Project Archivist Jane Speller writes:

A new archive project funded by the John Rylands Research Institute aims to unlock the fascinating information contained in the foreign correspondence of The Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian) newspaper of the early 1930s. This key period in world history is told through the thousands of letters of the editor, William Percival Crozier (1879-1944), to and from his principal foreign correspondents, Robert Dell (1865-1940) in Geneva, Frederick Augustus Voigt (1892–1957) in Belin and Alexander Werth (1901-1969) in Paris.

Crozier rose up through the ranks of the paper and was appointed as editor in April 1932, working from the headquarters of the paper on Manchester’s Cross Street.

Guardian office in Cross Street, Manchester. Image reproduced courtesy of the Guardian Media Group

Foreign news had always been Crozier’s chief interest and in the interwar period he sought to increase foreign news coverage in the newspaper, as…