Dunkirk: how British newspapers helped to turn defeat into a miracle
As the UK gets ready to mark the 80th Anniversary of the rescue of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from Dunkirk, Professor Tim Luckhurst, founding Principal of our new South College, looks at how British newspaper journalists were forced to report it from afar. Modern Britons associate The Great Escape with the 1963 film of that name starring Steve McQueen, referring to, of course, a mass escape by Allied prisoners during the Second World War. But this title might more appropriately be applied to the rescue of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from Dunkirk between May 27 and June 4 1940. As the UK marks the 80th anniversary of that escape, we shall hear much of the author JB Priestley's first "postscript" for BBC Radio on Wednesday June 5. That broadcast coined the phrase "Little Ships" and even acknowledged Priestley's own part in shaping understanding of Dunkirk. He asked listeners: "Doesn't it seem to you to have an inevitable air about it - as if we had turned a page in the history of Britain and seen a chapter headed 'Dunkirk'-" But there was nothing inevitable about it. Before pledging to "fight them on the beaches", Winston Churchill himself reminded the House of Commons in the same speech that " wars are not won by evacuations ".
