Click below to read an extract (Adobe Acrobat Reader required)
Synopsis
Barbara Board (1916-1986) was a rare woman foreign correspondent. From the age of 20 she reported from Sudan, Egypt and the Middle East. Newsgirl in Palestine was published in 1937, and her Newsgirl in Egypt followed a year later – resulting in her being expelled from Egypt. This – her third book – was stopped because of Government war censorship then post-war paper shortages, and has lain forgotten until now. Reporting from Palestine was written from the front line of the conflict between Jews and Arabs, Zionists and non-Zionists and Jews and the British Mandate Government. Barbara Board was there when the bombs went off, reporting mainly for the Daily Mirror. She criticised the Zionists and reported on resistance to the British Mandate – with very little knowledge of what was happening to Jews under the Nazi regime. Barbara Board interviewed everyone she could find – supporters and opponents of the Jewish underground armies, Arab landlords and peasants, Armenian and Christian minorities, refugees and British servicemen. Reporting from Palestine is illustrated by contemporary photographs, cables home to the Daily Mirror and other archive material. The book is edited by Jaqueline Karp, who will be in the UK for publication. The book is fully referenced for the modern reader.
Surrounded by the devastation of a bomb blast that had ripped through the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Daily Mirror reporter Barbara Broad began pounding the keys of her typewriter.Her report, published the next day in July 1946, read: "I owe my life, and the fact I am able to write this story of the bloodiest terrorist outrage, to the cool courage of a British military policeman."As a thunderous boom roared out and the building collapsed like a pack of cards, a military policeman threw me to the ground and shielded me with his body."Fifty years later, hands shaking as she tried to take in what she was reading, Jacqueline Karp stared at the words her mother had written in the aftermath of an atrocity that had killed 91 people.A box of yellowing cuttings hidden in a box under a bed was offering Jacqueline a glimpse into her mother's life as Fleet Street's only female war reporter - exploits that she knew nothing about until two decades after her Barbara's death.For 10 years our woman in Palestine kept Mirror readers informed of events in the Middle East through vivid reports from the front line...
Matt Roper
Have you read Reporting from Palestine (1943-44) by Barbara Board? - Add your own review
