Newspapers

Probably no short period in modern history has been as intensively studied as the month of July 1914 — or more precisely, the five weeks between the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, in the Bosnian town of Sarajevo on 28 June and the British declaration of war on Germany on 4 August. Within the vast corpus of resulting literature the reporting of the so-called war crisis in the British press remains, nonetheless, a relatively neglected aspect. Coverage of events in the provincial press has been even less well examined. At one level this is not surprising. The focus of analysis has inevitably been an attempt to understand precisely what was going on within the corridors of power — what were the motives behind key developments such as the Austrian ultimatum, the German ‘blank cheque’ and the Russian mobilization; which countries were prepared or even keen to accept the transition from diplomacy to war and on what scale; and which countries were genuinely striving for a peaceful resolution. If contemporary political and military leaders, and their governments and cabinets, with all the resources of diplomatic representation and clandestine intelligence operations at their disposal, could not settle these questions with any certainty or accuracy, then it would be unrealistic to turn to the press, and particularly provincial newspapers, for answers. Only painstaking research on the secret diplomatic and political files of the various powers has enabled historians to base their conclusions on hard evidence. Many crucial documents remained concealed from such scrutiny for several decades after the end of the Great War. Even after a hundred years, with little more governmental documentation likely to come to light, historians still find it difficult to reach a consensus on the basis of the vast quantity of archival material now available to them. Explaining what actually happened is, then, unlikely to be the main historical value of the contemporary provincial press. But in their record and interpretation of the events of that fateful summer a century ago, and of reactions to the fast changing picture as it emerged, newspapers are themselves part of the wider history of the time and worthy of note. What follows is an analysis of the coverage of the 1914 crisis by two local newspapers with sharply differing political stances, the Dumfries and Galloway Standard and Advertiser and the Dumfries and Galloway Courier and Herald.