[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

I stumbled across this by accident: a pilot digitisation of Hansard, funded and operated by Parliament. What an excellent thing! It’s functional, but based only on a subset of 20th-century Hansard material:

What’s on this site? This site is generated from a sample of information from Hansard, the Official Report of Parliament. It is not a complete nor an official record. Material from this site should not be used as a reference to or cited as Hansard. The material on this site cannot be held to be authoritative.

This warning should be heeded — it’s only a prototype and should not be relied upon for any purpose. It’s easy to find omissions, such as Baldwin’s ‘the bomber will always get through’ speech, even though there’s quite a number of entries for the day in question. The text itself appears remarkably uncorrupt, given the volume of data that’s been OCRed: I’ve only found a few errors (most amusing one: the Marquees of Londonderry — I guess it must rain there a lot). There are certainly a few minor problems — for example, once I managed to get the search engine to tell me that a debate in 1958 happened earlier than one in 1944. At present there’s no disambiguation between different people with the same name — so the earliest utterance recorded for Mr. Winston Churchill is on 19 March 1941, and the latest on 11 March 1997 — nor combinations between (possibly) the same person with different names — such as Churchill, Mr. Churchill, Mr. Churchill (by private notice), Mr. Churchill (Stretford) and so on. It’s all experimental at this stage, so these issues will presumably be addressed in future. (LibraryThing lets its users do a lot of the work for similar problems, but I doubt a HansardThing would ever reach the critical mass needed for that to work.)

But in it’s current form, it’s easy to use and is laid out in an admirably clear and uncluttered fashion. The little histograms showing the frequency of search results are a nice touch, and you can quickly drill down to a specific timeframe of interest. I LOVE human-readable URLs, ones you could easily read out to somebody (as opposed to ones which end in a 64-character hex hash or some combination of [0-9]s, ?s, =s, and &s); these ones are human-guessable and human-hackable too. The code will be open sourced; the bleeding-edge version is already available. There’s even an OS X dashboard widget if you’re into that kind of thing. A low-traffic discussion group gives a flavour of plans for future features, such as linking in mentions in Hansard of place names to Google Maps. (Actually, that’s a feature that was apparently in the prototype in the past, but doesn’t seem to be now — presumably it will be back.) Eventually there’ll be a lot more cross-referencing and so on. Even now you can get useful things like all the Air Ministers listed in one place.

It’s nice to see the 20th century get some digitisation love, even if it’s only for a pilot. (Some new data is coming soon, apparently, which will go back to 1804.) All of these wonderfully ambitious scanning projects are great, except they tend to stop in 1900. (Hey, people with scads of money for scanning old books and things! Some moderately interesting events took place in the 20th century too, you know.)

What would be really nice, though, would be something similar for all the parliamentary papers — these are much harder to find in academic libraries than Hansard, in my experience. Actually, this has been done, but the digitisation rights have apparently been sold off to a third party. Hopefully, this won’t happen here. And hopefully ‘Hansard online’ won’t just disappear without being replaced by something even better, like the BBC’s Infax did one day …

A comment from Melissa got me thinking about gender and the knock-out blow, which is admittedly not something I do very often. There are certainly a number of ways into this subject. The most obvious would be to look at the fact that airpower would bring war onto British soil for the first time since at least Culloden (ok, or since the Great War, if you want to be pedantic), thus threatening British women (and children) directly and on a large scale. Pointing this out was a powerful argument in favour of taking the threat of bombing seriously, and was widely deployed. So one could look at that construction. Or there’s the gendered language which was occasionally used to describe aerial warfare, such as Trenchard’s analogy of a football match, with victory going to the side which struck hardest and in their manly way made the defenders ’squeal’ first. Very playing-fields-of-Eton.

Another way would be the simple one of looking at what men and women wrote about the knock-out blow, and how it might have differed in style, content and reception. Certainly most of the writers on the subject were men, which is to be expected since only men had experience of air combat and so could plausibly present themselves as experts. But, particularly from the 1930s, a number of women writers did venture their opinions on the coming era of air war, generally from the pacifist viewpoint: H. M. Swanwick, Barbra Donington (with her husband, Robert), Sarah Campion, and of course Vera Brittain. (A notable non-pacifist, was the famous aviatrix Amy Johnson who wrote for the bellicose Daily Mail in the mid-1930s.) However, male writers could be dismissive of their arguments in highly gendered terms, when they bothered to note them at all. For example, W. Horsfall Carter wrote a pamphlet entitled Peace Through Police to rebut Swanwick’s works Frankenstein and his Monster: Aviation for World Service and New Wars for Old (both 1934). He thought that her attack on the idea of an international air force had ‘all the misdirected fervour of a militant suffragette’ and referred to her as a ’sentimentalist’.¹

All honour to the pacifists whose consuming idealism and “conscience” impels them to denounce war and all its works. But when the heart is stronger than the head the result is a peace babel totally ineffective for the realistic business of peacemaking.²

Read: don’t you worry your pretty little head about it, let us hard-headed menfolk sort things out!

But there was one woman who was not so easily dismissed, for she wrote the most influential attack upon the very idea of the overwhelming superiority of the bomber to be written in the interwar period. The Great Delusion: A Study of Aircraft in Peace and War was published in 1927, inspired at least one book-length rebuttal (Murray F. Sueter’s Airmen or Noahs: Fair Play for our Airmen; The Great “Neon” Air Myth Exposed, 1928), and was still being cited as a prime example of airpower scepticism over a decade later. Its author was pseudonymous. Who was Neon?³

Actually, that isn’t really a mystery at all. If you believe the British Library’s catalogue, Neon was the pseudonym of Marion W. Acworth. Aside from the fact that I have no idea how the British Library knows this, this isn’t immediately helpful, for this is not a name which otherwise appears in the annals of aviation, pacifism, strategy or anything else that I’m aware of. It doesn’t appear in the Times or the Oxford DNB. The only clue from this is that she shared her surname with a fairly well-known writer on strategy, the former submariner Captain Bernard Acworth. David Edgerton notes the similarity of their somewhat unusual surnames, and also that Bernard cited Neon’s book.⁴ Can we go further than this? Was there a connection between Bernard Acworth and Marion Acworth?

In fact, there is contemporary, though circumstantial, evidence that there was — indeed, that Bernard actually wrote The Great Delusion, or at least had a hand (or two) in its writing. J. M. Spaight, in Air Power and the Next War summarises Neon’s arguments in The Great Delusion and then immediately, and with uncharacteristic sarcasm, turns to Bernard Acworth where he writes that:

The mantle of “Neon” descended miraculously on Captain Bernard Acworth, whose book [The Navy and the Next War, 1934] was again a determined attack upon the air arm and all its works and a glorification of sea power [...]⁵

This is a pretty broad hint that any similarity between Neon and Bernard is not coincidental!

Another piece of circumstantial evidence comes, oddly enough, from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which has put many documents of historical interest online. In a letter sent on 12 January 1928 to Stanley Bruce, the Prime Minister, his liaison in London R. G. Casey wrote:

If you happen by chance to have read a book called ‘The Great Delusion’ by Neon, which was published about a year ago, you may be interested to know that I hear confidentially that it was by a Mrs. Acworth, who has a brother-in-law in the Admiralty who is suspected (by the Air people) of having loaded her gun. It was, as you may remember, a violent attack on the Air Service and an implied boost for the Admiralty. It created considerable stir at the time.

So, maybe they were related by marriage?

Thanks to the magic of digitisation, I’ve now got a bit more information. It turns out that Marion was the wife of Joseph John Acworth, a chemist and developer of certain photographic processes. His obituary appeared in the Journal of the Chemical Society and provides a few details about her:

In his technical work, he was very capably assisted by his wife, who, as Miss Marion Whiteford Stevenson, had taken the Associateship course at the Royal College of Science and received her diploma (A.R.C.Sc.) in physics in 1893. She was the third woman to earn the Associateship, and the first in physics.⁶

So, it appears that here we have our Marion Whiteford Acworth. She was clearly an intelligent, educated and technically-minded person. And ‘neon’, one of the noble gases, makes some sense for a scientist’s pseudonym. Still, is she a likely candidate for the author of a diatribe against the aeroplane?

Let’s turn aside from Marion for a moment, and look at Bernard Acworth. If he was Marion’s brother-in-law, then Joseph would have been his brother. But this doesn’t work. Bernard’s 1937 Who’s Who entry says that he was born in 1885 and that his father was the Rev. Herbert Sumner Acworth. That must be this genealogist’s Herbert Sumner Acworth, born 1845, with a son Bernard born 1885. But if the Reverend was born in 1845, then he can’t be the father of Joseph, born in 1853, according to his obituary. They could be brothers, at best.⁷ So, perhaps Marion was Bernard’s aunt by marriage.

Now (and we’re nearly there, I promise), if Bernard did write The Great Delusion, he presumably chose not to publish it under his own name because he was still in the Navy. I’m not sure when exactly he retired, unfortunately, but he was in it for at least 24 years, so he can’t have left it any earlier than the mid-1920s. And he started producing the first of a steady stream of books (at least one a year up to 1940, bar 1931) in 1929. That suggests that it was shortly before then that he lay down his sword and picked up his pen. Which fits with Neon’s known publications in 1927 and 1928.

In his later writings, Bernard was apparently always a navy man, a sceptic of airpower and a controversialist by nature. This all fits with the style and content of The Great Delusion. In fact, his first book (under his own name, at least) sounds like it has some overlap with Neon’s: This Bondage: A Study of the “Migration” of Birds, Insects, and Aircraft, with Some Reflections on “Evolution” and Relativity (1929). According to Robin Higham, it contained an attack on the RAF (to the point of ‘hatred’) and on airships in particular.⁸ And according to my notes on The Great Delusion, the first nine chapters (out of fourteen!) are about ‘airships and how useless they are’. Even more intriguing, I notice that the first chapter is about air currents (as relating to flight), and Bernard published a letter on this subject in the Times on 15 August 1930, p. 8. All circumstantial, but all pointing only one way.

But even if Bernard published a book under a pseudonym while still in the service, as many officers did, what, then, did Marion have to do with The Great Delusion? Here follows complete supposition. The drafts of Neon’s book were evidently substantially complete by the start of 1927, because the preface (by Arthur Pollen, the inventor of a sophisticated naval fire control system) is dated 8 and 18 January 1927. And Joseph Acworth died on 3 January 1927. So, here’s my best guess: that Bernard put The Great Delusion under his newly-widowed aunt’s (pseudonymous) name, in order to earn her a bit of much-needed cash? Or maybe he was just especially paranoid about having the book traced back to him and so used his aunt for an extra layer of plausible deniability?

Well, far from exploring the subversion of gender norms in airpower literature by way of Marion Acworth, it’s seems I’ve ended up reinforcing them by way of her possible nephew Bernard Acworth! That is, Neon was probably Bernard Acworth, not Marion Acworth. Let the word go forth.

1. W. Horsfall Carter, Peace Through Police (London: New Commonwealth, 1934), 6.
2. Ibid., 3.
3. She also wrote at least one article: Neon, “The future of aerial transport”, Atlantic Monthly, January 1928, also in a sceptical vein.
4. David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 319. He also gives Neon’s full name as ‘Marion Whitford Acworth’, but I think this is a typo — see below.
5. J. M. Spaight, Air Power and the Next War (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1938), 50.
6. ”Joseph John Acworth”, Journal of the Chemical Society (1927), 960.
7. Herbert and his siblings are listed on a page about the village of Rothley in Leicestershire, but as that information is drawn from the 1851 census, it can’t tell us anything about a possible brother born in 1853.
8. Robin Higham, The Military Intellectuals in Britain: 1918-1939 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981 [1966]), 61.

Source: Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Australia.

I’ll be giving a talk entitled “From Darfur to London: P. R. C. Groves and the construction of aerial apocalypse, 1916-1922”, at the Australian Historical Association’s Biennial Conference, Locating History, 7-10 July 2008, which is conveniently being held at the University of Melbourne. Here’s the abstract:

The idea that cities could be shattered and wars won by aerial bombardment in a so-called ‘knock-out blow’ was embryonic before the Great War. After the war, such exaggerated theories became an orthodoxy among airpower theorists and, by the 1930s, among the wider British public — an important factor underlying support for pacifism, appeasement and collective security up to the Munich crisis. But the war itself was crucial to both the formulation and the propagation of the theory of the knock-out blow.

Most responsible for promoting this idea of the knock-out blow to a wider audience was General P. R. C. Groves, a veteran of both aerial and bureaucratic warfare: the British equivalent of Douhet and Mitchell. Convinced that Britain’s air defences were being dangerously neglected, he retired from the RAF in 1922 and waged a highly-visible press campaign on the issue. In so doing, Groves relied upon and popularised the theory of the knock-out blow, drawing on his experiences in using airpower against rebellion in Darfur, in trying to win the war in France, and in trying to suppress a German resurgence after 1918 — and thereby, ironically, complicated the task of dealing with Germany after 1933.

I wrote that a few months ago, and some of it strikes me as a bit strange now, but I doubt that anyone is going to be tracking how rigorously I adhere to my abstract!

I’m currently slated to talk just after lunch on the first day. I’ve never been before, but it must be Australia’s biggest history conference, with twelve parallel streams. One of these is a war and society-type stream, so I should be right — although the title that’s intriguing me the most is from one of the others: Erin Ihde’s “Do Not Panic: Hawkwind, the Cold War and ‘the Imagination of Disaster’”! I see that fellow bloggers Megan Sheehy and Melissa Bellanta will be giving papers too.

Should be fun.

The last few hours of daylight of my last day in Rome were upon me. So, sadly, I couldn’t linger in the forum — there was still so much to see!

On top of the Capitoline Hill (the centre of religious life in ancient Rome) is the Piazza del Campidoglio, a space designed by Michaelangelo. There are three palazzi on its edges: this one, the Palazzo Senatorio, is Rome’s town hall. It was built in the 13th century, though the facade is from the late 16th (and the twin staircases are by Michaelangelo). The resting place for the birds is a replica of an equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius which stood here for several centuries (see below).

The other two palazzi are occupied by the Musei Capitolini, the Capitoline Museums. Their history can be traced back to 1471, when Pope Sixtus IV donated what are still some of its most impressive artefacts to the people of Rome (though it seems they weren’t actually allowed to see them for about three hundred years) and housed them on the Capitoline. 1471! That’s ZOMG-worthy in and of itself. But there are far more ZOMGs to come.

These aren’t part of the original collection: they have only been in the museum for 522 years. They are marble fragments of a colossal statue of Constantine which originally stood (or sat, rather, as he was enthroned) in the Basilica of Maxentius.

The original statue (the torso was made of brick, wood and possibly bronze, and has not survived) was about 12 metres high. Here’s how Con would have appeared from the vantagepoint of one of his citizens in the early 4th century.

A newly-restored bronze equestrian statue, sans rider, which is Greek and either 5th- or 4th-century BC. It may even have been carved by one of the great sculptors of antiquity, Phidias, if this USA Today article is to be believed. (Well, it’s probably no worse than Wikipedia …)

This is the equestrian bronze of Marcus Aurelius which used to stand in the piazza. Notice the lack of stirrups — the Romans didn’t have ‘em.

It’s apparently the only full-size bronze of an emperor to have survived, as in the Middle Ages they tended to be melted down to make more useful things. The pagan philosopher Marcus was spared, it is said, because he was confused with Constantine, the first Christian emperor. Seems a bit unlikely when you look at the clean-shaven Constantine above … but whatever the reason, we can be grateful that it has survived.

Probably the museum’s most famous artefact out of an incredibly iconic collection: the Capitoline Wolf, a bronze statue of the she-wolf who, according to Rome’s founding myth, suckled the infant Romulus and Remus. (Their figures were added in the 15th century.) It’s not just any statue, either: it was famous enough for both Cicero and Pliny the Elder to write about it. That is, assuming it is the same statue — two Italian scholars claimed recently that it may have been cast in the middle ages. (Bloody historians, they are no fun at all.) Otherwise, it’s Etruscan and dates to 500 BC or so.

Also mentioned by Pliny is this Hercules, which originally stood in the Temple of Hercules Victor, by the Tiber (and which I didn’t know about when I was only 200 metres from the place!)

And the hits keep on coming: fragments of another colossal statue of Constantine, bronze this time. Part of the original collection (thanks, Sixtus!)

A life-size dog, found near the auditorium of Maecenas, a patron of the arts. Whether this has anything to do with him, I don’t know, but it’s probably safe to assume that whoever commissioned it was a dog person.

Connecting the two palazzi of the Museum is a tunnel running past the ancient state records archives, which has some interesting bits and pieces in it, but the best thing about it is the view of the Roman Forum. From the left: the Arch of Septimius Severus, the tiny Arch of Titus, the Column of Phocas, the Palatine.

Marforio, one of Rome’s five talking statues — a place where, during the Renaissance, popular dissent could be expressed by sticking up satrical poems and the like. He now resides (reclines) in the second of the museum’s palazzi. Originally (i.e. during the 1st century) he represented the god Oceanus.

.

Another really, really, really famous piece, the Dying Gaul. I hadn’t really thought about it, but I guess I sort of assumed he was one of Vercingetorix’s mob. He’s actually a Galatian warrior, one of a large group of Gauls who managed to make it to central Anatolia, in what is now Turkey. It’s a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original from the 3rd century BC.

Dying with dignity.

Rather more cheerful is this boy playing with a goose. Unless it’s a copy of a statue made by Boethus, mentioned by Pliny: in that case, he’s strangling it.

If I squint the right way, it looks like the bust in the middle is of Lucilla, daughter of Marcus Aurelius, brother of Commodus, old flame of Russell Crowe. But the interesting thing is the colours — it’s made from at least four types of marble — and in particular the stripes. How did the sculptor do that? Are they just painted on? Has the marble been stained somehow? Not for the first time I find myself wishing I’d lashed out on the beautiful and massive museum catalogue!

I have no idea who she was …

… but this is the Capitoline Venus. Presumably as a concession to her modesty, she has a room all to herself. Compare with the Campo Iemini Venus in the British Museum.

Hey, you’re supposed to appreciate her from all angles, that’s why she’s in the middle of an octagonal room! And compare with Aphrodite Kallipygos. I think the latter wins out, actually — purely on artistic merit, you understand.

Once again, I must confess my ignorance of this statue’s identity. Nike/Victoria? Nemesis? Iris?

Now, this statue fascinated me. Who it represents is unknown, other than a Roman matron from the Flavian period. The head is clearly a portrait of a real person, not idealised (though the body probably is). Judging from her face, she’s past the first bloom of youth, but confident enough to display her mostly-naked body and perhaps even disdainful of the viewer’s reaction. What would she do with such a statue? Is it something you’d put in the atrium to greet visitors? Or keep it in private for the pleasure of a privileged audience? I’d love to know the story behind this one.

This small boy is definitely strangling the snake, because he’s the infant Hercules, defending himself against Juno’s assassin.

That’s it for the Capitoline Museum. It’s an amazing collection, not as big or diverse as the British Museum’s, but possibly of even higher quality overall (at least if you like Roman stuff. Which I do).

Probably everyone does a little double-take when they see this — it seems familiar somehow, have I taken a wrong turn? It’s not the Colosseum, of course, but the Theatre of Marcellus, inaugurated by Augustus in 12 BC. It’s been extended by later users — the top level is apartments! (The silhouetted photo at the top of the post shows the theatre as well.)

Nearby is a contemporary structure, the Porticus Octaviae. In antiquity, it contained temples, a library and a curia. Latterly it was the site of a fish market, from medieval times through to the end of the 19th century. I can report that it no longer smells of fish.

I walked past the porticus to the Tiber, to the Pons Fabricius, the second-oldest intact bridge in Rome (I think so — the Milvian Bridge is older). The faces on the pillar belong to Janus.

The inscription reads:

L FABRICIVS C F CVR VIAR
FACIVNDVM COERAVIT
Q LEPIDVS M F M LOLLIVS M F COS

Don’t ask me what it means, except that Q. Lepidus and M. Lollius were evidently the consuls in the year the bridge was finished (i.e. 62 BC).

Looking north along the Tiber. On the left is Tiber Island, or Isola Tiberina, the site of a temple to Aesculapius the healer in antiquity, and the location of an antimatter bomb in a Dan Brown novel, according to Wikipedia.

By now I was very tired and footsore, hot and sweaty. I could have tried to find a few more sights to cross off my list, or wandered around one of the many museums, or even gone back to the Roman Forum to see what it looked like at dusk. But to be honest, all I could think of now was getting back to the hotel and flopping down on the bed. Which was half-way across the city. Cursing the ubiquitous Roman cobblestones, I rested in the Largo dei Librai, very near the site of the (long gone) Theatre of Pompey, where Julius Caesar was assassinated. Squashed into the angle between two buildings is this tiny church, Santa Barbara dei Librai (St. Barbara of the Books), founded in the 11th century and rebuilt in 1680.

Nearby is the Campo de’ Fiori. The papal rulers of Rome used this space to carry out executions, and it was on this spot on 17 February 1600 that Darth BrunoGiordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for heresy. (DID YOU KNOW: the call sign of the popular Sydney radio station 2GB is named for Bruno, because its original owners were theosophists who held him in high regard.)

And then I eventually got back to the hotel, packed my bags, got a good night’s sleep, and after another day or so got back to Australia (via Heathrow and Hong Kong).

This concludes my series of posts on my 2007 trip to Britain and Italy!

In late March and early April 1938, the Manchester Guardian ran a competition inviting readers to send in ‘a List, with short reasons, of Six Books with which to Furnish a Gas-proof Room’¹ — that is, a room designed to provide a temporary refuge in a gas attack. The article which discussed the entries began by noting that ‘A gas-proof room is not a desert island, at least from a literary point of view’, because desert island books are meant to be aids in survival, whereas those in a shelter are intended to divert the mind from dwelling on the danger of poison gas. So,

The competitor from Ulverston who suggested Bacon’s “Novum Organum,” “The Last Days of Pompeii,” “The City of Dreadful Night,” “Paradise Lost,” “Sighs from Hell,” by Bunyan, and Blair’s “Grave” presumably knows his own mind better than anyone else does, but most people would say that the furniture of such a room would only be complete with a revolver to be used in case the gas and bombs and literature all failed to do their work.

Despite this admonishment, many of the entries displayed a rather dark humour:

Talking about once-obtainable foods will obviously be THE diversion in the War to end Civilisation. No better guide, then, to the menu of one’s dreams than “Mrs. Beeton.”

To the common suggestion of Who’s Who, the Guardian responded by saying that this ‘would easily, in an air raid, take on the appearance of an anthology of brief obituaries’.

Other submissions were more practical:

The books must steady jittery nerves by distracting the mind from business overhead. Whilst entertainment is required, purely light literature is useless, since it does not demand sufficient concentration. Humour only irritates in moments of strain. Books giving something to do are, therefore, best.

Though just how many people could be bothered with ‘A Book of Mathematical Problems’ or ‘Any Chosen Work in Foreign Tongue, and a glossary for it’ may be questioned!

While some suggestions were fairly optimistic — ‘Holiday Guide. — To plan the next holidays’ — others, quite naturally, despaired of humanity:

Pope. — For a reminder that men were once civilised.

Boswell’s “Johnson.” — For a reminder that men were once sensible.

Urquhart’s “Rabelais.” — For a reminder that there are better kinds of nonsense than dropping gas bombs.

So, who won? Douglas Rawson (or perhaps Hawson) of Malton in Yorkshire. His list had a bit of everything:

“Anatomy of Melancholy.” — For general reading.

Italian Phrase-book. — In case of visitors.

German Phrase-book. — Same reason.

Family Bible. — Exhibiting Aryan descent.

Students’ Song-book. — For community singing.

Telephone Directory. — To call doctors, &c., or locksmith if door combination forgotten.

It might be interesting to know what reading material people actually took with them into shelters during the Blitz. Some insight could no doubt be gleaned from diaries, especially Mass-Observation ones. Did people want to be amused while the bombs fell? Educated? Tested? Though amusing, the Manchester Guardian competition quoted here does not, I think, have much bearing on the question: the readership (middle class, left-Liberal, I suppose largely Mancunian) was small and not particularly representative. More importantly, people would have submitted lists which they thought would catch the judge’s eye, in the hopes of winning the prize (two guineas), rather than the books they would really take into the refuge with them. Even more importantly, perhaps, when the air raids did eventually come, they were mostly at night, and shelterers (from HE and incendiaries rather than gas) were generally more concerned to get some sleep than to feed their heads.

Still, it’s a fascinating little glimpse into the grim humour with which the British were facing up to the horrors they believed were coming:

But perhaps in the end we should all be pessimists enough to reach out automatically for Jeremy Taylor’s little treatise on A.R.P. — “Holy Living and Holy Dying.” Its advantage is, of course, that, supposing the precautions did work after all, we could concentrate on the first half.

1. Manchester Guardian, 28 March 1938, p. 5. All other quotes from “Literature and gas”, Manchester Guardian, 6 April 1938, p. 6.

The 13th Military History Carnival is up at The Cannon’s Mouth. I was dismayed to read I, Clausewitz’s post explaining why female breastplates don’t need breast-bulges. I suppose next we’ll be told that chainmail bikinis would provide next to nothing in terms of protection in battle.

I’ve been meaning to update my sidebar for a while now, as there are a lot of good blogs (both new and old) which I like and which are worth bringing to people’s attention. Some will already be known to readers of this site since they’re written by readers of this site!

I’ve mostly kept my rather idiosyncratic categories, but have added a new category for digital history — which I’m interested in but don’t actually do. Reading these blogs helps me to keep feeling guilty about that fact. So, here there’s academhack, Found History and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, which range from the practical to the theoretical in varying proportions.

On British history, there’s Edwardian Promenade, which I was pleased to find as the Edwardian period seems under-represented in the historioblogosphere. Edwardian Promenade is mainly about the style, fashion and etiquette of the upper classes, which I’m finding unexpectedly interesting (possibly because of my boundless ignorance of such things). Mercurius Politicus is the blog of a student doing an MA on the early modern period. So it has quite a bit on the 17th century and its historiography, the odd travel post, and Carnivalesque 36.

There are a number of great Australian blogs appearing out there. I’ve been especially impressed by the host site of this month’s History Carnival. The Vapour Trail investigates various forms of theatre in 19th century Australia and other English-speaking countries and how this illuminates broader aspects of society and culture. It’s a good place to go if you want to know why the Sentimental Bloke was sentimental and whether Circassian beauties were Circassian. Humanities researcher is very close to home for me — not because of the subject matter (medieval lit) but because the author is an academic at my own university! (Not from Historical Studies, alas, but Culture & Communication.) The title of the next one elicits some cognitive dissonance at first, but soon makes perfect sense: Space Age Archaeology. (Plus it has sputnik cakes.) And then there’s The Cerebral Mum, somebody I’ve known (but haven’t seen!) for a long time. It’s not all that historical most of the time, but it’s always an interesting read, and beside, she’s also a history undergrad. Close enough for government work.

In the military history section, there’s Zone of Influence, which isn’t directly about military history, but rather about wargames (and their history), things which I sometimes post about but never have time to play myself anymore! The War Reading Room is the blog of an independent researcher and writer on various military history topics. And then there’s the Australian War Memorial, which as I noted in the last state of the military historioblogosphere, has a new group (or group-of-groups) blog. Very airminded too — the latest post is about the restoration of a German fighter from the First World War. And even more airminded is Spitfire Site News, which is all about a single type of aeroplane — what else but the Supermarine Spitfire? One day, there’ll be a blog devoted to the Yeoman Cropmaster, and then the blogosphere will be FINAL and COMPLETE and we can all uninstall our RSS readers and go outside and play.

After my first day in Rome, I collapsed onto my bed in my little hotel room, watched Italian TV, and got a good night’s sleep. Which was just as well, as I still had a lot to see on my last day …

First stop: the Column of Marcus Aurelius, erected in the late 2nd century to honour his victory in the Marcomannic Wars, in which the Romans defeated a series of invading German tribes. (The column at the head of the post is Trajan’s Column, the inspiration for this one.)

Winding up around the column is a pictorial account of the campaign. Here, the Roman Army crosses the Danube into barbarian territory, over a pontoon bridge, probably in 172. Note the window on the right — there’s a spiral staircase inside the column leading up to the platform at the top.

I kept my eye out for this bit, as I remembered it particularly from Anthony Birley’s biography of Marcus Aurelius. It’s the Rain Miracle, a mysterious episode which occurred in 172 or so. The legion XII Fulminata was surrounded by the Quadi and without water. Weak from thirst, they were nearly at the point of surrender when an Egyptian priest in the Emperor’s retinue used magic to bring down the rain. Reinvigorated, the legionaries defeated the Quadi. And the makers of the column commemorated this deliverance with the rather spooky figure above.

Trajan’s Column and Trajan’s Forum (above) are just behind the typewriter, and were my introduction to the whole forum complex — the heart of ancient Rome. It doesn’t look like much now, but this was once the biggest and busiest forum of them all. Also the last to be built, opening for business in 112.

This is Trajan’s Market (on the right in the previous photo, behind the fragment of wall). Ignore the black egg thing — that’s part of some modern art installation. This is way cool — it’s basically a Roman shopping centre/office building, which you can walk around in! It’s also where the corn dole (the bread in ‘bread and circuses’) was administered.

Here are some of the little shops on the second floor. I’m not sure what exactly was sold in this area, but probably something along the lines of food, oil or wine.

Until I make it to Pompeii or Ostia, this is the closest I’ll get to an actual ancient Roman street! And how cool would it be to live in the house behind, and peer out your window into the past?

Now, this is (part of) the Roman Forum proper. It was already ancient when Augustus became emperor: Tarquinius Priscus, one of the Etruscan kings of Rome, cleared a space for it by draining the original marsh sometime around 600 BC.

The Arch of Septimius Severus. Like the columns of his imperial predecessors, it was built to celebrate a victory, this time over the Parthians. Originally, it would have had a flight of steps leading up to the arch, like Trajan’s Arch in Ancona, rather than a having a road through it as it does now, and as more modern triumphal arches tend to do.

In the foreground on the left is the Column of Phocas, erected in 608 to honour the Byzantine emperor Phocas — or rather, re-erected and re-purposed from its original function, which was to support a statue of Diocletian. Not exactly in the same class as the older columns shown above: such was the decline of Rome. It was apparently the last addition to the forum.

In its way, the survival of this building is as remarkable as that of the Pantheon, and it has survived for the same reason: because it was turned into a church. The Curia Julia was where the Senate of Rome met to debate and vote. Sadly, it’s not the same building that Cicero, Fabius Cunctator, Cincinnatus, etc used, or even in the same location. This site was chosen for a new senate house by Julius Caesar (hence the name), which was completed by Augustus in 29 BC. But that building itself burned down in 283, and was rebuilt under Diocletian (according to Wikipedia, but wouldn’t Maximian have been responsible, as the tetrarch in charge of Italy?)

Inside the Curia. I’m not sure what this is — supposedly the Curia was mostly bare inside. I suppose that could be the emperor seated on the chair in the middle, with his senators around him? You can also get a glimpse of the colourful pavement, which dates to the early 4th century.

Just nearby is the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, another building preserved by its use as a church (though only partly, this time). Antoninus Pius was one of the five proverbially good emperors (others included Trajan and Marcus Aurelius). I don’t know how good he really was, but he certainly loved his wife Faustina, for after her death her deified her and dedicated this temple to her. After his own death, Hadrian (another good emperor) deified Antoninus himself and re-dedicated the temple to both of them.

Facing in the opposite direction for a moment, in the foreground is (I think) the House of the Vestals and behind that, the Palatine Hill. Actually, you can’t see much of the hill itself because in front of it are these massive retaining walls. The Palatine was the most exclusive address in Republican Rome, and so naturally when the Emperors came along it’s where they built their palaces.

The massive Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine (M started it but C won the right to finish it at the Milvian Bridge). Nowadays a basilica is a church, but back then it was something more like a town hall. More recently, it was the setting for the wrestling at the 1960 Olympics!

Further down the Via Sacra is the Arch of Titus, built by Domitian to honour his predecessor and older brother, who died in 81. It has been restored in recent centuries (note the obviously newer bits on the sides). In the middle ages it had been used as a fortress by one Italian noble family!

It was also used, in the 16th century, as the site for the Jews of Rome’s ghetto to declare their obedience to the Pope, Rome’s ruler. The reason for this, I presume, is because the Arch marks the defeat of the Jewish rebellion by Titus. This detail from the arch shows the looting of the Temple of Jerusalem.

Yet another arch, possibly the most famous of all the Roman arches — the Arch of Constantine, dedicated in 315. It was probably originally the Arch of Hadrian, but as he died nearly two centuries earlier, I don’t suppose he minded being usurped too much. It’s a beautiful spot for wedding photos (possibly after holding the ceremony itself in the Pantheon), but judging from where the photographer is standing, the actual backdrop is …

… the Colosseum! One of the most famous structures in the world. On which I promptly turned my back, and headed up the Palatine Hill. I can’t even remember why. I think it was because the same ticket covered both the Colosseum and the Palatine, but the queues were far shorter at the Palatine!

The Colosseum from the Palatine.

There are all sorts of interesting bits and pieces on the Palatine, though no structures as impressive as in the forum. This is on the side of a long pedestrian tunnel or cryptoporticus, built for Nero. (Caligula was stabbed in the Palatine cryptoporticus — oooooh, that must hurt, as Kenneth Williams might have said — though it might have been a different one which was uncovered recently.) It’s a wonder some duke or pope didn’t cart it away centuries ago.

The same goes for this, which is on a wall above a small outdoor shrine or something of that sort — there are two niches where statues presumably used to stand. Who, or what, is she?

Part of a monumental foot. Look on my works, ye mighty, etc.

There’s a small museum on the Palatine, mostly filled with assorted statuary found nearby, but some frescos too. This one of Apollo Citaredo — Apollo the cithara player?

A courtyard in Domitian’s late-1st century palace, dominated by a fountain (?).

One end of the so-called Hippodrome of Domitian. It’s too small to be for racing horses, so maybe it was a stadium for athletics, or perhaps just a garden shaped like a stadium … The oval feature shown here may be part of the restoration carried out during the reign of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, some decades after the end of the Roman Empire in the West.

The Colosseum’s big, yeah, but it’s not the G, is it? And in fact, the name probably comes from a giant statue of Nero which stood nearby: the Romans called this the Colossus and the Colosseum the Amphitheatrum Flavium, the Flavian Ampitheatre. It wasn’t until about 900 years after it was built that people started calling it by the now-familiar name.

Closer to the level of the arena floor itself, which was made of wood and so is long gone (though much of the more durable bits have also since been plundered for building materials). But you can still see the hypogeum, the tunnels in which the animals and gladiators were kept before combat.

I had previously read somewhere that the Colosseum was well-designed in terms of moving people around. Recent simulations have cast some doubt on this view, however, identifying some potential bottlenecks. Perhaps that’s not so surprising — how much experience could the Romans have had with designing buildings capable of holding 50,000 people at a time?

It was by now mid-afternoon. Time to push on … but I had to take another picture of the Arch of Constantine, before walking back through the forum up to the Capitoline Hill.

This will end in tears: Zeppelins to make tourist flights over London. (Via Airshipworld.)

Image source: from the front cover of Louis Gastine, War in Space: or, an Air-craft War between France and Germany (London and Felling-on-Tyne: Walter Scott Publishing, 1913). (OK, it’s Paris, not London — so I cheated.) The oldest paperback I own, incidentally.