Sounds of Captivity: Prisoner-of-War Recordings in the First World War
Journal: Journal of the Royal Musical Association
Year: 2025

Before a cyberattack in October 2023 knocked out most of the British Library’s online resources, audible voices from the First World War were only a click away: sixty-six British soldiers, recorded in prisoner-of-war camps in Germany between 1915 and 1918, all reciting the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son. 1 In their erstwhile digital home, these recordings sat alongside other surveys of English accents and dialects, offering a taste of the variety and richness of vernacular speech across th