Professor Wynn Interviewed for BBC Radio 4 Documentary

  5th November 2012

I recently had the pleasure, or strange experience, of being interviewed by Martha Kearney (presenter of The World at One and Women’s Hour) via the BBC studio in Gloucester. The interview focussed on the impact of the presence of black American GIs in Britain during World War II, and our 40 minute discussion was cut to a couple of sentences in the first part of a two-part series on “GI Britain” celebrating the 70th anniversary of the arrival of American forces in this country. The discussion covered segregation and prejudice in the U.S. armed forces, British attitudes and reactions, and something of the cultural impact of the “black presence”. This has been the focus of much of my recent research and has some relevance to Gloucestershire given the considerable number of black troops who were stationed in the area, from Bristol to the Forest of Dean, Tewkesbury to Chipping Norton. The radio programme was very skillfully put together, combining interviews and extracts from film material. You can find it on BBC Radio 4 I-player (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ntqjj) – and the second part is next week. A summary is on the BBC News magazine: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20160819