A Quarrel in a Faraway Country

In 2007 I made a documentary for BBC Radio 4’s Archive Hour, mapping the role of radio in what came to be known as the Munich Crisis of 1938, a crisis that has disturbing echoes in our own time. The electronic media may have changed, but the techniques of manipulation remain remarkably similar. If you see parallels with Russia’s behaviour today in Ukraine and other places in its “near abroad”, you are not alone.

“David Vaughan opens rare radio archives, Czech, German and American, to examine the Munich crisis of 1938 in close-up. This was when radio became the world’s witness to history…”

Gillian Reynolds, Daily Telegraph

“Radio 4’s Archive Hour is in magnificent form for Saturday’s A Quarrel in a Faraway Country, Chamberlain’s notorious words on Nazi-threatened Czechoslovakia. Incredibly preserved recordings in Czech Radio’s cellars chart the build-up to the tragedy: naive, touchingly optimistic English-language broadcasts, confident the great democracies would support the young country’s integrity; the anger and incredulity at systematic betrayal by Daladier and Chamberlain; the Czech broadcaster, whose live account of a German military parade (“A huge black crow has flown into Prague”) cost him his life.”

Martin Hoyle, Financial Times

“David Vaughan brings history to life with archive recordings of the Munich crisis and Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia.”

Daily Mail

I made the documentary A Quarrel in a Faraway Country back in 2007, not long after I had first started exploring the radio archives. At the time the use subject seemed to belong more to the past than the present. Tragically, the use and abuse of the electronic media to influence and manipulate public opinion has since become one of the most prominent themes of our time and 1938 no longer seems far away.

Here is a short extract, from the moment on 21st September 1938, when the Czechoslovak government has just declared that it will be willing to cede the borderlands to Hitler.

 

 

Alongside many archive recordings, the documentary also features interviews with people who lived through the events of 1938.

I had the honour and pleasure of visiting Sir Nicholas Winton (1909-2015) in the summer of  2007 at his home near Maidenhead. He was responsible for saving the lives of 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Prague in the months leading up to the outbreak of World War Two.

 

 

And here is a second extract, where he describes the moment when a train was due to leave Wilson Station in Prague, with a further group of children. It was 3rd September 1939.

 

 

I also spoke to Lenka Reinerová (1916-2008), a wonderful Prague writer, who was unusual in continuing to write in her native German till the end of her life. She was 22 at the time of Munich.

 

 

The documentary also features the Canadian historian, Gordon Skilling (1912-2001), whom I interviewed in 2000. He was working at Czechoslovak Radio in 1938.

Here is a programme that I made for Radio Prague, based on that same interview.