Communicating with the Occupied and Exiled: The BBC and Czech-Language Broadcasts, 1940-1945

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The opportunity for this collaboration arose after Czech Radio, the Czech counterpart to BBC Radio, contacted the University of Bristol for advice about a unique, previously unexplored, uncatalogued collection of BBC Czech-language broadcasts made in London between 1940 and 1945. The enquiry indicated both the need for sustained British academic involvement to make sense of the collection and the significance to a British audience of what the collection could show.The collection of 700 gramophone records features new recordings of President Benes and Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk and much about Czech RAF pilots and their families, including broadcasts from airfields and interviews. The recordings were created by an independent Czech-language service, the Voice of the Free Republic (VFR), established by the government-in-exile alongside the BBC Czech Service to counter the claims of German broadcasts and raise morale at home. The two services, however, had a fraught relationship because the VFR did not conform to BBC standards of objectivity, and initially had different views about the Munich agreement and the loyalty of occupied Czechoslovakia. The collection, stored in the Czech(oslovak) Foreign Ministry since 1945, was unavailable for investigation during the Communist period (1948-1989), when information about 'Western-based resistance' to the German occupation was suppressed, and therefore no authoritative account of BBC Czech-language broadcasting during the war exists. This project will therefore uncover a whole new dimension of a subject that still fascinates Czechs and defines British-Czech relations.The project focuses on a key unwritten chapter in the history of the BBC, exploring its working practices and political role during the war in the context of its relationship with the Czechoslovak exile government and providing a case study for comparison with other examples from the period. It will examine the relationship between the BBC and the VFR and their contrasting agendas, shed light on editorial and technical processes, including censorship, and reveal new information about the activities and opinions of major Czech political and cultural figures who contributed to the broadcast. The student will spend about a year in total working at the Czech Radio archive, supervised by experienced archivists, broadcasters and technicians, and will create a searchable, electronic on-line catalogue of the collection for future researchers and programme-makers.The project will benefit historians working throughout the world on media history, propaganda, the BBC and British broadcasting history, British-Czech relations and British relations with exile governments and occupied countries, and twentieth-century Czech and Central European history and politics. The student will be able to pursue a career based either in any of these academic areas or in radio archive work, programme-making or broadcasting. During the project, alongside academic presentations and publication, the student will make a programme for Czech Radio's English-language strand and give an illustrated public lecture about the research. Following an existing model, Czech Radio will also consider publishing a bilingual, popular-historical monograph with CD based on the research. The catalogued collection will support further programming about the activities of Czechs during the Second World War, while providing access to recordings of important voices from the period and previously unavailable sound effects for use in other contexts. Czech Radio and Modern Languages at Bristol University will establish new relationships with the BBC and the British Library Sound Archive, with a view to exchanging archival resources and creating joint research and broadcasting projects, and aim to replicate the model of collaboration in future partnerships with other Europ