Helen Chambers
speaker
180 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 4 Jun
Helen Chambers’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 — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yes, it's quite hard to know how he got into it, except that there are reports from editors in the offices that he turned up at.
And the report that this young man appeared very skinny in a ragged military uniform
very proud and handed over his short texts, which were then received and indeed published.
And he had a quite remarkable output and success.
And in that first year, 1919, when he'd filled in his registration card with Occupation Journalist, which...
He wasn't really.
He then published 178 articles in 1919 as a 24-year-old.
And already in these articles, and you asked me why and how he succeeded, perhaps sheer bloody-mindedness, but also the quality of his work is absolutely clear from the outset.
I mean, not every article is a gem, but very many of them do all the things that he was later to do in his novels.
Yes, I mean, he was very concerned with injustice, with the underdog, with the veterans coming back with nowhere to go, unemployed, no income.
And he watched them and he saw them and he went to military hospital and he saw people whose faces had been shot away, jaws shot away, and they weren't allowed to look in the mirror anymore.
and they weren't allowed to see plaster casts of themselves, although these existed, and wrote a really hard-hitting piece saying they should show these photographs before the newsreels, they should put them on the advertising pillars, and people wouldn't fight wars again.
I mean, he didn't say explicitly people wouldn't fight wars again, but that was very much what he... You know, he could see that these people were suffering dreadful injustice.
Up to a point.
I mean, he was, just to perhaps go on from what John was saying, he was at one time the best paid journalist on the Frankfurter Zeitung.
And he wrote his articles exactly the same size as the column inches in the paper.
And he earned a mark, a line.
So he was earning a lot of money.
But he said that Berlin was like a waiting room in a big station somewhere.
And he was... What did he mean by that?
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