the development of my work. And I think it is absolutely essential for future researchers to be able to access this material. Not least, but in terms of the subversive stations, these are almost verbatim reports that do not exist anywhere else, so it is crucial that researchers continue to have access to these materials now and in the future.”
Dan Stone, Royal Holloway, University of London: “The range of information and the, the scope of the BBC's own project is, is breathtaking, really the, I was particularly interested in the Romanian broadcast and to, to see that the BBC is using its resource to monitor Romanian broadcast in Romanian, in Hungarian, in German, in English, in French, in Italian for a fairly peripheral country of limited geopolitical importance, quite extraordinary really.”
Maria Ferenc Piotrowska, University of Warsaw: “So I was extremely happy that I was able to find the archival document that supported my arguments, but also was able to answer my very, very important and substantial question regarding this, this documentation. So, I was very pleased to find out that this network of scholar exists and that I could be become part of it.”
Dan Stone: “There are examples of huge archives that have been digitised; the International Tracing Service would be a good case in point, which is of course far larger than the, the BBC Monitoring Archive, so given the will to do it, it can be done.”
Pieter Lagrou: “If one day there will be this online access to these documents, fully digitalised with word recognition, that would open up almost unlimited possibilities.”
Ashley Jackson, King's College, London: “In many parts of the, the former empire, when we move away from sort of the inverted comma ‘white dominions’, understanding scholarship, historical memory relating to the war can be surprisingly deficient, and so I think if there was any chance of people in in, you know, colonies in Africa in, in South Asia and in other parts of the world could, could have access to these kinds of, of sources, it would be, it would be a real boon for their own sort of historical memory and understanding.”
Dan Stone: “And you could, you could easily I think look create a Pan-European vista or landscape of BBC monitoring and the Holocaust, to look at how different countries’ broadcasters are talking about the Jews in one way or another.”
Pieter Lagrou: “If we can conceive of a database that would both allow this kind of full text search, but then also the possibility to re-situate these documents. Into their original archival context, then this can be very important, and it could be almost an entry point into any research project. If you start with your country, you will be automatically drawn into the larger context thanks to the tool that could be developed by the BBC.”
This workshop, one of five organised as part of the AHRC BBC Monitoring Collection Research Network, focused on the BBC Monitoring Collection in relation to the Second World War, and took place at IWM London. Presentations were heard on a diverse array of topics including the use of radio by the Oneg Shabbas chroniclers in the Warsaw ghetto, Vichy France's radio propaganda, the activities of the Dutch Government in Exile in London and the role of the US Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS).
Papers can be downloaded here.