Reflections on Cold War Voices: Stories, Speech and Sound, 1945-1991

On 22nd and 23rd of January 2020 Grace and I had the pleasure of hosting about 40 delegates at the University of Bristol for our ‘Cold War Voices: Stories, Speech and Sound, 1945-1991’ conference. In addition, we and our delegates were some of the 150 or so people, including pupils from local schools and members …

‘Cold War Voices: Stories, Speech and Sound, 1945-1991’ conference

Over the last few months we’ve been working hard to organise our conference: ‘Cold War Voices: Stories, Speech and Sound, 1945-1991’. Now that much of the organisation is complete, we can look forward to welcoming 25 speakers from around the world to Bristol to share their research in January. Over the course of two days, …

The Fall of the Berlin Wall

The following blog by Dr Grace Huxford is a copy of a blog originally published on 8 November 2019 by our funder , the Arts and Humanities Research Council. For more detail see: https://ahrc-blog.com/2019/11/08/the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall-british-residents-remember-november-1989/ It includes a link to an interview with Grace about the project on BBC Radio 3 and the AHRC's 'New Thinking …

Processing our oral histories

Over the last few months I’ve been hard at work, doing some of the ‘processing’ tasks that are often part of an oral history project. When I joined the project, Grace already had lots of completed interviews and she’s conducted even more since then. More than fifty are now complete, and we’ve got more planned. …

Project team update

GERMANY UNDER ALLIED OCCUPATION (BU 13082) The arrival at Cuxhaven of wives and children of soldiers serving with the British Army of the Rhine. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205206449 In the previous blog post, Grace promised that news would follow about the appointment of a project Research Assistant, so I’d like to introduce myself. …

Living on a Cold War Frontier? A Project Update

When I first began this research in 2016, the pilot project (funded by the British Academy) was entitled ‘Living on a Cold War Frontier’ (Ref SG15233). In my earliest oral history interviews, I asked former residents of British military bases in Germany lots of questions about the nature of the Soviet threat, how prepared they …

Berlin: British Cold War City, 1945-1994, PhD studentship

The Principal Investigator of the 'British Military Bases in Germany' project, Dr Grace Huxford, will be acting as a supervisor on an exciting new Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Studentship funded by the AHRC and in collaboration with the Imperial War Museum on “Berlin: British Cold War City, 1945-1994”. If you meet the relevant qualifications and are …

Welcome!

Welcome to the 'British Military Bases in Germany' blog. Over the coming year, I will be using this blog to share aspects of my research into the social history of base communities and to share some of the fascinating, moving and amusing experiences of those who lived, worked or grew up in Germany. I will …