On the night of 16 February 1873, the Russian ironclad Kaskowiski slipped into Waitemata Harbour, off Auckland, the largest city in the British colony of New Zealand. She found a British warship at anchor, and sent a ’submarine pinnace’ to disable its crew by means of a ‘mephitic water-gas’ so that their ship could be taken. Having done this, the guns of both ships were trained on the city. The Russian captain began to land his marines on shore, with orders to occupy the armoury and all telegraph stations within 40 miles, as well the banks at Grahamstown, which serviced the nearby goldfields. The Russians began rounding up prominent citizens and colonial officials, holding them at gunpoint in the Provincial Council Chamber. Vice-Admiral Herodskoff demanded from them a ransom of £250,000, or else he would give orders to burn Auckland to the ground. Eventually, a bit over half that sum was handed over. The Kaskowiski sailed away, leaving the provincial capital under the guns of the captured ship. The Daily Southern Cross, which reported this shocking news the morning after, was in despair: ‘WHERE IS THE BRITISH NAVY?’ But the British had problems of their own, for (unknown to the remote colony) war with Russia had already broken out over central Asia and Persia …

Of course, this never happened. It was a hoax, perpetrated by the editor of the Southern Cross, David Luckie. His aim was to draw attention to Auckland’s complete lack of defences, Battle of Dorking-style. But the effects were more War of the Worlds. Despite the clues (”Cask of whisky” and a supposed publication date three months in the future), some people prepared to flee the city, saddling horses and prying their gold from under the floorboards. Pupils skipped school (not that they needed much of an excuse, surely) to look out for the Kaskowisky, while others kept a suspicious eye on the British warship in the harbour. With crowds besieging his newspaper, he wrote a follow-up explaining what, in his opinion, needed to be done to guard against privateers and Russians: a chain of fortifications built to protect Auckland, armed with torpedoes, and a strong Royal Navy squadron for the Australian station.

The idea of a Russian attack on New Zealand wasn’t quite as silly as it might sound today. In 1865, a Confederate warship, Shenandoah, had visited Melbourne en route to plundering the American whalers off Alaska, so there was a precedent for privateering. The Great Game between Britain and Russia did indeed have the potential to turn into a Great War, and was causing concern in New Zealand as early as 1855. News of tension between the two empires led to war fever in early 1871, and in April that year, a Russian clipper called the Gaidamak had left Melbourne, and was last seen heading west for New Zealand … maybe it was scouting out sheltered harbours for use in wartime? (It wasn’t the first or the last Russian ship to visit Australia either.) The Australian colonies were starting to provide for their own defence — Victoria’s powerful monitor Cerberus arrived in the colony in 1871 — so why shouldn’t New Zealand do the same? It was so remote from mother England, after all, a long way for help to come.

But not much was accomplished. Some work was started on coastal defences in 1877; in 1885, there was another Russian scare, another hoax, and a number of forts were constructed. By 1909, the Russians had been replaced in the New Zealand imagination by Germans, and the commerce raiders were supplemented by airships. Finally, in the Second World War, some Germans and Japanese submarines did come to New Zealand, but didn’t actually do much. And there my knowledge of New Zealand’s defence panics ends, but I doubt there was anything else as curious as the Kaskowiski affair …

Sources: Glynn Barrett, Russophobia in New Zealand 1838-1908 (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1981), 48-53. Impressively, all of the Southern Cross has been scanned and is freely available online: the relevant articles would seem to be this, this, this, and this.

From the Manchester Guardian, 29 September 1938, p. 6:

We are hearing and reading so much (writes a correspondent) of people talking in the streets, in public vehicles, and wherever they meet about the international situation that perhaps “Miscellany” may care to preserve for posterity this perfectly true and unvarnished record of a conversation overheard between two young women lunching together in London:

First Y.W.: What is all this about the Czechs?

Second Y.W.: My dear, I haven’t the faintest. I never read the papers, and when they start those news bulletins on the wireless I always switch off.

It’s unclear exactly when this conversation took place — assuming the above is indeed a ‘perfectly true and unvarnished record’ — but presumably it was some time in the previous few days, when the danger of war with Germany was becoming acute. If Second Y.W. wasn’t curious about the Sudeten crisis by then, with gas masks being handed out, sandbags appearing everywhere, her neighbours heading off into the countryside for safety, anti-aircraft guns being positioned around the capital, and trenches being dug in public parks … then she probably would never be.

Neville Chamberlain didn’t exactly have his finger on the pulse of the nation, but when, on 27 September, he said on the BBC ‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing’, on this evidence he was not wrong!

Some more plots from the talk I gave the other way. I was trying to think of a way to illustrate in concrete terms the problem of speed for the air defence of Britain. I came up with the following:

Simply put, it shows the length of time it would have taken for an attacking bomber to fly from the coast to London (in blue) — call it the crossing time — and the time it would take taken for a defending fighter to climb high enough to intercept (in red) — call it the intercept time. And how these changed over time, obviously. As can be seen, the fighters generally had enough time to climb high enough to intercept the bombers before they got to London, but the margin decreased over time, from 15 or so minutes during the First World War, to less than 5 in the Second.

But all this is not straightforward so I’ll explain further. To begin with, the data is slightly dodgy. It’s mostly drawn from the same source as this, which is fine as far as it goes. But that means that I’m showing how long it would have taken British bombers to penetrate from the coast to London, which was not really a great worry. Having said that, it’s probably reasonable to assume that the performance of British bombers was roughly in line with those used by Continental air forces. (And the RAF’s own air defence exercises had to make this assumption, too, because borrowing somebody else’s air force for a day wasn’t feasible.) One day I’ll create a dataset for European aircraft …

How are the numbers derived? First, the bombers (blue). This is just the distance from the coast to London divided by each bomber’s maximum speed (which is not necessarily realistic). Why the coast? Because it was only when the incoming raiders crossed the coast that they could be detected by ground observers, and fighters dispatched to intercept them.¹ What is the distance from the coast to London? Well, obviously it varies, depending on which direction the enemy came from (and some writers expressed fears that they would fly up the Thames Estuary and avoid detection). Looking at a map, 50 miles seems like a reasonable approximation.

Next, the fighters (red). The time it takes for a fighter to climb meet the bombers is the height of the raid divided by the climb rate of each fighter. This climb rate is a bit of a problem. I don’t a good source for this number and had to plunder Wikipedia. That’s bad enough in itself, but it’s worse because the data is inconsistent. Sometimes — when it’s not missing — it’s expressed in feet per minute, and sometimes in the number of minutes to reach a given height. Obviously one can be turned into the other, but actually both are only approximations, and I’ve had to extrapolate and interpolate from these to get a usable number.² What height would the bombers be at? Well, that varied — it was higher on average during the Second World War than in the First because aircraft were more capable, and also because bombers tried to climb higher to escape the fighters. I’ve assumed that this height was 10000 ft in the 1910s, 15000 ft in the 1920s, 20000 ft in the 1930s, and 25000 ft in the 1940s.³ I just plucked these numbers out of the air, more or less, but they seem to work well in terms of keeping the red and blue trends in touch with each other. If anything they are probably underestimates.

Some other points. Firstly, the fighters would generally have to move horizontally to intercept the bombers, as well as vertically. This plot says nothing about that. But given the edge fighters had in speed and the location of their aerodromes, they should be able to cover that distance while climbing. Secondly, the data points are for the year each aircraft entered into RAF service. But since they remained in service for several year, at least, the data points should really be horizontal lines.⁴

Thirdly, I’m assuming a perfect command, control, communications and intelligence system. Fighter Command (and its predecessors) was good, but it still took a finite but non-zero amount of time for sightings to be reported, sifted, collated and reported, and then for squadrons to be allocated, given orders, and take off. Also there was a chance that raids might not be observed, that squadrons could be given the wrong vector, that the enemy could be missed in cloud — so the greater the gap between the red data points and the blue ones the better. The more inefficient Fighter Command, the narrower the margin for error.⁵

Now we can show what difference radar made. The Chain Home system came into operation in 1939 and had an effective range of 120 miles. What this means here is that instead of only having to cross 50 miles from the coast to London after being detected by the observers on the coast, the bombers now had to cross 170 miles after being detected. As the above plot shows, this pushed up the crossing time dramatically: from 1939, the defenders could generally expect to have around 40 minutes’ warning of any raids. The margin for error increased dramatically, from only 5 minutes or less, to more than half an hour, which is far better. In theory, the defending fighter squadrons would now have plenty of time to get in position before the enemy arrived. Of course, that’s not the whole battle, but it’s a good start!

Lastly, here’s a counterfactual which I’ve long wondered about. Between 1933 and 1935, the Air Ministry put a fair amount of effort into researching the feasibility of using acoustic mirrors as a comprehensive early warning system. The acoustic mirrors were, mostly, concrete hemispheric dishes for focusing sound, which had been used as early as 1916. The biggest ones, at Dungeness in Kent and Maghtab in Malta, were 200 feet long curved walls. Land was actually purchased along the Thames Estuary for the beginnings of a national acoustic mirror system, but work never started because radar came along. But if it hadn’t, then in 1940 Fighter Command might have relied upon a network of these acoustic mirrors all along the coast.⁶ How useful would they have been?

The experimental mirrors had a maximum detection range of 22 miles (on very windy days it was a lot less). I’ll be generous and call it 25 miles, which is then added to the 50 miles from the coast to London for a total distance of 75 miles. The Thames Estuary acoustic mirrors probably would have come online in 1936, and so again I’ll be generous, and assume that London at least would have a working early warning system from that year.

Taking all this into account, the results can be seen above. And sadly the acoustic mirrors wouldn’t have made much difference — a margin of only about 10 minutes, not much improved on the 5 minutes with no warning system. Of course, even a few minutes’ extra warning was worth having, but the Air Ministry was right to terminate development of the acoustic mirror network in order to concentrate on the far more promising radar.

John Ferris has argued against the idea that ‘Air defence in Britain began during 1934 and only because radar was developed’, and that the importance of the C³I system — ultimately a legacy of the First World War — has been underestimated by historians: it was ‘ideally preadapted to radar’.⁷ And he’s right. Even without effective early warning, as long as the enemy bombers could be intercepted and shot down on their way back home, air defence could still work by inflicting prohibitive casualties. Except, that is, when the casualties from bombing were predicted to be massive, and then a failure to stop the bomber getting through would have devastating consequences. Radar was part of the antidote to the fear of the knock-out blow. Or rather it could have been, if it hadn’t remained secret until 1941 …

(Just to repeat: the data and assumptions underlying these plots are on the dubious side, and are not fit for any purpose, probably including this one!)

1. I’m neglecting radar, obviously, but see below. I’m also neglecting the fact that sound detectors, of the type that had been developed during the First World War, had a range of about 5 miles. But see even further below. Distant patrol aircraft were also used as a kind of picket line.
2. What I really need are curves showing climbing time vs. height because the higher an aeroplane flies, the harder it is to climb in the thin air. I assume these are available somewhere, but digging them up is too much work for a quick and dirty plot like this!
3. Fighters got a lot better at climbing very rapidly by the late 1940s, but as that happens I’m shifting the goalposts ever higher, as it were, and so the above graph is understating the rate of climb of fighters.
4. E.g., the two red triangles in the late 1930s are the Hurricane and Spitfire, which between them were the RAF’s primary interceptors throughout the war. This plot makes it look like there wasn’t anything able to catch raiders in 1940, which was not the case!
5. I could model this inefficiency by adding a fixed number of minutes to the climb time of the fighters — call it the response time — but I don’t know what a reasonable number is and it might vary a fair bit. For instance, in 1918 LADA (London Air Defence Area) had a response time of 2.5 to 5 minutes, according to John Ferris, “Fighter defence before Fighter Command: the rise of strategic air defence in Great Britain, 1917-1934”, Journal of Military History 63 (1999), 853 (JSTOR). But it presumably rose after LADA was dismantled after the war. David Zimmerman, Britain’s Shield: Radar and the Defeat of the Luftwaffe (Stroud: Sutton, 2001), 25, seems to suggest that 5 minutes was the time it took in 1933 just to transmit observations to ADGB (Air Defence of Great Britain) HQ, but that’s for the big acoustic mirrors which probably required more computation than normal acoustic detectors. So, pending more comprehensive figures, I’ll just leave the response time out of it.
6. See ibid., chapter 2, for more on the acoustic mirror research of the 1930s.
7. Ferris, ibid., 845, 884.

An illuminated tram-car which is touring Blackpool as a recruiting agent for the A.R.P. services.¹

Every autumn in Blackpool, the promenade is festooned with miles of multicoloured lights — the ‘Blackpool Illuminations‘. Part of this display involves similarly-decorated trams — the ‘Blackpool illuminated trams‘. (Or so I read, I’ve obviously never been.) This particular example featured in the 1938 illuminations, and was fitted out as a travelling advertisement for recruitment into air raid precaution jobs, such as wardens and first aid. It looks like it’s the same tram as the third one pictured here, which was built in 1937, and later rebuilt and called “Progress”. Evidently it could be modified to reflect a particular theme. In the picture above, it’s got some slogan written on the top windows — something about ARP — and a model aeroplane fore and (looks like) aft — a fighter? My favourite is in the front window: ‘A.R.P. DISPELS FEAR’.

I wonder who the intended audience was? ARP was largely a devolved responsibility; local authorities planned and implemented their own schemes. Since, I assume, the tramway was also paid for and operated by the town, it’s probably just aimed at local citizens. But of course Blackpool was also a major holiday destination (the sunny Spanish coast at this time being far more likely to receive visits from Italian bombers than British airliners!) The illuminations, then, were also an opportunity to influence visitors from a much wider area than Blackpool, particularly from the north-east. So I wonder if the Home Office played a role in encouraging such recruiting methods?

It’s probably only a coincidence, but the day when this photo was published, 27 September 1938, was practically at the peak of the Sudeten crisis. 29 September was the day when the Munich conference was announced in the papers; only on 1 October was it clear that it had succeeded in averting war (and that was the deadline Hitler had announced for resolution of the Sudeten problem). On 27 and 28 September, war seemed imminent. So as the brand-new ARP tram trundled along the promenade, its lights could have been extinguished at any time …

1. Manchester Guardian, 27 September 1938, p. 7.

The 14th Military History Carnival is up at Investigations of a Dog. It’s a big one! I direct readers’ attention particularly to a series of posts by Paul Brewer at The War Reading Room: here, here, here, here, here, and here. The subject is a new book by Nicholson Baker called Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, which has been reviewed widely and panned roundly, at least by historians. Baker’s subject is the origins of the Second World War and his approach is to quote and juxtapose contemporary newspaper and magazine articles. I haven’t read it, but have flicked through it in the bookshop and can understand why reviews have been negative. The extracts are presented with little or no context and are arranged in such a way as to imply close causal connections between events which would seem to have little to do with each other, and it’s all wrapped up in an irritatingly portentous tone. I didn’t buy it, can you tell?

But while he doesn’t excuse Baker’s ‘dishonest history’, Paul argues that most reviewers (the historian ones, at least) seem not to have understood the point of Human Smoke. It’s not a history as such, nor an argument that the Second World War was not a good/just/necessary war (though I think Baker is sympathetic to such views). After all, Baker is a novelist, not an historian (or journalist). Instead, it’s an attempt to understand how an American observer of world events in the 1930s and early 1940s might arrive at a pacifist-isolationist position:

We experience an event, such as the ongoing War in Iraq, in a piecemeal form, filtered by two editors - one is located at our source of information, whether radio or newspaper in 1939, and the other is our own selection of what to pay close attention to. Baker’s book shows us how one reader might have perceived the oncoming war and decided that the cost of fighting it might not have been worth it.

If that’s right, it sounds more interesting than I originally thought; and in a way it’s not too far from some of my own work. I make pretty heavy use of newspapers in one of my chapters to show what the average person on the street was being told about the dangers of bombing, though I’m not restricting myself to only one political vantage point, nor (I hope!) conflating unrelated events in a naive way. In any event, thanks to Paul’s posts I may reconsider my decision not to buy Human Smoke. If I ever have a spare $35 lying around, anyway.

The talk at Earth Sciences went well, I think. It was a good-sized audience and they seemed interested in what I had to say, judging by the questions afterwards. I also found out that one of the honorary fellows had actually lived in London during the war, and though only a child could remember watching out for V1s passing overhead and even the ‘electric’ atmosphere of the day that war was declared.

I was all set to record the talk, but forgot to fire up the audio app. At some point, I may try recording it again at home or just putting the text up. Until then, here are a couple of the graphs I used, along with some different ways of presenting the same numbers. (Except where indicated, the data is courtesy of Dan Todman, who compiled it from Home Office files. Thanks Dan!)

Firstly, this shows the civilian casualties (killed and seriously wounded) each month in Britain due to enemy action between 1939-1945. Most — all? — of these will have the result of bombing, so I’ve labeled it accordingly. (This is the counterpart of a histogram I did for 1914-1918, except that combined civilian and military casualties, and separated different forms of attack.) It’s easy to pick out the Luftwaffe’s major offensives: the biggest peak is September 1940, when the Blitz started; it ended in May 1941, after which casualties were never so high again. There’s a relative lull in January and February 1941, due largely to bad weather conditions. In April-June 1942, there’s the Baedeker Blitz and from January 1944, the Baby Blitz. Then there’s the V-1 offensive in June-September 1944 and the V-2 offensive in September 1944-March 1945.

I thought it might be instructive to compare what actually happened with what was predicted would happen: if the knock-out blow had attempted and if pre-war estimates of German airpower had been correct. I derived this from figures provided by Richard M. Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy (London: H.M.S.O., 1950), 9 and 12-3, which were estimates made circa 1938 by government bodies for a war starting in 1939. These lead to the following assumptions:

1. the Luftwaffe could deliver 3500 tons of bombs on London in the first 24 hours of an attack, and an average of 700 tons per day for some weeks thereafter (Committee of Imperial Defence)
2. the casualties caused per ton of bombs dropped would be 48 (24 killed, 24 seriously wounded) (ARP Department, Home Office)
3. the war would last for 60 days (CID)

It’s then simple to calculate that a German knock-out blow launched on 3 September 1939 would have led to a bit over 1.1 million casualties in September and a bit over a million in October, 168000 on the first day of war. More than a million fatalities in just two months.

It’s easy to quibble with these assumptions — for example, I’m using the most pessimistic multiplier for casualties, but that’s partly because it’s easy to relate it to the definition of casualties I’m already using. And my assumption that the 700 tons per day could be kept up for 60 days may well be too high, but I can’t find anything better. The CID did estimate in 1937 that an aerial war of this length would kill 600,000 and wound 1.2 million, so that shows that I’m in the right range and also that officials did make these sorts of calculations at the time.

Anyway, the point of the histogram is to show that the actual bombing, as bad as it was, was nothing like as terrible as ‘the expected holocaust’ (as Tom Harrison termed it), and I think it succeeds — you can just make out the Blitz and the V-1 attacks, but they’re just tiny blips. However, precisely because of the huge disparity in scale, it’s hard to make a meaningful comparison.

In his graphs of all British casualties, Dan opted for running cumulative figures rather than monthly ones, and that is indeed better for showing the overall picture — whereas monthly is better at showing intensity, I think. So, here’s my actual vs. predicted plot redone in cumulative fashion. Even by the end of five and a half years of total war, the scale of the knock-out blow isn’t even approached. (In fact, I think that even when military casualties are taken into account, the knock-out blow still wins handily.)

Here’s a different way to present the monthly data. This time I’ve plotted the casualties on a log scale. This is good for showing changes in the order of magnitude, and it’s immediately apparent that the knock-out blow was around two orders of magnitude (i.e., about 100 times) more intense than the worst month of the Blitz.

Finally, the cumulative casualty figures on a log scale. So, overall, the civilian experience of bombing over the whole of the Second World War (mainly meaning the Blitz) was about one order of magnitude (i.e. about 10 times) less devastating than the knock-out blow predicted shortly before the war.

The knock-out blow would have been 100 times more intense and 10 times more devastating than the Blitz was — I’ll have to remember that!

Via Museum of Hoaxes, the Nazi air marker hoax — though it seems to me that it was not a hoax in the sense of a deliberate attempt to deceive, but rather an honest misinterpretation. And taking into account the role of the press in the story’s rise and fall, it looks a lot like what I’d call a defence panic.

What happened was that in August 1942 the US Army issued a press release claiming that its airmen had discovered strange patterns in fields across the eastern United States, which appeared to point in the direction of important nearby military and industrial sites. This was offered as evidence that enemy agents were active in the US, laying down signals for German bombers. Nearly two thousand newspapers (including Time) across the country published the story, and editorialised about the enemy within.

Of course, the patterns weren’t Nazi air markers; they were the result of perfectly ordinary rural activities, which had been appearing for years without anybody paying any attention to them. For example, the one shown above was created in 1938 under the supervision of the Department of Agriculture. It’s just the way the field had been ploughed. It was only now, when the country was at war and people were worried about its security, that such patterns were interpreted as signs of danger. It took a sceptical Washington Star and a sheepish confession from the War Department to lay fears of a fifth column to rest.

One aspect I found interesting is that the same story had circulated in a few newspapers in June, but for some reason didn’t take off as it did a couple of months later. The major difference seems to have been the addition of photos of the supposed markers. Maybe they were the evidence needed to make the stories plausible. Maybe they just made the stories more striking and so more appealing to editors. Or it could just be that they were desperate for news in the slow summer months. But it could also be that there was some domestic reason why security was more of a concern in August.

There are a number of obvious parallels. This was not the first time that Americans had imagined aerial threats to their nation: in the First World War — even before their country was in it — there were reports of aircraft flying across the border from Canada at night, perhaps bringing spies and saboteurs. That there were plenty of less dangerous ways for German agents to enter the country dampened the rumours in 1916 about as much as the improbability of New Jersey or Virginia being bombed did in 1942.

The idea of covert signals to enemy bombers can be found in the British press in both world wars. For example, in September 1940, Emil and Alma Wirth, an elderly Swiss-German immigrant and his British-born wife, were arrested on suspicion of ‘making signals “intended to be received by an aircraft in flight”‘ from their Kensington flat. A neighbour, who presumably reported them to the police, said that during an air raid on the night of 24 August he’d seen ‘flashes from the window of the accused whenever an aeroplane appeared to be overhead’. A porter also gave evidence against the couple. It’s not clear from the press accounts, but as the Wirths first appeared in court on 8 September, they may have been arrested in response to the first day of the Blitz, the day before. At any rate the magistrate dismissed the charges, so evidently he wasn’t particularly impressed by the evidence against them. It seems that they weren’t even fined for violating the black-out, which perhaps suggests that there may have some personal reason for the accusations — and being an ersatz German, Emil was an easy target, of course.¹ Sounds like a bit of a witch-hunt, but as the magistrate’s response — and the Washington Star’s scepticism — shows, just because it was war-time doesn’t mean that paranoia was automatically given free reign.

Update: something very similar happened in Britain too.

1. Manchester Guardian, 9 September 1940, p. 11; The Times, 9 September 1940, p. 9; 13 September 1940, p. 2.

This year, because I don’t have enough to do I’ve joined the editorial collective of the Melbourne Historical Journal. Here’s the call for papers for Volume 36:

Call for Papers

Submissions Due: 1st June 2008

Published since 1961, Melbourne Historical Journal (MHJ) is a refereed journal for the publication of Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand postgraduate work in history. It is open to new approaches and aims to present original postgraduate work to a wide and responsive readership.

Journal articles should be between 5000-7000 words and constitute an original piece of research. Manuscripts should not be under review or scheduled for publication by any other journal, and should be substantially different from other published work. The collective asks that all manuscripts conform to the MHJ style guide.

Articles submitted for publication pass through a two-stage process of review. First, all articles are read by the collective, which decides whether or not to send the article to be refereed. Then articles are sent to two referees who are experts in the relevant field of historical inquiry. If both referees agree that the article is of a standard worthy of publication then the article is accepted.

Articles and queries may be submitted to MHJ via email at mhj@unimelb.edu.au.

Admittedly, not very much!

I’m giving a talk at 4pm, next Friday, 16 May 2008, in the Fritz Loewe Theatre at the School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne. The title is “Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941″ and it will be a broad overview of my thesis topic. It should be fun, for me at least — it’s the department where I’ve worked for many years as the IT manager, so it will nice (and perhaps challenging) to try to explain to all the geologists and climatologists exactly what it is I’ve been doing these past few years. Thanks to Malek Ghantous of the Earth Sciences Postgraduate Group for the invite and for organising this — it’s the first, and quite possibly the last, time a poster has been made to advertise a talk I’ve given!

If anybody local has nothing better to do on a Friday afternoon, you’re more than welcome to attend the talk (and enjoy the refreshments afterwards). Perhaps just drop me a line first, though, so we can anticipate any massive surge of interest (ha!) There’s a map showing where Earth Sciences is after the jump. (The lecture theatre is on the 2nd floor, right near the main entrance, just past the disused theremin/mural …)


View Larger Map

A GIANT OF THE AIR. A HANDLEY-PAGE FOUR-ENGINED BIPLANE.

A Handley Page V/1500, the Kabul bomber. Below is (I think) a S.E.5a.

Image source: Harry Golding, ed., The Wonder Book of Aircraft for Boys and Girls (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1919), frontispiece. Painting by Geoffrey Watson.