Hilary Footitt: “I thought it was wonderful to have the monitor speaking. I mean, this was a great privilege. When you look at the documents themselves, it is very difficult to see how they were arrived at and how the monitors talking about what it was like to work in a team, what it was like to actually be at the sharp end of this process I thought was amazing.”
Suzanne Bardgett: “Many of them talked at the beginning about what had taken them into monitoring and it was interesting to realise it was very often an advertisement at the, in the back of The Sunday Times, a tiny little advertisement that had caught their eye as they were finishing their languages degree.”
Leszek Luszowicz: “You had to take a test just like everybody else. I was told the pass rate was very, very low, but somehow I managed to scrape through, and I was in about three months later.”
Julia Slater: “In a way it fell into my lap and it happened, really, knowing people who knew people and most people who do language degrees either become teachers or become lawyers and accountants and things like that. And yeah, that speak that hands down.”
Suzanne Bardgett: “There's nothing like meeting the real people who worked here to get a real sense of, of what they did.”
Bet Tickner: “The basic function would be to take regular bulletins, which in most countries are broadcast in much the same way as we do over here that you'd have a major news bulletin at certain times and then small bulletins in between programmes, usually on the hours.”
Mike Hollow: “You were looking for new material of potential interest to anyone in the BBC, in government, anyone who used the material we produced, which included commercial customers who are paying for it. The, if you, if it was an urgent item, you would flash the item, which meant in those days typing it on what was called a ‘flash sandwich’, which was stapled together paper copies and carbon.”
Linda Eberst: “It really was a messy process because you'd have your typewriter and you had two sheets of paper abanda they had on it, and they were purple coloured, and they were horrible. And you, you’d get purple, literally, you'd get purple on your fingers.”
Mike Hollow: “And then you would run from the listening room, clutching a copy of this item to the Newsroom and hand it to the news editor pr put it in his in tray. When you'd done that you would then move on to your next task for the day. So it was it was all prescribed, but you had to be very flexible because you never knew what would be the implications of the content and there had to be some flexibility in.”
Julia Slater: “But it was done really very, very efficiently. We had one person who would be taking a running summary, so who would just be sitting at the typewriter typing away everything that was happening. It was recorded on magnetic tape, obviously. Somebody would be in charge of, of cutting this tape into like 5-minute chunks so that the rank and file monitors would be given a, a chunk to do. So, you ended up with a running summary so you'd follow exactly what had been going through. You run; you then eventually had a complete account of what had happened. It required an awful lot of people to do it and it was very carefully planned and, and it was obviously a team effort, but it worked, yeah, very well.”
Chris Westcott: “Some of the skills that we cherish today were skills which were instilled into people right in the early days of BBC Monitoring. Remember in 1939, no one in the world had ever done this before. So, when this organisation started, everything had to be learned from scratch and we're still learning today but the important thing is we're learning now based on a shared history of 70 years of knowing how to do media monitoring better than anybody else in the world.”
Suzanne Bardgett: “I was very struck by the speed and total, sort of homing in on particular details on annotations on possible interpretations of words, and so that was fascinating to have that kind of insight.”
Chris Greenway: “The Iranians looked at a British report in English, which talked about the elections being a shambles and of course, shambles is an old English word for a slaughterhouse. They translated it into Persian, meaning a slaughterhouse. We then monitored that and translated it as, as, as something sort of shambles have become a bloodbath. So yeah, even, even now those, the importance of getting those translations right and thinking about that is, is important.”
Jennifer Glastonbury: “You can't possibly imagine just looking at those transcripts the struggle to produce that sometimes, you were literally plucking words out of the air.”
Leszek Luszowicz: “For every 3 minutes broadcast it would take you on average an hour to transcribe. And say this big story was a minute long, it should really take you about 20 minutes but because reception was so poor, you were struggling, you were still sweating away an hour later.”
Hilary Footitt: “And so we had monitors talking about the selecting material. We had monitors talking about deciding what kind of output, and then at the same time we heard people saying yes, but it wasn't actually intelligence analysis. And I found this really interesting and it and it became clear the more the monitors talked that this is a long-running issue.”
Linda Eberst: “Translator, journalist, later intelligence with a little eye.”
Mike Hollow: “But I saw myself primarily as a translator and a specialist in Russian and Soviet affairs, because I understood the context and the cultural, economic, political, historical context of the material.”
Jennifer Glastonbury: “So one had almost a sort of unique take on some of these countries and, and I suppose one was always aware you know that that the intelligence part of it was important and indeed although we were employed by the BBC, you know our funders were, you know, government departments.”
Chris Westcott: “People often talk about journalism as being the first draft of history, and if you look at the, the archive, it's a very raw but hence I think a very rich first draft of history, history, literally the world in its own words, as that world was, was evolving right from the end of World War Two through the Cold War and into events subsequently, so I think there's immense value in probably understanding 20th century history in a way that we've not been able to understand before.”
Linda Eberst: “Before the vision of all these 15,000,000 sheets of paper, you said this morning, that's just incredible, and that someone is actually finding some value in it. I, I find that really very amazing.”
Suzanne Bardgett: “And, and then at the very end we talked about where the next steps might go in terms of new research questions that have been brought to the surface through the day.”
Laura Johnson: “We would like really to inspire these academic researchers that came to maybe start thinking about monitoring and maybe incorporate it in their own work and see if some of these academic questions that they've been looking at in the last few years and can really benefit from looking at monitoring and seeing what that has to tell them.”
Jennifer Glastonbury: “I mean, I think it's going to be extremely valuable just to look at, you know, at what we did in, in, in, in the time that we did it, especially during that Cold War period, you know, and to think about, you know those sort of propaganda stations, you know, what was going on and how we somehow captured, captured that.”
Laura Johnson: “Oral history should really be the next step. I think there's a real awareness that we're, we're losing the chance of some of the ones to record their experiences and hopefully if interesting monitoring continues and obviously interest in translation studies and intelligence is continuing and it would be lovely to have these oral histories that people could come back to and, and look at.”
This workshop, one of five organised as part of the AHRC BBC Monitoring Collection Research Network, took place at BBC Monitoring’s offices at Caversham Park, Reading – a historic setting for a day which focused on the daily work of monitoring broadcasts. Former monitors and academics specialising in translation came together to discuss topics such as their backgrounds, how they had been recruited, and the working practices of monitoring, translating and summarising broadcasts.
Chris Greenway: “I worked in Africa in our Nairobi office for a number of years over the course of several different uh secondments there. And I was there in the early 90s, which is a very dramatic time in Africa because the, the changes in Europe before the Berlin Wall actually had a triggering effect in Africa, a lot of change there.
And in East Africa, where I was based, we saw the fall of a number of leaders in that time, and I particularly remember the fall of the Somali President Siad Barre, which was in 1991 and for a time there was really just one transmitter in the whole of Somalia that was providing news about what the government was doing and how it was falling. This was operating very erratically; It was only on a certain times of the day, very unpredictable and to get monitoring of it consistently, really consistent, consistent monitoring of it, I went down from Nairobi to Mombasa, which is on the coast where we could actually hear this transmitter throughout the day. But to get the best reception I actually was standing on the top of the building in the centre of Mombasa and actually tuning into this one station in Mogadishu and making a recording, rushing to a phone line, feeding it back to Nairobi to my Somali speaking colleagues to translate. And we actually got the first announcement that the presidency Siad Barre had been overthrown and had fled, and that the that the rebels had taken over and that we were the sole source of that, and the news went, went around the world.
After the 2010 British general election, when there had been complaints on Election Day that coming up to 10 o’clock in the evening when the polls closed, that some people hadn't been able to vote, that didn't seem, things didn't seem to be working quite right in polling stations. The following day, we actually had a report from, from Iran to say that the British elections that ended the previous day in a bloodbath. And when this report first came out myself and my colleagues looked at it and thought, you know, well, did one of our staff make a mistake in translation, or was it actually just the Iranians as frankly, sometimes as is the case just completely misunderstanding what happens in Britain or exaggerating.
Then it suddenly struck me that what had happened was that they had looked at a British the, the Iranians looked at a British report in English which talked about the elections being a shambles and, of course, shambles is an old English word for a slaughterhouse. They translated it into Persian, meaning a slaughterhouse. We then monitored that and translated it as something, so a shambles had become a bloodbath. So yeah, even, even now, the importance of getting those translations right and thinking about that is, is is important.”
For further reading on the area of translation and the BBC Monitoring Service, Dr Hilary Footitt’s paper: ‘War and Culture Studies in 2016: Putting ‘Translation’ into the Transnational?’, (2016), Journal of War & Culture Studies, 9, is available online here.