J. M. Spaight

Recent Articles

• Acquisitions

  3 February 2012 in Acquisitions, Books

  Ronnie Scott, ed. The Real 'Dad's Army': The War Diaries of Col. Rodney Foster. London: Virago, 2011. Foster was a retired Indian Army officer who commanded a Home Guard company in Kent in the Second World War. Looks interesting: takes a lively interest in the progress of the war, but is also engaged with his [...]

• Counter-revolution from above

  2 February 2012 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Air control, Australia, Books, Periodicals

  In the middle of the First World War, the Australian government found itself preoccupied with the possibility of civil unrest, perhaps even rebellion. In December 1916 the Hughes government passed the Unlawful Associations Act, which proscribed the Australian branch of the Industrial Workers of the World. The Wobblies had campaigned strongly against conscription in the [...]

• Duck and cover, 1942

  31 January 2012 in 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Australia, Civil defence, Cold War, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Pictures

  This is an image we might particularly associate with the United States in the 1950s, when schoolchildren were taught to duck and cover in the event of the flash of an atomic blast. But its use in civil defence drills predates the Cold War (albeit without a Bert the Turtle to help kids remember the [...]

• Death from the skies

  25 January 2012 in 1930s, Air defence, Art, Books, Civil defence, Film, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals, Pictures

  The images in this post are from Boyd Cable, 'Death from the skies', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 20-4 (see below). The article itself is a short story describing an air raid in the next war. I won't summarise it in detail, [...]

• The wooden bombs return

  21 January 2012 in 1940s, Books, Interviews, Pictures, Rumours, Videos

  I received this request for assistance from Jean Dewaerheid, a Belgian writer who is working with Peter Haas and Pierre-Antoine Courouble to track down wooden bomb eyewitnesses: Three authors (from Belgium, Germany and France) have been working for years on a bizarre subject: the dropping of dummy wooden bombs on wooden airplanes. In order to [...]