Monthly Archives: May 2010

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On 2 June 1915, a London coronial inquest was held into the deaths on the night of 31 May of Henry Thomas Good, 49, and Caroline Good, 46. The jury returned the verdict

That the deceased died from suffocation and burns, having been murdered by some agent of a hostile force.1

That was about as far as they could go in assigning blame, as they had no direct evidence as to who the murderer was. But everyone present knew that, as the coroner said,

these two people, man and wife, who were civilians and peaceful inhabitants, had died from shock, suffocation, and burns on May 31 owing to an explosion and consequent fires created by bombs no doubt dropped by a hostile airship. They might say that some unknown agent of the hostile German Army murdered these persons, and beyond that he did not think they could go.

This was the first air raid London ever experienced, ninety-five years ago today. The coronial inquest was therefore one of the first held into air-raid deaths. (At least one other was held in London the same day, and others had taken place after the first Zeppelin attacks in January.) To hold judicial inquiries into civilian deaths due to enemy action now seems like a slightly odd practice, and indeed the practice was not continued in the Second World War (or at least was not reported). But coronial inquests into air raid deaths were common features in the British press in the First World War.
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  1. The Times, 3 June 1915, 3. All quotes taken from this source. [↩]

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A recent post on io9 mentioned Le Péril Bleu, a 1912 French novel by Maurice Renard (who also wrote the oft-filmed Les Mains d'Orlac, 'The hands of Orlac'). According to io9, Le Péril Bleu features 'invisible aliens who lived in the upper strata of the atmosphere[,] fish for humans and keep them in a space zoo'. This sounded to me suspiciously like a British science fiction story published in Pearson's Magazine that same year, John N. Raphael's 'Up above'.1 I re-read Raphael's story to refresh my memory: set in 1915, it concerns the mysterious disappearance of various objects and people, ranging from a pub's sign to the Prime Minister. Other strange occurrences included houses being demolished and a fall of red rain. It turns out that the 'Sky Folk' are responsible; they live on the boundary between the upper atmosphere and outer space, and have been sending expeditions down to the Earth's surface to trawl for specimens, in the same way that we might explore the bottom of the sea bed. This analogy is very explicit: the Sky Folk's vessel labeled a 'sub-aerine', and the people and objects they pull up are put on display just like fish in the new Oceanographic Museum in Monaco. (The Sky Folk and their sub-aerine are invisible, apparently in the same way that we are invisible to fish. Or that we can't see very well under water. No, I don't get it either.)

So it does sound a lot like Le Péril Bleu. But before I could cry 'J'accuse!' I noticed the following disclaimer on the first page of Raphael's version:

The central idea and some of the details of this story have been borrowed by permission from "Le Péril Bleu," by Maurice Renaud [sic].2

With that, all my dreams of making a major historical discovery -- the literary fraud of the Edwardian age! -- vanished. I'll have to win fame and fortune some other way.
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  1. John N. Raphael, 'Up above', Pearson's Magazine 34 (December 1912), 710-60. [↩]
  2. Ibid., 710. [↩]

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Furies, 43 Squadron, 1939

All the cool kids are talking about How to be a Retronaut -- well, they were a month or two ago, I confess it's hard to keep up. How to be a Retronaut is a blog which tries to engage your sense of anachronism to try and shake your assumptions about the past. As the Retronaut puts it:

The power of anachronisms
Its all to do with the power of anachronisms – things which seem to be in the wrong time. They can be objects, words, phrases, technology, ideas, fashions – anything we associate so strongly with one time that it seems wrong in another

Wrong associations
And its that word “associate” – that’s the powerful one. Because the strange thing is, real anachronisms do not exist. They can’t. A “thing” belongs to whatever era its in. Its not the “thing” thats got it wrong, its us, and our associations. Time to change what we believe.

But in that tiny, tiny moment, just before we grasp the fact that our beliefs are wrong, we get to be a Retronaut.

One of the main ways How to be a Retronaut achieves this is through the use of colour photographs taken in periods we don't normally associate with colour photographs -- 1913, for example.
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Ashley Ekins, ed. 1918 Year of Victory: The End of the Great War and the Shaping of History. Titirangi and Wollombi: Exisle Publishing, 2010. This is the product of a conference held at the Australian War Memorial in 2008, and features contributions from people like Jay Winter, Robin Prior, Gary Sheffield, Trevor Wilson and Stephen Badsey, among others, with chapters on 1918 from the perspective from various armies and arms (Peter Hart has a chapter on the air war, for example). It's encouraging to see a non-specialist Australian/New Zealand publisher putting out a serious work of military history which takes an international view (even if Australia does get as many chapters as Germany).

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Italian airships bombing a Turkish camp

The aforementioned Mike Dash sent me the above photograph, presumably a fake, wondering if I'd seen it before and if I knew its provenance. I have not, but I agree it's a fake. It can be found in a few places on the web, for example here and here.

It purportedly shows two Italian airships bombing a Turkish encampment in the Italo-Turkish War in 1912, one of the very first air attacks ever made. The airships do look like the airships used by Italy in Libya, namely the three P-types, highly streamlined semi-rigid dirigibles built in 1910-1 -- note the control surfaces at the rear. But they don't look real; at the least they have been heavily retouched. The gondola of the airship on the right doesn't look like it's in the right place, though that could be perspective. Also, from the (real) photos I've seen, the Ps didn't have shiny-silver envelopes, but had a darkened and banded appearance. And there's just too much going on. The airships are swooping, the bombs are exploding, and the cameraman was in the right place at the right time to capture it. I don't buy it. I suspect it was probably faked for Turkish consumption to show how the Italians were using inhumane new methods of warfare (the supposed photographer would have to be Turkish to be plausibly near a Turkish army encampment). That it seems to first appeared on a Turkish website may support this. But if anyone knows anything definite, please comment.

Here are a couple of other images I came across while looking for other photos of the Italian airships at war. They're from Willis J. Abbot, Aircraft and Submarines: The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day Uses of War's Newest Weapons (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1918), which has a lot of great illustrations.
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No sooner does Bomber Command get approval for its own grand memorial -- to be precise, a £3.5 million neoclassical pavilion in London's Green Park commemorating its 55,000 dead -- than Fighter Command trumps it with a proposal for an even grander memorial: a 'Battle of Britain Beacon' at the RAF Museum at Hendon, which would cost £80 million and stand 116m tall, making it 10m taller than Big Ben and visible from central London. It would also serve as a permanent exhibition hall. The bomber boys just can't catch an even break.

As I noted recently, at least the question of how Bomber Command should be remembered gets discussed in the UK, unlike in Australia. Having said that, Australia and New Zealand both already have Bomber Command memorials. Admittedly, New Zealand's memorial looks like it might originally have been designed by Nigel Tufnel on the back of a paper napkin. Then again, Australia's (much bigger) one was designed by a Kiwi and built in New Zealand. I'm sure this must be meaningful in terms of the longstanding trans-Tasman rivalry but wouldn't venture to guess how exactly!

Thanks to peacay and ErrolC for the tips.

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Given that it climaxes on board an airship which is carrying a devastating new chemical weapon, Sapper's fourth Bulldog Drummond novel The Final Count (1926) is somewhat disappointing from an airminded point of view. The poison gas is not intended for use against a city, or to terrorise an enemy, but to cover up a boringly mundane (if large-scale) theft.

But there is still much of interest. Hovering in the background of The Final Count is the threat of warfare, especially aero-chemical warfare. George Simmers noted some time back that this novel seems to present an unusually early example of the feeling that the Great War had been futile. That's my impression too, from a slightly different angle. The events described in the novel take place in 1927 (i.e. the near future of the time of publication in 1926), and Europe seems to be on the brink of war again. That's at odds with my impression of the mid-1920s, certainly after the Locarno treaties of 1925; it's not that there were no tensions between nations, but there was little feeling that war was likely any time soon. Perhaps Sapper needed to exaggerate the possibility of conflict in order to find employment for Drummond and his band of merry vigilantes, preferably against the Bolshevik menace.

The poison mentioned above was originally developed near the end of the Great War by Robin Gaunt, a British chemist serving in the British army. It's actually a liquid (as was mustard 'gas') which causes instantaneous (and very painful) death if applied under the skin. This made it impractical as a battlefield weapon, because the intended victims would need to already have some minor cuts to allow the poison to get in. There is also the problem of how to spray a liquid over a large area. The plan put forward was to use tanks for this purpose (a la J. F. C. Fuller in The Reformation of War).
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The Earl of Avon. The Eden Memoirs: Facing the Dictators. London: Cassell, 1962. The most famous British politician to ever wear an Anthony Eden. Also Foreign Secretary 1935-8 and later did other stuff.

Roy Jenkins. Mr Balfour's Poodle: People v. Peers. London: Papermac, 1999 [1954]. The People's Budget and the 1910 General Elections. An interesting time in British politics, unlike the present day.

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In England and the Aeroplane, David Edgerton made the following striking, and oft-cited, point about Britain's aerial strength at the outbreak of the First World War:

Overall, England had fewer aircraft than the other great powers. The total of 113 compares with 120 for France, 232 for Germany, 226 for Russia and 36 for Austro-Hungary. These figures are commonly cited to indicate England’s relative weakness but such a conclusion is based on the assumption that absolute air strength was important in 1914. If we consider what aircraft were for we may reach a different conclusion. Since aircraft were used for reconnaissance by both armies and navies the number of aircraft should be considered in terms of the sizes of each army and navy. If we do this England comes out as the most aeronautically inclined nation, since its mobilised army numbered less than one million men, whereas the French and German armies each had more than three million.1

And he's right. There were few advocates of independent airpower in 1914, as the proper use of aircraft was considered to be to support the army and the navy. And so we shouldn't just compare the number of aircraft possessed by each nation to each other: the numbers need to be contextualised. But how?
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  1. David Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Academic and Professional, 1991), 10. [↩]

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I was pleasantly surprised when A Fortean in the Archives linked (also here) to my recent post on Boer War airpower for several reasons. Firstly, because it's always nice to be linked to. Secondly, because I've been following A Fortean in the Archives for a while now: the Fortean in question is Mike Dash, a former contributing editor of Fortean Times who has a PhD in British naval history and has written a fine call-to-arms for Fortean historians called Borderlands, which deserves to be more widely read. And thirdly, because of the post itself, which is about the curious episode of Walter Powell, a Conservative MP who disappeared in 1881 when his balloon was swept out from Dorset over the English Channel. This was highly publicised in the press, and for the next week or so reports came in of sightings of Powell's balloon. Many were from fairly plausible locations (Dartmouth, Alderney, northern Spain), but a couple were from Scotland nearly a week later, which is not plausible at all. So in at least some cases, whatever they did see, it wasn't Powell in his balloon. This suggests that expectations were playing a role: having been told by the press that a balloon was lost at sea, people were apt to interpret anything aerial they didn't recognise (a planet, a Reticulan scoutship) as Powell in his balloon.

This is a useful reminder that phantom airship 'scares' were only incidentally due to fear; the real cause was expectation. An even clearer example comes from Canada in 1896. The context was the attempt by S. A. Andrée, a Swedish engineer, to reach the North Pole by air. His plan was to launch in a balloon from Danskøya, an island near Spitsbergen, and drift north with the wind. After reaching the pole, the balloon would eventually land in Canada or Russia. The Swedish and international press covered the preparations for the voyage in some detail. On 30 June, the balloon was inflated, and Andrée and his two companions announced their intention to start for the pole when the wind was favourable.

The very next day, some people in Winnipeg saw a balloon they identified as Andrée's, far off in the distance, which excited some comment in the press. More interestingly, on 3 July, the chief of the Kispiox people and a group of trappers saw something balloon-like, brightly-lit and travelling north while at Blackwater Lake in British Columbia. Not far away, on the Skeena river, an Aboriginal boy saw something very similar on the same date. Both of these reports were relayed through a local Indian Affairs agent, who had warned the locals that they were 'liable' to see Andrée's balloon travelling north over the next month, and presumably accepted the sightings as being reliable.

And so they did, or rather 'did', because Andrée's balloon never left the ground. The wind at Danskøya kept blowing steadily south, and the expedition was put off until the following year. Free ballooning was not at all common in the 1890s, and it's unlikely that anyone would have tried it over the wilds of British Columbia. So there was nothing to see along the Skeena, yet something was seen, precisely because something was expected.

The Andrée expedition did set off in 1897, on 11 July, but the balloon crashed into pack ice after only two days and 300 miles. Andrée and his companions tried to return on foot, but perished before reaching safety. Their fate was unknown until 1930. It will come as no surprise that more phantom sightings of Andrée's balloon were reported from Canada: this time from Rivers Inlet, Kamlooms [edit: more likely Kamloops], Victoria, Goldstream, Douglas, Winnipeg, Rossland, Souris and Honora. Most spectacularly, thousands of people in Vancouver saw 'a very bright red star surrounded by a luminous halo' to the south for a quarter of hour on 13 August, which again was identified with the now-wrecked Andrée balloon. With mystery aircraft, expectation is everything.

Source: Robert E. Bartholomew and George S. Howard, UFOs & Alien Contact: Two Centuries of Mystery (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998), chapter 3.