Authors

Julia Sutton-Mattocks¹;  ¹ University of Bristol, UK

Discussion

The extensive writings of James Baker FRGS FHS (1847‒1920) about the culture, history and people of Bohemia have been described as part of a ‘new wave of English Bohemica’ that started in the 1890s and continued until the establishment of independent Czechoslovakia in 1918 (Naughton, 1977, p. 126). Based in Bristol, the now-obscure Baker was a central figure in the dissemination of information in English about Bohemia and the Czech national cause: through journalism, historical novels, a collection of tales from Bohemian history and legend, and involvement in the Bohemian exhibit at the Imperial Austrian Exhibition in London in 1906. When Baker died, the Mayor of Prague described him in a letter to his widow as ‘one of the oldest and best of our city and of Bohemia’ (The Times, 14 July 1920, p. 9). 

Within the United Kingdom, Baker was also recognised as an authority on the region at governmental level. Most accounts of pre-1918 British-Czech political relations focus on the period of the First World War and consider the impact of British involvement on Czechoslovak independence. Fewer consider how engagement with the Czechs impacted on British home policy. Based on new archival work, this paper’s starting point is a 1900 report that Baker was commissioned to write by the then Board of Education on the technical and commercial education systems of Bohemia, East Prussia, Poland, Galicia and Silesia (Baker, 1900). The report provides an opportunity to consider British-Czech political relations before the First World War, and the related motivations for and impacts of pursuing these connections. It also provides a useful focal point for interrogating Baker’s own reasons for involvement with the Czech national cause - as writer, researcher and cultural intermediary.