Monthly Archives: July 2014

When the present is too painful to think about, there is always the past to retreat into.

Japanese planes forced down an airliner which was flying from Hong Kong to Wuchow to-day [24 August 1938], and, it is reported, machine-gunned the passengers.

Of 18 people in the plane it is believed that 15 have either been killed or drowned, as the machine, which landed on the Macao River, sank.

The pilot, named Woods, and a Chinese passenger, both of whom were wounded, have arrived at Macao, the Portuguese province at the mouth of the Canton River.

Woods said that after he had landed the machine on the west side of the river, four of the 12 Japanese planes that had forced it down, dived and machine-gunned the helpless passengers.1

Well, there's no respite there.

The turbulent Mohmand tribes who have been gathering ominously on the North-West Frontier of India under incitement by Congress Party and communist agitators to strike a blow at the British administration, failed to heed the warnings to disperse contained in leaflets dropped by aeroplanes which flew over the tribal country in the vicinity of the border, and to-day [9 March 1932] they incurred the penalty stated in the warnings, when scores of their villages were bombed by Royal Air Force 'planes from Risalpur and Kohat. Several villages were wrecked and set on fire, Tribesmen hidden on the mountain tops turned fierce rifle fire on the 'planes, which replied with machine guns.

The bombing will continue until the raiders return to their mountain fortresses. One section of the tribesmen, which was threatening the approaches to the remote British outpost at Chitral is reported to have dispersed.2

No respite there either.

When the airmail leaves Parafield for Perth tomorrow mornining [sic] it will carry a highly-bred Nawab with it -- Higham Nawab of Warncourt, a six-weeks-old Persion [sic] kitten, dusty black in color, and about nine inches long.

The Nawab comes from a distinguished family. He was bred by Miss A. E. Jarmyn, of Prospect. His mother is Higham Gipsy, a litter sister to Higham Roulette, a South Australian grand champion Persian. The Nawab will go to Perth in a specially light matchwood box, and he will be in the care of the pilot of the mail plane.

He has been sold to Miss A. G. Cohen, of Buckingham Hill, Western Australia, who will call for him when the mail plane arrives.

Miss Jarmyn thinks that the Nawab will not be airsick because he is so small. She will give him a good breakfast before he goes, to make him comfortable and sleepy.3

That will do! Except – this is on the same page:

News, 11 November 1932, 8

Mr. Baldwin stressed the probable horrors of aerial warfare. The greatest fear among ordinary people of all nations, he said, was fear of the air. It was well for the man in the street to understand that no power could protect him from air-bombing. The only defence in aerial warfare was to kill more people than the enemy killed.4

There's no escaping the present, or the past.

  1. Argus (Melbourne), 25 August 1938, 1. []
  2. Western Mail (Perth), 17 March 1932, 34. []
  3. News (Adelaide), 11 November 1932, 8. []
  4. Ibid. []

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An update of my list of early 20th century British newspapers online is well overdue. As such, there are a large number of new titles available (some only for a limited range of years), along with the usual additional ranges of years for existing titles. But it's clear that the imminent First World War centenary has really driven this expansion, or at least shaped it, because the range 1914 to 1918 appears over and over again.

By far the most new titles come from Welsh Newspapers Online (WNO):

Abergavenny Chronicle
Abergavenny Mail and Farmers' Gazette
Adsain (Corwen)
Amman Valley Chronicle
Baner Ac Amserau Cymru
Barmouth and County Advertiser
Barry Dock News
Barry Herald
Brecon & Radnor Express Carmarthen and Swansea Valley Gazette and Brynmawr District Advertiser
Brecon County Times, Neath Gazette and General Advertiser
Brython (Liverpool)
Cambrian Daily Leader (Swansea)
Cardigan Bay Visitor (Aberystwyth)
Carmarthen Journal and South Wales Weekly Advertiser
Carmarthen Weekly Reporter
Carnarvon and Denbigh Herald and North and South Wales Independent (Caernarfon)
Chester Observer
Chester Courant and Advertiser For North Wales
Clorianydd (Llangefni)
County Echo, Fishguard and North Pembrokeshire Advertiser (Fishguard)
County Observer and Monmouthshire Central Advertiser (Usk)
Darian (Aberdare)
Denbighshire Free Press (Denbigh)
Dinesydd Cymreig (Caenarfon)
Dravod (Trelwe)
Flintshire Observer (Holywell)
Genedl Gymreig (Caenarfon)
Glamorgan Gazette (Bridgend)
Gwalia (Caenarfon)
Gwyliedydd Newydd (Blaenau Ffestiniog)
Haverfordwest and Milford Haven Telegraph (Haverfordwest) (free)
Herald Cymraeg (Caenarfon)
Herald of Wales (Swansea)
Llan (Rhyl)
Llandudno Advertiser and List of Visitors
Llanelli Mercury and South Wales Advertiser
Llanelli Star
Merthyr Express (Merthyr Tydfil)
Monmouth Guardian (Rhymney)
Negesydd (Glayndon)
North Wales Chronicle and Advertiser For the Principality (Bangor)
North Wales Times (Denbigh)
Pembroke County Guardian and Cardigan Reporter (Solva)
Pontypridd Chronicle and Workman's News
Rhedegydd (Blaenau Ffestiniog)
Rhondda Leader (Tonypandy)
Rhondda Leader, Maesteg, Garw and Ogmore Telegraph (Tonypandy
Rhos Herald (Rhosllannerchrugog)
South Wales Weekly Post (Swansea)
Tenby Observer, Weekly List of Visitors, and Directory
Towyn-on-sea & Meirioneth County Times (Welshpool)
Tyst (Merthyr Tydfil)
Udgorn (Pwllheli)
Welsh Coast Pioneer (Chester)
Welsh Gazette and West Wales Advertiser (Aberystwyth)
Welshman (Carmarthen)
Wythnos A'r Eryr (Bala)

This is an extremely impressive expansion; in fact there are now so many Welsh newspapers I've had to break up the listing in order to make it more readable -- Scotland and Ireland, take note. This raises the question of whether I will continue to include Welsh-language newspapers in this listing: it would make my life easier if I didn't have to check them too, and not many researchers outside of Wales can read Welsh. But when combined with the superior user interface and the completely free access, this makes WNO the most impressive online newspaper archive in Britain. The only limitations are the scope: nothing later than 1919, and nothing that's not Welsh (though it now includes a few titles published outside Wales, in Chester and Liverpool, aimed at or including Welsh markets).

These are the new titles in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA):

Biggleswade Chronicle
Birmingham Daily Mail
Birmingham Daily Post
Birmingham Gazette
Burnley Gazette
Burnley News
Chelmsford Chronicle
Cheshire Observer
Daily Gazette for Middlesborough
Daily Herald
(London)
Daily Record and Mail (Glasgow)
Evening Chronicle (Newcastle)
Evening Despatch (Birmingham)
Folkestone, Hythe, Sandgate & Cheriton Herald and Chronicle & Observer
Hamilton Advertiser
Lancashire Daily Post
(Preston)
Leicester Chronicle
Liverpool Daily Post and Liverpool Mercury
Perthshire Advertiser
Sports Argus
(Birmingham)
Sussex Agricultural Express
Western Mail
(Cardiff)

There are some good things here. Birmingham was previously completely unrepresented, but now it has no fewer than five newspapers, including, unusually, a sports newspaper. However all of them are only available for 1914-1918. The most important newspapers here are probably the Labour Daily Herald and the Cardiff Western Mail, though again they are only for 1914-1918. A small number of titles have actually had issues removed from BNA, whether for copyright or quality control reasons I'm not sure.

The other major archives all have new titles too, though not many. Several Kentish newspapers have been added to ukpressonline for 1914-1918: Herne Bay Gazette, Kent Messenger, and the South Eastern Gazette. More interesting is that these newspapers for the period up to 1912 can be accessed for free, as long as you accessing them in Britain and use a special landing page. It looks like this has been the case for a while, though I missed it because it's not at all obvious from the usual ukpressonline site. Irish Newspaper Archives has added a couple of titles, the Dundalk Democrat and the Skibbereen Eagle. Unfortunately the Kildare Observer, which used to be a free sampler, now has to be paid for. This is probably to do with an upgraded user interface, which is much improved (but unfortunately doesn't seem to work in all browsers). And NewspaperArchive has added a suburban London paper, the North London Mercury And Crouch End Observer, as well as the London and Belfast editions of the US Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes (for the Second World War, obviously).

Finally, a nice standalone (and free!) archive of the Halifax Courier is now available for the First World War period -- thanks to Bruce Gaston for the tip.

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Spithead review

Today I had my very first radio appearance, on ABC New England North West, talking to Kelly Fuller on the Mornings show. I was talking about what was happening in Europe 100 years ago, during the July Crisis of 1914. More specifically, I spoke about the Royal Navy's test mobilisation at Spithead (above) and the drafting of the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia in response to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. Despite a throat infection and a couple of stumbles, and going under time, I think it went alright. You can listen to it here.

This is my first contribution to a weekly radio series, 'The Road to War', where historians from the University of New England (mostly) and Flinders University will discuss the events of 1914 and then 1915, a century after they happened. The idea, at least at this stage, is that we will highlight what was happening in the First World War (and the lead up to it) before Gallipoli, which is essentially when Australian memory of the war begins -- even though there was actually a lot going on before then. So something like the post-blogging I've done from time to time, but less time-intensive. Particularly since I'm just one member of a team: the others are my colleagues Richard Scully (whose idea all of this was), Nathan Wise, Erin Ihde (all from UNE), and hopefully Melanie Oppenheimer (Flinders). Richard has already given a couple of talks, on the assassination itself and the German blank cheque, and Nathan spoke last week about Europe going on its summer holidays while Austria-Hungary decided what to do; next week Erin will look at the Serbian response to the ultimatum and the firing of the first shots. Future episodes will be available from here or here. My contributions will mainly focus on the war in the air (naturally -- I even managed to sneak the RNAS in today) and at sea, but I'll be covering some aspects of the land war, too. It should be fun and educational -- maybe even at the same time!

Image source: the-weatherings.co.uk.

No sooner is one conference over than another one looms. The one which is over is the Australian Historical Association annual conference for 2014, which was held last week at the beautiful St Lucia campus of the University of Queensland. I spoke on the topic of invasion, Zeppelin and spy scares in Britain during the First World War. I was glad that I could speak, because I had an unfortunate throat infection that at times took away my voice entirely (and my poor students are still having to deal with the aftereffects). But I got through it, and the audience, if small, seemed appreciative. I had planned to use the talk to push the planning for my forthcoming research trip to the UK, but in the event teaching meant that I didn't have time to do any substantial new research. Instead, I expanded upon my recent n-map post, looking at how to use the British Newspaper Archive to map geographical variations in word use (and in my case, I'm arguing, suggesting where in Britain spy, invasion and Zeppelin fears were most common). That wasn't such a bad thing, and since historians, unlike scientists, are rarely explicit about how they do what they do, it may even be worth writing up as a methodological article, with the wartime fears as a case study. Otherwise, the AHA was good for what AHAs are usually good for -- catching up with friends and making new ones, and sometimes even learning some new history. I won't try to summarise the conference, particularly since I was too sick/lazy to livetweet it, but see Marion Diamond's post at Historians are Past Caring, as well as the indefatigable Yvonne Perkins' series at Stumbling Through the Past, here, here, here, here, and here.

The conference which is looming, Regional Australia at War, is just under a month away, 14-15 August 2014. Fortunately it is much closer to home; in fact it will be at my own institution, the University of New England, and is being organised by my Humanities colleague Nathan Wise. I'm giving a paper on the topic of 'The Australian mystery aeroplane scare of 1918', which actually fits in perfectly with the theme of 'regional Australia at war', since it was primarily a regional and rural phenomenon. The abstract is as follows:

Between March and June 1918, Australian newspapers, police forces and military intelligence units were deluged with hundreds of reports of mysterious aeroplanes. They were seen in every state, mostly at night, by men and women, young and old, civilians and soldiers. The vast majority of reports came from regional areas. As there were only a tiny number of aircraft known to be operating in Australia, the sightings were presumed to be German aircraft, perhaps flown from unknown merchant raiders operating in Australian waters or by foreign spies working against Australia. The reports were taken seriously, but investigations by the authorities eventually found nothing to substantiate them. The mystery aeroplanes were phantoms.

Australia had been at war for more than three years. But it was a nation both divided and defenceless. It had gone through two bitterly-fought conscription referenda, and appeared to be threatened from within by immigrants, the Irish and the Wobblies. The vast majority of its military forces were deployed overseas, with little more than poorly-equipped training cadres remaining at home. In March 1918, newspapers carried reports that the German merchant cruiser Wolf, which had been raiding Australian waters the previous year, had flown its seaplane over Sydney unopposed and undetected. A few days later, Germany's Spring Offensive opened, nearly breaking the Allied lines for the first time since 1914. The mystery aeroplanes resulted from a new perception that Australia was directly threatened and that the war could be lost.

This is pretty much the same abstract I used for the AHA in 2012 and at Singapore earlier this year. I actually plan to give a slightly different different talk, focusing on following the chain of rumour from the initial aeroplane sightings to (ultimately) the military and naval intelligence archives. But as my experience with the AHA this year shows, that may be somewhat ambitious! I'll even have to give my paper in between lectures and tutorials, since I'll be teaching that day, which unfortunately also means that I'll miss many interesting papers. I was particularly keen to hear Jennifer Sloggett, who I met at the AHA and is doing her PhD at Newcastle on the topic of Australian military and civil defence planning before and during the Second World War, especially since her paper "Girt" and "boundless": the war roles of the coast and hinterland in NSW in WWII' would seem to have interesting conceptual parallels with my aforementioned project on invasion, spy and Zeppelin scares. Well, there's always the next AHA.

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Alison Bashford. Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. This was launched at the Australian Historical Association conference this week and looked like fun -- an intellectual history of eugenics, birth control, food supply and, of course, world population, from the 1920s to the 1960s -- so I bought it.

Lara Feigel. The Love-Charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. I heard Feigel speak at Exeter a few years back. Here she has written something of a collective emotional biography of five key writers in Britain during the Second World War (Bowen, Greene, Macaulay, Spiel and Green). Inevitably the Blitz (and the V-weapons) bulk large, but it's not just about that.

Margaret MacMillan. The War that Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War. London: Profile Books, 2014. There's a centenary on...

Sean McMeekin. July 1914: Countdown to War. London: Icon Books, 2013. ... in case you hadn't noticed.

Free books!

The Earl of Avon. The Eden Memoirs: Full Circle. London: Cassell, 1960. I already have the volume of Eden's memoirs covering his life up until 1938, so it's nice to complete the set. This one covers his postwar career; it's interesting to note that it was actually published first, out of chronological order, almost as though he felt he needed to defend his most recent period in office...

The Earl of Avon. The Eden Memoirs: The Reckoning. London: Cassell, 1965. Covers the period 1938-1945, including Eden's time as Churchill's wartime Foreign Secretary.

Winston S. Churchill. Great Contemporaries. London: Fontana, 1959 [1937]. Written during Churchill's wilderness (i.e. broke) years. Everyone from Alfonso XIII to Boris Savinkov is here.

Winston S. Churchill. My Early Life: A Roving Commission. N.p.: Fontana, 1959 [1930]. Churchill's own account of his youth, his time in the Army (including on campaign in the Sudan and on the North-West Frontier) and as a journalist (etc) in the Boer War.

Jack Fishman. My Darling Clementine. London: Pan, 1963. A biography of Clementine Churchill.

Warwick Heywood. Reality in Flames: Modern Australian Art & the Second World War. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2014. This one I had to pay for -- the catalogue for a travelling AWM exhibition which is currently showing at NERAM in Armidale, and which just happens to include five works by Eric Thake, including Kamiri Searchlight.

Robert Rhodes James. Churchill: A Study in Failure, 1900-1939. London and Ringwood: Penguin, 1973. You may be sensing a bit of a Churchillian theme here. This is the pick of the bunch, a classic in its own right and an early (and still rather rare) critical biography.

'Johnnie' Johnson. Wing Leader. Harmondsworth and Mitcham: Penguin, 1959. Yes, '"Johnnie" Johnson is exactly how his name is written -- well, with the gloss 'Group Captain J. E. Johnston, D.S.O., D.F.C.' He was after all the highest scoring RAF ace of the Second World War, so he was a bit famous.

Harold Nicolson. Diaries and Letters: 1930-1939. London: Collins, 1966. I have the more recent, more definitive of his diaries, but that is less comprehensive, so it's nice to have this too.

Units of the Royal Australian Air Force: A Concise History, Vol. 9: Ancillary Units. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1995. Now I need the other nine volumes.

Kenneth Young. Churchill and Beaverbrook: A Study in Friendship and Politics. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1978. Some more Churcilliana. Given that this is dedicated to Max Aitken (fils, presumably), it's probably not likely to be very critical.