Catherine Nixey
speaker
98 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 6 Aug
Catherine Nixey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Postcards are cheap, smutty, and sometimes saucy.
And they are therefore often assumed to be silly, but their effects have been very serious indeed.
They have changed the world.
It was March 1942.
Britain was readying itself to fight the Nazis in Europe.
Britons knew that they would have to fight them on the beaches and on the landing grounds.
The only problem was that they had very little idea what those beaches and landing grounds actually looked like.
And so that spring, the head of British Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, took to the BBC airwaves with a public plea.
Send your photos and postcards, he said.
These might look like holiday frivolity to you, but experts may see a lot more.
People sent them in, in droves.
10,000 had been expected.
10 million were received.
And then British intelligence started to sort them under the names Omaha and Sword and Juno.
The preparations for what would become known as D-Day had begun.
Letters of all kinds are in trouble.
Twenty years ago, the Royal Mail, Britain's postal service, sent 20 billion letters a year.
By 2025, that number was 6.6 billion, and they expect it to fall still further.
Postcards are doing worse again.
Only 8% of British adults now send postcards, according to the charity English Heritage.
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