1900s

I was remiss in not mentioning the 12th Military History Carnival at Thoughts on Military History when it took place last month. My eye was drawn to ExecutedToday.com’s post about Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant and Peter Handcock, the Australian soldiers executed in 1902 for killing Boer prisoners-of-war. There’s still a debate about whether Kitchener issued an unwritten order to take no prisoners, meaning that the Australians were made scapegoats as a sop to either the Boer government (i.e. so it would consider peace) or to the British public. It seems unlikely to me, on the face of it, or at least unnecessary — it’s not like similar, illegal but tacitly accepted, acts were unknown in the later wars of the twentieth century.

By chance, I caught an episode of the excellent (but cancelled) Rewind the other night which dealt with the Breaker.¹ The transcript is online, and is worth a read: it does poke some holes in the scapegoaters’ arguments.

1. Rewind dealt with various mysteries and puzzles from Australian history. I missed it when it originally aired, which is a shame. It was different to most other history programmes in that it wasn’t afraid to present the viewer with primary source texts to support (or refute) an argument, or indeed to go digging around in archives for clues. I nearly stood up and applauded when, in a segment on the death of Billy Hughes’s daughter, the reporter said ‘So where to look for proof? Well, one obvious place is the National Library to look through Billy Hughes’s private papers’!

I’ve finally gotten around to adding Montagu of Beaulieu (pronounced ‘Bewley’, apparently) to my irregular series of biographies of airpower propagandists. He’s an important, but somewhat neglected figure, some of whose papers I’ve examined (those held at King’s College London). He helped found the Air League of the British Empire in 1909, and devised the influential ‘nerve centre’ theory, which argued that the destruction of critical infrastructure would be one of the chief dangers of aerial bombardment in the next war:

an attempt would certainly be made to paralyse the heart of the nation by attacking certain nerve centres in London, the destruction of which would impede or entirely destroy the means of communication by telephone, telegraph, rail, and road.¹

Later, in 1916, he stumped across the country giving speeches criticising the government for its failure to expand aircraft production sufficiently, and to call for the formation of an independent air force, the Imperial Air Service. He was a Conservative MP, then a Conservative peer, and all the time very wealthy (if you call 10,000 acres wealthy, anyway).

But today I’m going to talk about Montagu’s personal life, and the way it impinged on his public one. The photo above shows the ‘Spirit of Ecstasy’, the mascot adorning the bonnet of every Rolls-Royce — every one since Montagu put an early version on his Silver Ghost in 1911, that is, for he was a huge motoring enthusiast, and had his friend, the sculptor Charles Sykes, design it for him. Supposedly, the model Sykes used was Montagu’s own secretary and mistress, Eleanor Thornton. (Though there’s an alternate, and possibly more convincing, theory minimising the role of Thornton and Montagu.)
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1. Montagu of Beaulieu, Aerial Machines and War (London: Hugh Rees, 1910), 2.

I recently had the somewhat guilty pleasure of watching Flood, a film (from a novel) about the sudden devastation of London by a massive storm surge — predicted by a scientist who had long been dismissed as a crank — which swamps the Thames Barrier, submerges most of the city’s landmarks, kills a couple of hundred thousand people and forces most of the rest to evacuate. An even bigger disaster is averted (just in the nick of time, as it happens) and Londoners are left to clean up the mess. All very timely, given the unusually high proportion of England which was under water earlier this year.

Disaster movies are a pretty venerable genre by now (there were at least three films about the Titanic made in the year after it sank). The subset which deals with destruction on the scale of a big city (or larger) — as opposed to aeroplanes or skyscrapers — is relatively small, and that concerned, like Flood, with the fate of London specifically is quite small indeed.¹ No doubt this is because disaster movies are generally loaded with special effects and therefore are expensive, and as the US market for film is so huge, it makes more financial sense to destroy some American city rather than a British one. So there aren’t all that many cinematic depictions of the end of London. But books are much cheaper to make, and in those London has been destroyed many times over.

I’ve been trying to think of the first time this happened. It’s easy enough to find early references to the eventual ruin of London, such as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885) (in which a neo-medieval adventurer seeks his fortunes amid the city’s swampy remains), or Macaulay’s New Zealander (1840).² But those only show London long after its fall, and so, properly speaking, are post-apocalyptic. The actual destruction happens off stage; it is inevitable, something to accept rather than prevent. Other candidates might include science fiction stories like Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt (1913), wherein the Earth passes through a region of toxic ether, and Professor Challenger and companions take an eerie trip through dead London afterwards.³ Or H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), with its Martian tripods laying waste to the metropolis with their heat rays. Where else might we look?
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1. The Day the Earth Caught Fire springs to mind (rather oddly, since I haven’t seen it); Day of the Triffids and 28 Days Later too. There must be others though.
2. Not actually a novel, a story, a paragraph or even a sentence: merely a few clauses in a book review, referring to some future time ‘when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.’ But the image caught the imagination of many who read and spread it, to the point where it practically became a cliché. See David Skilton, “Tourists at the ruins of London: the metropolis and the struggle for empire”, Cercles 17, 93-119.
3. Even if the ending is a huge cop-out.

Here’s a treat for (some of) you: the very first aerial warfare movie ever made, in its entirety! Most commonly known as The Airship Destroyer (but sometimes called Battle in the Clouds or The Aerial Torpedo), it’s less than 10 minutes long and was produced in 1909 by Charles Urban, an American pioneer of cinematic special effects working in Britain. It’s pretty prophetic stuff: airships bombing cities and railways, fighters intercepting them, radio-guided SAMs, even an armoured car thrown in for good measure. I would guess it was inspired in part by the phantom airship scare which took place earlier that year. Here’s a contemporary description taken from an American trade journal, Motion Picture World (date unknown, taken from here, slightly emended):

BATTLE IN THE CLOUDS. - Section 1. - preparation. The Aero camp - Loading supplies - Start of the airships - The inventor of the airship destroyer - His love story - The parting - The alarm - The aero fleet in full flight - The aerial torpedo and its inventor.

Section 2. Attack. In the clouds - Dropping like shells from the firing deck of an airship - the chase - High angle firing from a gun on an armored motor car - Total destruction of the car - Railway wrecked by the aerial fleet - Shelling the signal box - The heroic operator meets death at this post - The fight in the air - Airship versus aeroplane - Wreck of the aeroplane - The burning of a town by the aerial fleet - Thrilling rescue of his sweetheart by the inventor.

Section 3. Defense. The inventor with the assistance of his sweetheart sends his airship destroyer on its mission of vengeance. The torpedo, steered through the air by wireless telegraphy - One flash and the airship is doomed - It falls, a mass of scorching fire, into the waters of a lake.

Urban produced a couple of other films along similar lines (The Aerial Anarchists, The Pirates of 1920, both 1911) and had some imitators — possibly including D. W. Griffith, who made a film in 1916 called The Flying Torpedo.

The link can be found on this page at BFI’s screenonline, if the above direct link doesn’t work. Unfortunately it’s only viewable by people in .uk educational establishments. Which sadly doesn’t include me, but that’s ok, I’ve seen it before, in a 16mm copy at what I think is now part of ACMI. So no need to feel guilty on my account :)

A good account of early aviation films can be found in Michael Paris, From the Wright Brothers to Top Gun: Aviation, Nationalism and Popular Cinema (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 10-22.

And marble, and granite, and wood …

I wrote recently that every town in Australia seems to have a war memorial. Here are some examples, photos I took over a three day period without going too far out of my way. This post is image-heavy, but everyone has broadband now don’t they?
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New Popular Edition Maps is an attempt to produce a copyright-free database of British postcodes. It does this by asking people to hunt around on a clickable, zoomable map of the UK for places for which they know the postcode (e.g. their home), and then enter that postcode at that spot. It’s a bit like a stripped-down Google Maps; and you can search the map by placename or postcode. But what’s interesting about this is that the maps used are out-of-copyright Ordnance Survey maps (1 mile to the inch) from the 1940s and early 1950s, which could be useful for historians or teachers, though these are obviously not the intended audience. Unfortunately Northern Ireland and most of Scotland is missing. (The National Library of Scotland has the OS maps of Scotland from the 1920s.)

Finding this inspired me to do a bit of a search for other online historical maps of Britain which similarly attempt to cover the whole country. (There’s a useful list of out-of-copyright maps here.) Old-maps.co.uk has been around a while and uses OS maps from the late 19th century. Vision of Britain (which site has lots of historical statistics which you can slice various ways, and which I must explore more thoroughly one day) is more sophisticated, and has a neat trick of switching between different maps depending upon the zoom level: for example going from a 1921 large-scale map to a 1904 OS one to a NPE map. It also has 19th-century maps and a 1930s land utilisation map. But possibly the most interesting is Old Ordnance Survey Maps, which is based upon OS maps from the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. The coverage is very much incomplete; but it uses the Google Maps API, which means that it has a familiar interface for users, and could be used for mashups. It already overlays the regular Google Maps satellite and street maps. There are also handy links to take you to the same location at old-maps.co.uk and Vision of Britain. I can think of some improvements (for example, printing the publication date on each map) but this approach has tremendous potential.

On the night of 23 March 1909, a police constable named Kettle saw a most unusual thing: ‘a strange, cigar-shaped craft passing over the city’¹ of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. His friends were sceptical, but his story was corroborated, to an extent, by Mr Banyard and Mrs Day, both of nearby March, who separately saw something similar two nights later. In fact, these incidents were only the prelude to a series of several dozen such sightings throughout April and especially May, mostly from East Anglia and South Wales. As the London Standard noted in May, there seemed to be common features to the various eyewitness accounts:

With few exceptions they all speak of a torpedo-shaped object, possessing two powerful searchlights, which comes out early at night.²

So, what was torpedo-shaped and capable of flight in 1909? An airship, of course. The press (metropolitan and provincial) certainly assumed that the most likely explanation for these ‘fly-by-nights’ was an airship or airships, generally terming them ‘phantom airships’, ‘mystery airships’, ’scareships’ or something similar.
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1. Standard (London), 17 May 1909, p. 9.
2. Ibid.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

I’ve been reading Joseph Corn’s The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation, 1900-1950, a classic study of airminded culture in the United States — which was very different to that in Britain. The “winged gospel” is the term used by Corn to describe an intense complex of hopes and expectations associated with the coming of flight:

Faith in that mission, in flight as a veritable religious cause, energized not only fliers but also millions of other Americans during the first half of this century. Airminded men and women embraced what was often called the “gospel of aviation” or the “winged gospel.” Like the Christian gospels, the gospel of aviation held out a glorious promise, that of a great new day in human affairs once airplanes brought about a true air age. Lindbergh offered one version of this gospel, prophesying a future in which air travel would be commonplace and large transport planes shuttle from city to city, unhampered by the weather. Other enthusiasts voiced even grander prophecies, looking to aircraft as a means of achieving perfection on earth or even immortality, promises usually identified with more traditional religion.¹

Corn offers many examples of this faith, some of it verging on the ludicrous — such as the expectant mother who rushed to a nearby airfield so that her child could be air-born, or the doctor who claimed that pilots must be descended from birds, whereas the rest of humanity hailed from the unfortunately non-aerial fish lineage (!). Only somewhat less quixotic were the predictions that flying would erase gender or racial discrimination, or the idea that every American family would one day own their own airplane, freeing them from the need to huddle in densely-populated cities.
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1. Joseph J. Corn, The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation, 1900-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 26-7.

A. Just about all the time, it seems, if it’s Britain:

Lord Palmerston in 1845, on the coming of the steam ship:

… the Channel is no longer a barrier. Steam navigation has rendered that which was before impassable by a military force nothing more than a river passable by a steam bridge.¹

Georges Valbert in 1883, on the proposed Channel Tunnel:

It will be a prodigious event in the life of an insular people, when they find that they are islanders no more. Nothing is more likely to excite and alarm them, or to affect and upset their preconceived ideas.²

Lord Northcliffe in 1906, on Alberto Santos-Dumont’s flight:

England is no longer an island … It means the aerial chariots of a foe descending on British soil if war comes.³

1. Quoted in I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763-3749 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 20.
2. Quoted in ibid., 95. Clarke gives the date as 1833, but 1883 makes a lot more sense, and is confirmed by this page.
3. Quoted in Alfred Gollin, No Longer an Island: Britain and the Wright Brothers, 1902-1909 (London: Heinemann, 1984), 193.

In his comment on my previous post, Alex mentions the “bolt from the blue” strategy as possibly related to the knock-out blow that is my current obsession (and he’s right, in my opinion). My reply started to get long, so I decided to turn it into a post instead …

In Edwardian debates about the defence of the UK, the “bolt from the blue” school of naval strategy believed that the German navy could temporarily gain local superiority and throw a few hundred thousand soldiers ashore in Norfolk or somewhere, and Britain’s puny army would be no match for those efficient Prussians. (Read: we need conscription!) It was opposed by the “blue water” school who argued that a strong Royal Navy would be sufficient to stop the Germans from getting ashore in any numbers. (Read: we need more dreadnoughts!) Of course, the dramatic and frightening bolt from the blue was the one favoured by Edwardian war-scare novelists like le Queux and Childers.¹

There’s certainly some similarity between the bolt from the blue and the knock-out blow, though how much the one influenced the other is difficult to say. Both were surprise attacks, and both evaded existing defences (the Royal Navy and the North Sea/English Channel). And both struck directly at the heart of Empire, rather than fighting the war at a safe distance, in Europe or the edges of empire. I think the major difference is that the bolt from the blue was still a military strategy: a way for Germany to bring its overwhelming military superiority to bear on the British army, defeat it and force Britain to surrender.² But the knock-out blow was, generally speaking, aimed at civilians: it was a way of using British civilians themselves to force the government to surrender, directly or indirectly.³ (In that sense, the closest comparison might be a guerre de course like the U-boat campaigns in the World Wars.) After the First World War, the knock-out blow replaced the bolt from the blue as the scaremonger’s nightmare of choice …

But now I’m getting ahead of myself!

1. See A.J.A. Morris, The Scaremongers: The Advocacy of War and Rearmament, 1896-1914, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.
2. I should emphasise that it wasn’t the Germans themselves who thought this, by and large: these were basically unwarranted British fears about what Germany was planning or at least was capable of.
3. In the pre-1914 period, there was some suggestion that strategic bombing would be best employed to disrupt enemy mobilisation, but that wasn’t seen as a potentially war-winning strategy, merely a helpful one.

• A flying machine is an aeroplane (qv).
• A dirigible balloon (or just dirigible) is an airship (qv).
• An aeroplane is the wing of a flying machine (qv).
• Airship collectively describes both flying machines and dirigible balloons (qqv).

Get it? (Got it.) Good!

Seriously, I’m glad the meanings of these words were rationalised within a few years: what a head-ache it would be to have constantly qualify them all through my thesis!

Sources: R.P. Hearne, Aerial Warfare (London and New York: John Lane,
1909); Fred T. Jane, ed, All the World’s Air-ships (Flying Annual)
(London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1909).

Can any better sport or amusement be imagined that could be obtained with an airship of the Zodiac type, endowed with a speed of 40 miles an hour for four hours, or 20 miles an hour for eight times this period, and so on in cubic proportion?
Always able to reach a desired goal, but with the ever changing wind to add an element of interest to the journey; free from dust and the dangers of the road; always able to stop and enjoy the still air. An airship of this type would combine the delights of a motor car, a balloon, a sailing yacht, an aeroplane, with the dangers of none …
It is perhaps worth while contrasting such a vessel with an aeroplane designed for the same purpose: condemned to be rushing through the air every moment of its time; never slowing, never pausing while its occupants look down on the mountain tops, or eat a quiet meal; unable to come down except where the ground has been specially prepared.
It would seem that it is to the dirigible that the ordinary family man must look for his aerial source of health and daily pleasure, and he will not be disappointed …
Then in a few short years we shall be able to alter the question and ask ”Won’t you come for a cruise over beautiful country in a staunch ship, with powerful pumps, with two reliable engines, at a speed as great as you could wish, and provided with a faithful anchor by means of which you can at all times pass a night in peace, or ride the fiercest storms?” And the whole world will answer ”Yes.”

‘Ripping Panel’, ”The future of dirigibles”. In Fred T. Jane, ed., All the World’s Air-ships (Flying Annual) (London: Sampson Low, Marston \& Co., 1909), 325.

Image source: ibid, 171.

Today, it’s a hundred years since voting began in the 1906 general election, in which the ruling Conservatives lost in a landslide to the Liberal Party. The new government, with Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman as PM (followed in 1908 by H.A. Asquith), had 400 seats; the Conservatives and Liberal Unionists managed only 156 between them.¹ This ushered in a most interesting time in British history: this parliament saw the dreadnought, spy and airship panics of 1909, the beginnings of British airpower and indeed the start of airpower politics. The general public first became generally aware of powered flight in this period, and the first signs of concern over air attack appeared; Blériot became the first to fly across the English channel. Outside of my parochial concerns, there were the beginnings of the welfare state, the People’s Budget and the confrontation with the House of Lords. And two giants of British politics were introduced to the national - indeed, the world - stage: David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. The fun didn’t end with the 1910 election(s) either - but that’s another story.

Anyway, congratulations to the Liberal Party! I haven’t finished reading my British History for Dummies yet, so I don’t know what they’ve been up to in the century since then, but with a start like that I’m sure they’ve gone from strength to strength :D

1. As a percentage of the national vote, however, it was much closer: 49% to 44%.

Rudyard Kipling, that poet of empire, also wrote two very airminded science fiction stories: “With the night mail” (1905) and a sequel, “As easy as A.B.C.” (1912). Both were set in the then-remote 21st century, and revolved around the Aerial Board of Control - the ABC of the second story’s title. This is effectively a world government, composed of elite aviators, which had grown out of the necessity to regulate air transport:

Her black hull, double conning-tower, and ever-ready slings represent all that remains to the planet of that odd old word authority. She is responsible only to the Aerial Board of Control– the A.B.C. of which Tim speaks so flippantly. But that semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score persons of both sexes, controls this planet. ‘Transportation is Civilization,’ our motto runs. Theoretically, we do what we please so long as we do not interfere with the traffic and all it implies. Practically, the A.B.C. confirms or annuls all international arrangements and, to judge from its last report, finds our tolerant, humorous, lazy little planet only too ready to shift the whole burden of public administration on its shoulders.

The globalising effects of air transport (more airships than airplanes) has helped the world to outgrow war; and more and more countries are becoming tired of messy politics, and place themselves in the ABC’s hands:

The story of the recent Cretan crisis, as told in the A.B.C. Monthly Report, is not without humour. Till 25th October Crete, as all the planet knows, was the sole surviving European repository of ‘autonomous institutions,’ ‘local self-government,’ and the rest of the archaic lumber devised in the past for the confusion of human affairs. She has lived practically on the tourist traffic attracted by her annual pageants of Parliaments, Boards, Municipal Councils, etc. etc. Last summer the islanders grew wearied, as their premier explained, of ‘playing at being savages for pennies,’ and proceeded to pull down all the landing-towers on the island and shut off general communication till such time as the A.B.C. should annex them. For side-splitting comedy we would refer our readers to the correspondence between the Board of Control and the Cretan premier during the ‘war.’ However, all’s well that ends well. The A.B.C. have taken over the administration of Crete on normal lines; and tourists must go elsewhere to witness the ‘debates,’ ‘resolutions,’ and ‘popular movements’ of the old days. The only people who suffer will be the Board of Control, which is grievously overworked already. It is easy enough to condemn the Cretans for their laziness; but when one recalls the large, prosperous, and presumably public-spirited communities which during the last few years have deliberately thrown themselves into the hands of the A.B.C., one cannot be too hard upon St. Paul’s old friends.

In “As easy as A.B.C.”, this theme is expanded upon, with the ABC being called in to Chicago to put down social unrest; as Michael Paris notes, this story shows that as peaceful as Kipling makes the ABC out to be, ultimately its authority rests on the use of its aircraft as weapons.¹

This is a very early instance of an idea which was to enjoy some currency in the 1930s, of an aviation-based technocratic alternative to democracy - in particular H.G. Wells’ Air and Sea Control in The Shape of Things to Come (1933).² Paris also suggests that as Kipling and Frederick Sykes (head of the RAF in 1918) were friends, the ABC stories may have had some influence on the latter’s airpower ideas, particularly air control.³

Although I think I’ve read “With the night mail” before, I’d never seen the faux ads for dirigibles and (air)shipping news reports which (according to Bleiler, Science-fiction: The Early Years) accompanied the 1909 New York edition, obviously to add to the verisimilitude.⁴ These are so fun! Not that newspapers have Edwardian-style “answers to correspondents” sections any more, but perhaps they should:

PLANISTON — (1) The Five Thousand Kilometre (overland) was won last year by L. V. Rautsch, R. M. Rautsch, his brother, in the same week pulling off the Ten Thousand (oversea). R. M.’s average worked out at a fraction over 500 kilometres per hour, thus constituting a record. (2) Theoretically, there is no limit to the lift of a dirigible. For commercial and practical purposes 15,000 tons is accepted as the most manageable.

PATERFAMILIAS — None whatever. He is liable for direct damage both to your chimneys and any collateral damage caused by fall of bricks into garden, etc., etc. Bodily inconvenience and mental anguish may be included, but the average courts are not, as a rule, swayed by sentiment. If you can prove that his grapnel removed any portion of your roof, you had better rest your case on decoverture of domicile (See Parkins v. Duboulay). We sympathize with your position, but the night of the 14th was stormy and confused, and - you may have to anchor on a stranger’s chimney yourself some night. Verbum sap!

Oh, and if anyone is looking for a job:

FAMILY DIRIGIBLE. A Competent, steady man wanted for slow speed, low level Tangye dirigible. No night work, no sea trips. Must be member of the Church of England, and make himself useful in the garden.

M. R., The Rectory, Gray’s Barton, Wilts.

But mind where you drop your grapnel.

(Thanks to Peter Farrell-Vinay for the pointer, and also for noting the similarity to Wells.)

1. Michael Paris, Winged Warfare: The Literature and Theory of Aerial Warfare in Britain, 1859-1917 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), 39. Though they do have the power to immobilise people as well as kill.
2. Ibid, 29.
3. Ibid, 39-40.
4. Kind of like the “Would you like to know more?” hyperlinks in the propaganda inserts in Starship Troopers … oh, I feel so unclean now that I’ve mentioned that film.

Chronomedia is a very nicely done chronology of developments in just about all forms of audio-visual mass media, covering a wide span but inevitably concentrating on Britain and America in the 20th century. Lots of interesting little tit-bits: the first film shot from an aircraft in flight was in September 1908; while in September 1939, British cinemas were closed to prevent mass casualties in the event of air raids - after a couple of weeks, they were open again, which I guess shows just how long it took people to realise that the knock-out blow wasn’t actually imminent!

One thing I find fascinating is how rapidly television was developing in Britain (as well as in Germany and the United States) before the war: John Logie Baird’s London studio broadcast a television play as early as 1930, entitled The man with a flower in his mouth (about which, see The World’s Earliest Television Recordings Restored); while the BBC’s first female television presenter was a Miss Elizabeth Cowell in August 1936. Of course, many of these transmissions were just experiments, but a regularly scheduled service from the Alexandra Palace began later in 1936, which continued until 1 September 1939.

There are some reminiscences of these pioneering broadcasts at Television Heaven, culled from a book by television critic Kenneth Baily, Here’s Television (1950). There was no nightly news, but the latest Gaumont and Movietone newsreels were shown several times a week. Other than that, current events and concerns were addressed, after a fashion. The programme for Armistice Day 1936 was described in the Evening News:

From the London Television Station last night was broadcast the most deeply-moving Armistice Day programme I have ever heard from the BBC. It took the form of scenes from the German film ‘West Front 1918,’ followed by scenes in England in peace-time, and it ended on that note of dedication for the prevention of another catastrophe which most people have felt so strongly this Armistice anniversary. These vivid, and at times terrible pictures, were accompanied by an admirable commentary spoken by Cecil Lewis . . .

As that page also notes, one of the first outside broadcasts featured a very small-scale air raid defence exercise!

Within ten weeks of the start of television, Cecil Lewis had taken cameras outside, at night. He provided an actuality programme about anti-aircraft defence. The 61st (11th London)AA Brigade RA demonstrated two ack-ack guns; and the 36th AA Battalion RE handled three searchlights, while RAF planes were specially flown over the Palace.

This co-operative “exercise” staged “a short action repelling the attack of hostile aircraft.” The very wording of that programme announcement breathed something of the oddity which most of us found in an exploit that seemed far from reality in 1936. Four years later the flash and crackle of a much mightier barrage surrounded the Alexandra Palace, and echoed through television studios emptied by a real war.

One would like to know why this subject was chosen … was it just because the sounds and images were dramatic, or was it intended as a reassurance that all was well (since the bombers were repelled)? Maybe both.

Finally, an indication of just who was watching these shows can be found from a BBC viewer survey in mid-1939 (by which time the total audience was an estimated 20,000):

The returns surprised the BBC in showing that television viewing was not confined to any one income group. Taking a sample of 1,200 of the questionnaires, it was found that 28 had been filled in by labourers; and scores were returned by shopkeepers, salesmen and school teachers.

There were more working- and lower middle-class viewers than expected (though still a minority), which is interesting given the expense involved (eg 48 guineas for a 15-inch 1939 Cossor - though it also doubled as a radio! See Television History - The First 75 Years for more.) Still, 20,000 is a tiny number of viewers, especially when you consider that in 1939 there were 990 million cinema admissions! That’s a whole lotta Clark Gable.

Here’s a minor curiosity. Many of the leading figures in the RFC/RAF (at least, many of the ones that interest me) had earlier served in West Africa. (They all served in the Boer War too, but that wouldn’t have been uncommon for their cohort.) This is the list:

• Hugh Trenchard: Southern Nigeria Regiment, 1903-10
• Frederick Sykes: West African Regiment, 1903-5
• P.R.C. Groves: West African Regiment, 1903-4
• L.E.O. Charlton: Gold Coast Regiment, 1902-7
• unnamed officer: Nigeria¹

Too much shouldn’t be made of this; it’s probably just a coincidence. But I can imagine a couple of explanations. One is that adventurous spirits might be drawn to the challenges of serving on the frontiers of Empire as much as to slipping the surly bonds of Earth. (Certainly the biographies of Trenchard and Charlton show evidence of this kind of restlessness.) The other explanation might be that (what I imagine to be) the extreme logistical difficulties of soldiering in West Africa back then may have suggested the advantages of simply being able to fly over all obstacles!

1. According to Robin Higham, The Military Intellectuals in Britain, 1918-1939 (Westport: Greenwood, 1981 [1966]), 134, an officer whom Trenchard knew from Nigeria was undergoing flight training, and suggested that he take it up.

I’ve (mostly) finished a big update to my other site, scareships, which is about the British phantom airship scares of 1909 and 1912-3 - essentially, Edwardian UFO waves. To my mind, the fact that people (including, for a time, newspaper editors) believed that German zeppelins were buzzing their country - when in fact they weren’t - shows that fear of airpower (in this case, espionage rather than bombing) came early to Britain. But I’ve created the site so that anyone interested can learn about the sightings, read the primary sources and form their own opinions about what was going on.

Anyway, I have completed entering summaries of all the phantom airship sightings I found while researching my 4th year thesis, 135 in all, using WordPress as a simple content management system. There’s a bit of tidying up to do first, and then the next step will be to finish scanning in and uploading all the primary sources (newspaper articles), which may take some time …

Leo Amery was a long-serving Conservative MP, minister, imperialist and close contemporary (though not, I think, a close friend) of Winston Churchill’s - they were at Harrow together, where at their first meeting the future staunch foe of Nazi oppression pushed the smaller boy into the school pool. For some reason, he seems to pop up in many of my readings on diverse topics and here he is again, in 1904:

Sea power alone, if it is not based on great industry, and has not a great population behind it, is too weak for offence to really maintain itself in the world struggle … both the sea and the railway are going in the future … to be supplemented by the air as a means of locomotion, and when we come to that … the successful powers will be those who have the greatest industrial base. It will not matter whether they are in the centre of a continent or on an island; those people who have the industrial power and the power of invention and of science will be able to defeat all others.

Comments on H. J. Mackinder, “The geographical pivot of history”, Geographical Journal xxiii, no. 4 (April 1904); quoted in Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001 [1976]), 184 (emphasis in Kennedy).

This was quite farsighted of Amery. Not only was he quite right about the necessity for industrial power, and about the weakness of naval power (not likely to be a popular point of view during the twilight of the Pax Britannica), but he also pointed to the future importance of aviation as a form of transport a mere four months after Kitty Hawk (which in any case was barely reported in the British press). Some day I must read up on Amery.