Thanks for your comment. You may well be right! When enlarged, that section of the horizon on the right actually doesn’t show any countryside, but more roofs. So at least it suggests that the photo was indeed taken in a big city.

Roy:

Judging from the painting on the beer stein in question, I would say it actually depicts LZ3, which first flew in 1906, but was sold to the German Army in 1909, which renamed it ZI (ie Zeppelin I) upon taking it over on 29 June. I don’t know if LZ3/Z1 ever flew over Mainz but the Army seems to have flown it about quite a bit — initially to Metz, which is not too far away — so it’s certainly possible. There’s a photo of LZ3 on this page (second image, click to enlarge). You can see it has a very distinctive tail arrangement, which matches that on the beer stein but not the pictures of LZ4 above.

The boxy one is the “old” one I think.

Chris:

Well spotted! By stepped gables, do you mean something like the ones on the Great Hall at Stirling Castle?

Bob:

The photo of Londesborough Hall now links to a larger version (you may need to clear browser caches first). I’ve got some other photos of Londesborough Hall from Peter but they are long-distance and blurry. It’s on the top of a slope down to a lake, and there are tall trees (twice as high as the hall itself) behind it. No stepped gables! But you could be right that the Londesborough Hall photos are of St Dunstans … it doesn’t look like there is or was a lake at Londesborough, and there’s certainly one at Regent’s Park. And the building looks very different to the much boxier one on the Wikipedia page, although admittedly it was remodelled between then and the 20th century. But I don’t know that that would help with the airship photo, because there weren’t any non-phantom Zeppelins flying over London before 1915 either :)

Lester:

Thanks for that. The way in which the colours map to shades of grey on monochromatic plates is definitely something which can trip up casual viewers! I hadn’t even thought about that so I’m glad you did.

I can’t see how the picture could be at Londesborough Hall, even if LH has a stepped gable end around the back somewhere we can’t see, because the chimney styles are too different - and I can’t see LH ever having had the style of chimney seen in the Zeppelin plate, which wouldn’t fit the architecture at all.

The tones are exactly right for an Imperial German flag, too - I was initially surprised at how light the red tone looks (given that it’s probably not a panchromatic plate at that time, so reds tend towards black*) but it’s pretty close tonally to the bricks, which aren’t yellow bricks (pale on ortho plates).

*(I was noticing this very strikingly on a photo of 1914 French soldiers the other day - their dark blue coats look quite light because the film’s fairly blue-sensitive, while their red trousers look black on the photo - the two uniform colours’ lightness is almost reversed on the plate compared to real life!)

http://www.usembassy.org.uk/rcwinfld.html

So it may be a tad difficult to find a photograph of St. Dunstan’s