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Home Front: The Changing Role of Women in WW1

2015-03-11T11:03:05+00:00

Editor’s Note: To mark International Women’s Day, we asked Professor Maggie Andrews, consultant historian to Radio 4’s Home Front to explore the changing role of women in WW1. Last week Maggie looked at Women in the Workplace. This week she looks at Women in the public space.

Radio 4’s wartime epic, Home Front, tells fictional stories against the factual background of the Great War.

Maud Burnett played by Carolyn Pickles

At least for the duration of the war, some young women had greater earning power and leisure opportunities. Women, even those from the middle and upper classes, began to go to pubs after work; and in some areas to attract these new drinkers, pubs provided meals and improved their décor. One observer remarked on the introduction of white cloths, flowers, artistic prints and shaded lamps which all gave pubs a ‘homelike quality’.

Wartime also gave an added impetus to women’s participation in public life which had been increasing in the Edwardian era as women became Poor Law Guardians, participated in suffrage campaigns and from 1907 were able to stand as County and Borough councilors. In Home Front, a real female councilor Annie Maud Burnett appears in the Tynemouth Season (played by Broadchurch’s Carolyn Pickles).

Joyce played by Tracy Whitwell

There were, however, tensions as women grasped the new opportunities war offered. One area of public life women entered was the temperance movement, attempting to restrain other women’s drinking. Home Front’s character Joyce Lyle is actively involved in the local temperance league. Similarly the British Women’s Voluntary Police also took a role in curtailing working class women’s leisure activities.

Maggie Andrews is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Worcester.

Series 3 of Home Front BBC Radio 4 on Monday to Friday at noon with an omnibus at 2100 on Fridays.

Catch up with Home Front and subscribe to the podcast

World War One on the BBC

World War One on TV and Radio

Home Front: The Changing Role of Women in WW1

2015-03-06T12:27:38+00:00

Editor's Note: To mark International Women’s Day, we asked Professor Maggie Andrews, consultant historian to Radio 4’s Home Front to explore the changing role of women in WW1. Radio 4’s wartime epic tells fictional stories against the factual background of the Great War.

Women in the workforce

100 years ago on 17 July 1915 Mrs Pankhurst led a women’s march through London to demand the right to work. Women already made up a significant element of the workforce, in domestic service, textiles, laundries, millinery, clerical and retail work even as chain-makers in Cradley Heath. Wartime conditions adversely affected some of these trades and when the July march took place, with Lloyd George’s support, some young unmarried women had already moved into new areas of work. Government and local authorities led the way, providing women with working opportunities: collecting refuse or as tram conductresses; firms like Home Front’s Marshalls making munitions followed.

For some women finding work was a pressing need. There was little organized financial assistance for wives and widows of soldiers prior to WWI; arrangements to look after soldiers’ dependents were haphazard, often delayed and organized by charitable bodies with a degree of moral censure towards women, particularly those who were euphemistically described as ‘unmarried wives’.

During the transfer to a fully regulated system and the formation of the Ministry of Pensions in December 1916, some women were homeless, destitute or in the workhouse whilst their husbands fought and died in the trenches. They consequently grasped the new working opportunities available.

At least for the duration of the war, some young women had greater earning power and leisure opportunities; they went the cinema and formed workplace football teams. Women’s football became an increasingly popular spectator sport, especially after the men’s professional game was suspended at the end of the 1914-15 season. A Munitionettes' Cup was established in 1917.

"People didn't have to justify paying women literally half the money they were paying men" - Writer Melissa Murray on women's war work

Maggie Andrews is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Worcester.

Series 3 of Home Front BBC Radio 4 on Monday to Friday at noon with an omnibus at 2100 on Fridays.

Catch up with Home Front and subscribe to the podcast

World War One on the BBC

World War One on TV and Radio

Imperial War Museum North are celebrating #100YearsOfWomen: find out more

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites

Remembering Churchill’s Funeral

2015-01-13T09:30:00+00:00

Editor's note: Sir David Cannadine, presenter of Churchill’s Other Lives remembers Churchill’s funeral 50 years ago. You can hear the programme on Monday 19th January.

David Cannadine at Chartwell

Winston Churchill has always been a figure of extraordinary fascination to me. When I was growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, these were the years of Churchillian apotheosis, and he was the most famous man alive. On his ninetieth birthday, greeting cards were sent, addressed to ‘The Greatest Man in the World, London’, and they were all delivered to Churchill’s home address.

As Lord Moran’s diaries would later make plain, Churchill’s last decade was in many ways a sad one: he was old and infirm, which meant he was no longer able to keep the ‘Black Dog’ of depression at bay; and as his own strength ebbed and failed, he also came to feel that his life’s work, to preserve and safeguard Britain as a great empire and a great power, had been in vain. ‘We passed all the tests, but it was useless’, he is alleged to have said, as the British Empire disappeared and Britannia ceased to rule the waves. ‘I have achieved so much’, he observed on another occasion, in what must surely rank as among the saddest words ever uttered by a great man in extremis, ‘to have achieved in the end NOTHING.’ Of course, he did himself less than justice: it had been an utterly extraordinary life, and the more it recedes into the distance, the more extraordinary it seems, not less.

As Roy Jenkins observed, having written the life of Britain’s greatest nineteenth-century prime minister (Gladstone), and its greatest twentieth-century premier (Churchill), and thus being uniquely placed to compare them: Churchill was the most remarkable human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street, and whatever the verdict of the electorate this coming May, it seems inconceivable that it will be such as to cause anyone to modify, let alone overturn, that judgment.

The State Funeral of Sir Winston Churchill as the procession approaches Tower Pier in London.

Since Churchill’s death exactly fifty years ago, a great deal of material has come to light which makes possible a much more rounded and nuanced appreciation of his remarkable, controversial, versatile and lengthy life than anyone could have managed half a century ago. But on his death, as I well vividly remember, there were two sentiments uppermost, both of which were very powerful, but which were also in their way contradictory.

On the one hand, his magnificent state funeral was a final gesture of homage to a man widely regarded (in Isaiah Berlin’s unforgettable phrase) as ’the saviour of his country’. But there was also a very different sense that his obsequies were not only the last rites of the great man himself, but also the requiem of Britain as a great power – a sense that would later be vividly be caught by Bernard Levin in his book on the 1960s, ‘The Pendulum Years’; by Jonathan Dimbleby in his biography of his father Richard, who delivered his last great commentary on Churchill’s funeral; and by Jan Morris, who ended the final volume of his trilogy on the British Empire, ‘Farewell the Trumpets’, with an account of Churchill’s sad but spectacular send-off as the last great imperial pageant.

That he could be at once the saviour of his country, but also a figure who had failed to halt his nation’s decline was a paradox and a contradiction that few then wished to explore in detail. But as Churchill passes from memory into history, it is one of the many ways in which his life is becoming more remarkable and extraordinary, not less.”

Churchill’s Other Lives is written and presented by Professor Sir David Cannadine. It starts on 19 Jan at 13:45 and runs every day for two weeks.

Andrew Motion: Coming Home

2014-11-05T17:15:29+00:00

Editor's note: Poet, Andrew Motion uses conversations with British soldiers as the basis for a series of new poems reflecting on what it is like for British soldiers to come home after their long and dangerous campaign in Afghanistan. Hear Coming Home on Radio 4 on Sunday, 9 November at 4.30pm.

In April this year my producer Melissa FitzGerald and I visited the British Army camp at Bad Fallingbostel, forty kilometers north of Hanover. Our plan was to talk to members of the 7th Armoured Brigade – the Desert Rats - as they ended their final tour of duty in Afghanistan (‘Operation Herrick 19’), and to see what they felt about ‘coming home’. Later, when I got home, I would receive transcripts of our conversations and use them as the starting point for a series of new poems, which I envisaged as a form of collaboration between me and their subjects.

Margaret Evison and Andrew Motion

When we landed at Hanover I still had only the vaguest idea how this would work. But as we drove up the autobahn, and saw the remains of the old pine forest of northern Germany thicken around us, I began to think this was going to be an even more intense time than I’d anticipated. For one thing, I realised we were following almost exactly in the steps my father took when his regiment came this way in the spring of 1945. For another, as we came onto the camp itself and felt the peculiar power of all enclosed communities begin to assert itself, I knew I was about to come face to face with extreme emotional states of one kind or another.

Extreme states that were very well-controlled, of course – the army is very good at that – but probably all the more remarkable for being so well-drilled and rigorously reserved. Relief. Pride. Sadness. Excitement. A very strong and strangely-mixed brew, which existed at an equally strange distance from the world I usually inhabit.

In the course of our time there we talked to about ten people – junior and senior – as well as two medics and a padre (and, when we got back home, to the mother of a soldier who had been killed in Helmand in 2009). Each in their own way had very powerful things to say, but by and large the soldiers were very reluctant or actually unable to speak with much candour about the bad things they had seen. Comradeship, yes; the beauty of the landscape yes; pleasure at being home (and also the frustrations of civilian life) yes. But not death and destruction. Yet in each conversation I felt the pressure of these un-said things very strongly. Every voice seemed to be haunted by difficult memories.

Major Wendy Faux

When I got back to England and began reading through the transcripts of these talks, my first instinct was to look for a linguistic richness that conveyed these ideas. Then I realised I was looking for the wrong thing. The expressions that most interested me were in-between the sentences I had heard spoken. They were implications, not bold utterances. The pity was in the pauses, the silences, the suppressions; the poetry, if there was to be any, had to catch these things, and not hunt for eloquence.

With this in mind, I then set about editing, rearranging, adding to, tweaking, ventilating, and shaping the things I had heard. It was an extraordinary experience. In fact I can’t remember when I last spent a more enthralling few working days. Everyone I spoke to had been profoundly changed by things they had seen and done in Afghanistan. Listening to them, I felt that I had been changed a bit too.

The Gardener

Dr Margaret Evison

In Memory of Lieutenant Mark Evison

We spent

many hours kneeling together in the garden

so many hours

Mark was

he liked lending a hand

watching Gardener’s World

building compost heaps

or the brick path with the cherry tree

that grows over it now the white cherry

where I thought I mustn’t cry

I must behave

as if he’s coming back

It was just after Easter

with everything in leaf

he is so sweet really

though worldly

before his time

I kissed him and said

See you

in six months and he turned round

he turned round and said

I opened the garden for the first time

the National Gardens Scheme

you know

what gardens are like in May

and this man was hovering

outside the front

as we walked down the side passage

he said

I’m a Major

I said

O my son he’s in the army

sort of brightly

Then no one was there

so I went

and I gardened all day

how slow how satisfying

I felt next morning

he was struggling for his life

He would be home

with three transfers

in three different planes

and if he died they would ring me

and they would go back

and they would not keep coming

my daughter Elizabeth and I drove to Birmingham

my mobile there on the dashboard

we had worked out the times of the last plane

and we arrived

and they still hadn’t called me

and he was still

He was lying he was

with this

Mark

with this big plastic hole

sort of

a bandage over a hole

just like

asleep

The reindeer the wild reindeer

giving birth in the snow

with the rest of the herd scarpering

they have seen the eagle above them

but the mother stands still

what am I going to do what

a bit restless and everything

but starting to lick her baby

with the eagle watching

Quietened that is the best word

to describe it I felt quietened

seeing the hills below

as we came into Kabul

I was thinking

Mark lived in a very green place

and here everything is purple

orange Turner colours I call them

In my imagination he is never dead

bandaged lost never dead

with my love

circling

nowhere to go

I was thinking

thousands of lives

in an instant

and the molecules starting again

and the mountains never changing

how was I

quietened

how

but for a moment

I was

then losing height

with the brown earth rushing to meet me.

Poet, Andrew Motion presents Coming Home on BBC Radio 4

Listen to Coming Home

Home Front Preview

2014-05-01T06:59:11+00:00

As the summer and the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War draw closer so too does the beginning of the Radio 4’s landmark new drama series Home Front.

A specially commissioned original drama, Home Front will form the spine of Radio 4’s World War 1 offer over the next four years. Unprecedented in scale, there will be 500 episodes between now and 2018, each around 12 minutes long.

Since the Radio 4 blog last followed Home Front, a first series - which will run from the fourth of August to the third of October has been written and recorded. Set in Folkestone it will follow a number of characters and families, for whom war will mean very different things.

Here is an introduction to just a few of them.

Kitty Wilson

Kitty Wilson is a bright, confident Kent girl. Eighteen years old in August 1914, she’s part of a happy family, with a steady job as a domestic, and a loving, handsome boyfriend, Dieter, who works as a waiter in a posh hotel. Unfortunately Dieter is from Germany. As Folkestone’s harbour fills with Germans rushing home to enlist, and restrictions are placed on enemy aliens, Kitty realises their chances of a future together are disappearing.

Ami Metcalf plays Kitty Wilson

Sam Wilson and Jimmy Macknade

Kitty’s youngest brother Sam and his school friend Jimmy, both eight years old, are inseparable, much to the despair of their families. The Wilsons, provided for by dad Albert, a railway signal man, and mum, Florrie, a laundress, see themselves as the respectable working class. They see Jimmy’s family, the Macknades, penniless, hungry, terrorised by their feckless, jobless, hard-drinking dad, Bill, as the opposite. Bill and his wife Alice don’t think a lot of the Wilsons either. But Sam and Jimmy don’t care. There are more important things in life, like aniseed balls and lemon drops, and borrowing a St Bernard so they can enter a dog show. War is exciting; soldiers in uniform with guns are marching around. If only they were big and old enough to fight the Germans themselves.

Alfie Lowles as Jimmy Macknade and Alexander Aze as Sam Wilson

The Grahams

Respectable and well-to-do, the Grahams are one of the leading families in Folkestone. Councillor Gabriel Graham is a man of status, serving on Folkestone Town Council. He enjoys red meat, red wine and red-blooded English pursuits such as cricket. His wife Sylvia comes from an impeccable aristocratic bloodline in Northumberland. Commanding and committed to public life, she has just as much authority and status among the ladies of Folkestone as Gabriel does among the gentlemen. They love all their children, even the unmarried and probably unmarriageable Isabel but reserve particular pride for their only son Freddie. Isabel, pious, intelligent and ladylike, serves a valuable role in community as Sunday School teacher in the parish church, though she sometimes yearns for something more. A cheerful, vigorous product of the ‘muscular Christian’ English public school system, Freddie is a cavalry officer in the Hussars, soon to leave for France. While Freddie will be tested at the front, the rest of his family face the challenges of leading a community in uncertain times, as Folkestone’s tourist trade is shaken by the war and the town becomes a home for thousands of Belgian refugees.

The Grahams: Michael Bertenshaw as Gabriel, Keely Beresford as Isabel, Freddie Fox as Freddie and Deborah Findlay as Sylvia.

Find out more about Radio 4’s plans for World War One programmes this summer

World War One on the BBC

World War One on TV and Radio

Radio 4’s plans for World War One programmes this summer

2014-04-29T07:55:56+00:00

Across the BBC a range of programming has been commissioned to mark the centenary of World War One, from dramas to documentaries, discussions and historical debate.

At the heart of our coverage on Radio 4 is Home Front, a hugely ambitious drama with more than 500 episodes, which will launch this summer. Distinctive factual programmes are also scheduled and we’ve designed our World War One programmes so that we’ll be telling compelling stories in real time across the four years that the war lasted.

I hope that with our programmes this summer we’ll be able to offer Radio 4 listeners something new and insightful about the period leading up to the war and how this felt from the perspective of the home front.

In Month of Madness, Professor Christopher Clark explains the reasons for the onset of hostilities from the perspective of the key centres of action and decision making - Sarajevo, St Petersburg, Berlin, Paris and London. The five 15-minute episodes will run Monday to Friday at 9.45am, starting on Monday 23 June.

From Friday 27 June, we’ll hear Professor Margaret MacMillan present a series of short programmes chronicling the road to war called 1914: Day by Day. The 42 episodes, each around four minutes long and broadcast daily just before 5pm, will take us from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand through to the first week of the conflict.

We’re working together with 14-18 NOW and The Cartoon Museum on a project in which twelve cartoonists and graphic artists will respond as if in real time to the events that brought the world to war. Each week, the reaction of two cartoonists to the deepening crisis will be published on the Radio 4 website and distributed via social media.

Specially commissioned original drama is planned as the spine of the Radio 4 offer over four years, with Home Front starting on Monday 4 August 2014. This is an exciting drama serial, unprecedented in scale with 500 episodes between now and 2018, each around 12 minutes long.

After careful consideration about the year ahead, we’ve decided to create a new slot in the schedule after the midday news on weekdays, hosting both Home Front and new factual content. This way we can offer something fresh to our listeners, adding to the already rich mix of programmes on Radio 4, and without limiting the range of dramas we broadcast and have already planned for the next year.

Home Front will be broadcast in clusters throughout the year, enabling us to create as realistic a picture as possible of day-to-day life away from the trenches. And for the weeks when Home Front isn’t on, we have plans for interesting new factual series that will be broadcast after the midday news, commissioned specifically for the new slot. This means that from August onwards, You & Yours will start at 12.15 and finish just before the weather bulletin ahead of 1pm.

In the coming days, we'll have an update from the Home Front production team which will be giving us a glimpse of their plans so far, blogging about characters that are being developed and some of the themes the drama serial will be exploring. Here's a piece that we published about Home Front from November of last year.

World War One on the BBC

World War One on TV and Radio

Find out more about some of the characters in Radio 4's landmark new drama series Home Front

The Taliban debate

2010-09-08T18:25:00+00:00

UPDATE: the Taliban debate on Radio 4 has now finished and I've closed the live chat. The chat will be archived here permanently and we've lifted the seven-day limit on the radio debate so you'll be able to listen again whenever you like. If you listened, or took part in the online debate, please leave a blog comment here and tell us what you thought. And for news of forthcoming debates and events, follow @BBCRadio4 on Twitter and 'like' our page on Facebook.

The debate is under way. Has the Taliban Won in Afghanistan? is on BBC Radio 4 now. Panellists include Peter W. Galbraith, outspoken critic of the 2009 presidential elections in Afghanistan and Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb who was working, until recently, as a senior advisor to US General McChrystal. Join the debate by typing your comments directly into the live chat below or, if you're on Twitter, by tweeting with the hashtag #TalibanDebate.

I'm hosting the debate and Radio 4 Producers Jo Mathys and Hugh Levinson are on hand. We'll publish as many of your comments as we can. We'll close the live chat at 2100, fifteen minutes after the programme ends, and we'll archive the whole debate here. We've also made sure that the programme will be available to listen to on the Radio 4 web site indefinitely.

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

Listen to Radio 4 on 92-95 FM, on DAB, on your digital TV or, from anywhere in the world, online. More details on the Radio 4 web site.
The debate was recorded at Chatham House in London last night.

Has the Taliban Won in Afghanistan? Join the debate

2010-09-07T15:49:52+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tmtqc

We'd like you to join tomorrow's Radio 4 debate about the outcome of the war in Afghanistan. Host Eddie Mair is heading over to Chatham House to record the programme after he's finished on PM this evening, for transmission at 2000 tomorrow. We'll be opening the discussion here on the blog half an hour before transmission at 1930 and producers Hugh Levinson and Jo Mathys will be on-hand to host the debate.

There are two ways to join in: either tweet using the hashtag #TalibanDebate or type your comment directly into the live chat here on the blog. We'll publish as many of your messages as we can during the debate and the live chat will be archived permanently after it finishes.

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

Listen to the debate on Radio 4 FM (92 - 95), DAB, digital TV or on the Radio 4 web site at 2000 on 8 September 2010.
The picture shows Taliban in Afghanistan. It's from the BBC News web site.

Radio 4 and Naomi Campbell's blood diamonds testimony

2010-08-13T12:55:00+00:00

"Why did this trial only appear on the BBC's News radar when there was a celebrity event to cover?" - Julie Smith.

"The BBC seems to be becoming like the tabloid newspapers, caught up in the cult of celebrity" - Cynthia Wells.

"The message is loud and clear that it is important because famous people are involved" - Silas Sutcliffe.

Not many of us knew that Charles Taylor, the former dictator of Liberia, was almost three years into his trial at the Hague, facing 11 separate charges of war crimes. Until, that is, a certain supermodel gave evidence in front of the cameras, to be followed by a former Hollywood star and civil rights campaigner.

The Feedback listeners quoted above, like several others of our correspondents, wondered if BBC news editors think the public is more interested in the supermodel Naomi Campbell, and the actress, Mia Farrow, than in the genocide.

As Don Benson wrote: "As far as I know Miss Campbell is famous for wearing clothes. Beyond that any talents and achievements which might possibly make her important escape me."

The court did establish that Ms Campbell had received stones of some sort, but their size and the name of their donor is still not clear. Neither is the reason that they were given to Naomi Campbell.

While none of our listeners disputed the importance of covering the trial itself, dealing as it is with the most appalling crimes of genocide, rape and disfigurement, they do question the way it has been covered, and fear it reflects a growing obsession with celebrity.

I put listeners' concerns to the Editor of the BBC Radio Newsroom, Richard Clark.

Also this week I talked to Mark Wakefield, head of performance at the BBC Trust who is in charge of the reviews into Radio3, Radio4, and radio 7. You have just 2 weeks left to take part in the consultation, which ends on 26th August. If you want to take part either head for the Trust's website or to that of Feedback itself where you will find a link. If you require a hard copy of the consultation document or a Braille one the number to call is 08000680116.

See you next week.

Roger Bolton presents Feedback on BBC Radio 4

Listen again to the whole programme, get in touch with Feedback, find out how to join the listener panel or subscribe to the podcast on the Feedback web page.
The picture shows soldiers loyal to Charles Taylor during the civil war in Liberia. It's from the BBC's picture library.

Hitler's Muslim Legions

2010-07-14T17:13:02+00:00

Editor's note: Sometimes the decision to commission a programme about events from recent history is a complicated one. Samir Shah lays out the many factors that contributed to one such decision - SB.

Fascination with the Second World War and Nazism is one of the abiding characteristics of post war Britain. By 2010, you'd think that almost every conceivable topic and angle has been covered. But not so. Programmes on television and radio continue to be made and books by distinguished historians about the period continue to come off the printing presses. Recently one such caught my eye. It was by Jonathan Trigg and entitled 'Hitler's Jihadis.' I knew nothing of this story and wondered how it came about, how many were involved, how this could be reconciled with Hitler's Aryan fantasies. Questions came tumbling out and I turned that into a proposal for a radio documentary.

Later this month Radio 4 will broadcast a programme called Hitler's Muslim Legions. A clue as to the care and attention taken in producing this programme was the discussion surrounding the title. Was it right to juxtapose Hitler and Muslims like this? Is the word legions appropriate - especially the use of the plural?

The story reveals that over 70,000 Muslims fought for Hitler, many in the Waffen SS. There are photographs of Himmler visiting these Muslim soldiers and an extraordinary photograph of Hitler in conversation with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (although not a figure of lasting significance, he was central to the recruitment of Bosnian Muslims). The title is undoubtedly accurate.

However the debate illustrates some of the care taken in making what is nevertheless a challenging documentary. As story it fits comfortably within a tradition on Radio 4 of exploring little known aspects of the war: Document, for example, reported how thousands of Sikhs renounced allegiances with Britain and instead fought for Hitler; Secret Warriors looked at the involvement of British Jews in the 1947 War of Independence and militant activity against British forces; France's Forgotten Concentration Camps investigated French collaboration with the Germans; Crossing Continents (Reopening Lithuania's old wounds) reported on allegations that Holocaust survivors had committed war crimes. So the basic idea for the programme was not exceptional.

What of the story itself? Well, with over 70,000 people involved, it was clearly a significant enough number for it to be of import. However, of course, many more Muslims fought for the Allies - and this is made clear in the programme. But there are other fascinating aspects of the story: how did they reconcile their vision of a master race made of Aryans with using Muslims to fight for them? And what motivated the Muslims to join up? The answers reveal much about the contradictions and absurdities of Nazism. The motivations of the Muslims themselves ("starve or join") are telling about the realities of war.

Inevitably a little-known story such as this restricts the cast list of contributors. In fact we found a number of serious historians who did know something of the story. What was surprising - well, perhaps not altogether surprising - was the paucity of Muslim scholarship. We did try a range of Muslim academics and organisations and all but one felt they did not know enough about the subject to contribute . But the programme did pull off a coup - an eyewitness account: a German, now in his 80s, lived and worked with Muslim soldiers when he was 19.

Indeed, thanks to the journalistic diligence of the producer Jenny Chryss and the measured commentary of seasoned reporter, Julian O'Halloran, Hitler's Muslim Legions throws an illuminating light on a remarkable chapter in the continuing story of the Second World War.

Samir Shah is Executive Producer of Hitler's Muslim Legions

Hitler's Muslim Legions is on BBC Radio 4 at 2000 on Mon 26th.
The picture shows Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (ca. 1895 - 4 July 1974). The picture is from the Wikimedia Commons. He has a detailed Wikipedia entry.

Sunday Worship from Camp Bastion, Helmand

2009-11-10T16:04:14+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nnp0k

The seeds for Sunday Worship from Helmand were sown more than five years ago. I'd always been interested in the role of religion in an organisation where the job - when all else failed and to put it bluntly - was to blow things up and kill people. It took about 18 months from first contacting the Ministry of Defence until Martin Bell and I stepped on to a flight from Brize Norton to Iraq just before Christmas 2006.

We were heading for Basra to meet the Reverend Andrew Martlew, who was then stationed at the Shaiba Logistics Base with 40 Regiment Royal Artillery and the series for Radio 4 was called 'God and the Gun'. In the jargon of the Church his job is known as incarnational ministry. Getting out of the churches and on to the ground. Sharing the lives of the people who need you. And for a padre in the military, that can mean going in to some very uncomfortable places, both physically and spiritually.

The programme was a success, winning the premier award from the Sandford St Martin Trust, but I felt there was unfinished business. 'God and the Gun' was a documentary and came, I hope, with its own insights. But there was another way of exploring the experience of religion in a battle field. Why not through an act of worship? I thought that would allow us to explore the human side of this story at a much more profound level.

'Sunday Worship' is Radio 4's weekly act of worship. Mostly it comes in a conventional form as you'd imagine, from a church or cathedral, but occasionally it goes 'out on the road' and is recorded as a feature - still recognisably an act of worship with prayers and hymns, but with added documentary elements.

When the causalities started to mount in Operation Panther's Claw everyone I spoke to in the military told me that the atmosphere on Remembrance Sunday this year would be different. In July I suggested recording a Sunday Worship in Helmand on the themes of sacrifice, service and remembrance and that Andrew Martlew, who's still a serving padre, would be the ideal man to do it.

So, after a lot of behind the scenes negotiation with the Ministry of Defence, that's how we found ourselves early one October morning once again at Brize Norton waiting for the RAF flight to Afghanistan. When you're making a programme dealing with such powerful and emotional themes, getting the right tone is the most important and difficult challenge - giving an honest account of what the people serving this summer in Afghanistan have been through, without being voyeuristic and sensationalist, or sentimental and mawkish.

I'd be lying if I said that I had an exact image of the tone I wanted for the programme and I think I'd doubt any producer in similar circumstances who told me they had. I don't believe you can ever have an advance plan; you've just got to rely on your antenna and thankfully, in this case, your presenter. We were interviewing the sergeant major of the hospital in Camp Bastion. He's a member of the Territorial Army and in civilian life worked for BT. In Helmand he found himself, among other things, in charge of the mortuary.

He'd steeled himself for preparing the bodies of soldiers for repatriation; what he didn't expect was to be wrapping in shrouds the bodies of young children - victims of accidents who'd been brought to the hospital, or who'd been caught up in the fighting, and sometimes victims of IEDs - those roadside bombs can't tell the difference between a British soldier and a local child.

As the SM told us, you can't see the sight of small children in large body bags without it changing you and not surprisingly he started to cry. And so did my presenter Andrew Martlew. But then something extraordinary happened. Something which I, coming from a documentary production background, had never encountered. Andrew Martlew the presenter, instinctively and unselfconsciously became Padre Martlew, the army chaplain. He reached out to that soldier knowing, in a way that only another soldier would, what he was going through and offering comfort and reassurance. For chaplains, this is what incarnational ministry is about.

For me this small moment, mirrored countless times in different guises, distilled the essence of remembrance from a soldiers' perspective. This is the window I wanted to open for listeners. I think only Sunday Worship could do that and perhaps only an army padre would understand what tone to take. And there were three people crying in the corner of that ward in Camp Bastion hospital.

Phil Pegum is a Producer in the BBC's Religion & Ethics department

Sunday Worship is on Radio 4 at 0810 Sunday. Listen again to the Remembrance Day special.
Both episodes of Phil's God and the Gun, presented by Martin Bell in March 2007, are available on the Religion and Ethics web site.
Phil also produced last week's Moral Maze about Twitter and mob rule.
Phil took these photographs while he was at Camp Bastion.

Afghanistan: Is It Mission Impossible?

2009-10-07T18:01:38+00:00

Eric Joyce MP.

Brigadier Buster Howes, Head of overseas operations, MOD.

Francesc Vendrell, former EU Special Representative to Afghanistan and Lindsey German, Stop the War Coalition.

Eddie Mair, presenter

To warm you up for tonight's debate about the war in Afghanistan, chaired by Eddie Mair, here are some pictures taken at the recording. They were taken by photographer Tully Chaudry.

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

Afghanistan: Is It Mission Impossible? At 2000 on BBC Radio 4 tonight.

Steve Bowbrick is Editor of the Radio 4 blog

Pictures from Iraq on the PM blog

2009-09-24T11:00:05+00:00

Guantanamo Bay: 245 prisoners.
US camps in Iraq: 8,305 prisoners.

They're in two relatively small camps near Baghdad. The third - and most used - Camp Bucca, in the southern desert, has just closed.

Here's a taste of it:

editor's note: these remarkable pictures, taken by Hugh Sykes in a US 'theatre internment facility' in Iraq, caught my eye on the PM blog. See the rest of the pictures and leave comments on the original post - SB.