1908 was the year that aviation, and its possible consequences, burst into British consciousness. In July, the British press reported on a long-duration flight over Germany of the Zeppelin LZ4, which proved that controlled lighter than air flight was practical, and in August, on the flights in France of Wilbur Wright, which very publicly proved that controlled heavier than air flight was too.¹ At home, H. G. Wells’ The War in the Air was published in January and the first controlled heavier than air flight took place in October.²

In amongst all these, culminating a century ago today, was Britain’s first (very minor) air panic.³ (Well, the first since the Napoleonic Wars, perhaps, but I’m not sure what impact that plan had in Britain.) On 11 July 1908, the Daily Mail published an interview with Rudolf Martin, a civil servant who had recently been dismissed from his position in the German Imperial Statistical Bureau for publicly predicting the imminent collapse of the Russian Empire.⁴ In 1907 Martin had written a novel called Berlin-Bagdad, which foresaw a German empire of the air, which tolerated and even helped Britain in its own imperial difficulties. However, in 1908 he was less friendly: he predicted that Germany could conquer Britain by airlanding troops in waves of 350,000, delivered by thousands of Zeppelins.

In my judgment it would take two years for us to build motor-airships enough simultaneously to throw 350,000 men into Dover via Calais. During the same night, of course, a second transport of 350,000 men could follow. The newest Zeppelins airship can comfortably carry fifty persons from Calais to Dover.⁵

I’m not sure that France would be altogether pleased at having 700,000 German soldiers assemble at Calais, but then Martin seems to have thought that one way or another, Germany’s aerial power harnessed to its mighty army would make everyone else fall in line behind it:

The development of motor-airship navigation will lead to a perpetual alliance between England and Germany. The British fleet will continue to rule the waves, while Germany’s airships and land armies will represent the mightiest Power on the Continent of Europe.

This interview was paired with comments from a British aviation expert, Major Baden Baden-Powell, on the recent flight of LZ4:

What this great revelation means is this, so far as we are concerned, although the fact is insufficiently realised. In time of war we should no longer be an island, and our mighty fleet would cease to be our first line of defence. A dozen great Dreadnoughts would be helpless when faced with the task of repelling a swift fleet of foreign airships sailing high above the earth.

He demanded that the government spend at least £100,000 on British airships, at least as fast as the German ones, if not faster, for

Of two opposing airships the faster will be able to outmanœuvre the adversary and hold it at its mercy.

The leading article in the same issue said that both Martin and, to a lesser degree, Baden-Powell were guilty of allowing their ‘imagination to run a little too fast’.⁶ However, it too considered it wise ‘to appropriate money to enable us at least to keep abreast of Continental enterprise.’⁷

What’s interesting about Martin’s proposal, and the reaction to it in Britain, is the obvious link with more traditional invasion panics. His enormous fleet of Zeppelins is not used to rain death and destruction upon London, but to enable a large army to be landed on British shores without having to face the Royal Navy first. The airships are just another way to effect the bolt from the blue, like a Channel tunnel or a secret weapon. Martin apparently didn’t even think of landing the invaders anywhere other than Dover, where every second fictional enemy of Britain had landed in the past generation.

It’s also worth noting that panics of this type, of invasion by air, were very rare; I can think of only one other in my period, the parachutist panic of 1940. I’m not really sure why, but I’d guess it’s a matter of perceptions of relative threat. In 1908, there was no knock-out blow theory: the Mail’s leader seems quite sanguine about its conclusion that dreadnoughts would be safe from bombing whereas ‘a good deal of damage could be done to great industrial centres’.⁸ In mid-1940, the bomber threat had not materialised, for whatever reason,⁹ but the Germans were dropping paratroops all over the place. Momentarily, these dangers may have seemed more worrying than bombing. Or maybe they were just too silly to be believable.

Anyway: along with Wells, Martin is why I start in 1908 and not any other year.

1. Admittedly, LZ4 was wrecked at Echterdingen in August, but the massive and spontaneous response of the German people, raising funds to fund a replacement Zeppelin, more than made up for this.
2. Depending what you think of Horatio Phillips’ multiplane hop in 1907.
3. See Alfred Gollin, No Longer an Island: Britain and the Wright Brothers, 1902-1909 (London: Heinemann, 1984), 334-9.
4. Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908-1918 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 295. The Mail calls him a Privy Councillor, but that seems unlikely: he is described as ‘low-ranking’ by Wohl, 76.
5. Daily Mail, 11 July 1908, p. 5. All quotations from this source unless otherwise specified.
6. Ibid., p. 4.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Not over Britain, anyway, though it had over Warsaw and Rotterdam, of course.

This is the talk I gave at Earth Sciences back in May. It’s long and picture heavy and much of it will be be familiar to regular readers, but some people expressed some interest in it so here it is. I’ve lightly edited it, mainly to correct typos in my written copy. I’ve put in links to the Boswell drawings because they’re under copyright, and I’ve replaced one photo because I realised it was of British Army Aeroplane No. 1b, not British Army Aeroplane No. 1a! How embarrassing.

Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941

Today I’m going to give you an overview of my PhD thesis topic. My broad area is the history of military aviation in the early twentieth century, so first I’ll give you a little background on that.

The first heavier-than-air manned flight was made by the Wright brothers in 1903, as you can see here. Within a few years, countries around the world started thinking about how they could use this new technology for warfare.

This is the British Army’s first aeroplane, which wasn’t very succesful but did at least make the first ever flight in Britain. In 1914, the First World War broke out and this pushed aviation along very quickly. At first, aeroplanes were mostly used to find and report on the movements of enemy troops, but soon they were used to drop bombs on them too.

And when aircraft became powerful enough, they started to bomb targets far behind enemy lines. This is the German Gotha G.IV, which was used to bomb London in 1917 and 1918. Of course, each country also developed fast fighter aircraft to try to shoot down their opponents’ slow bomber and reconnaissance aircraft.

Here’s one of the most famous fighters of the First World War, the British Sopwith Camel, as flown by both Biggles and Snoopy. It was fast, agile, and armed with twin machine guns.

After the war ended in 1918, aviation technology continued to progress, though not quite as quickly. By the 1930s, air forces were starting to be equipped with sleek biplanes such as this Hawker Hart, which was the fastest aeroplane in the Royal Air Force — which is a bit startling since it was actually a bomber and not a fighter!

The late 1930s witnessed the birth of a new generation of aircraft, powerful monoplanes with maximum speeds well in excess of 200 or even 300 miles per hour. They were also better armed than earlier aircraft: these Hawker Hurricane fighters had 8 machine guns.

This is one of the bombers that the Hurricane would be defending Britain against, the Ju 88, Germany’s most effective bomber. It could carry up to 2.5 tons of bombs. Germany built over 14000 of these bombers by the end of 1945.

Finally, this is one of the most powerful bombers of the war, the British Avro Lancaster. It was capable of carrying up to 10 tons worth of high explosive or incendiary bombs to Berlin and beyond.

But that’s all just by way of introduction. My research isn’t actually about aeroplanes as such or how they were used. What I’m looking at is the fear of bombing in Britain in the early twentieth century, from the early days of flight before the First World War, up until the end of the Blitz on British cities in 1941. More specifically, I’m interested in how the threat of aerial bombardment of cities was debated in the public sphere, as distinct from what was being discussed behind closed doors by the government and the armed forces. A number of historians have written excellent studies of British air strategy and air policy. Many of them mention the pervasive fear of bombing on the part of the British public, especially in the 1930s, but nearly always, they just take this fear as a given, and don’t spend much time trying to understand it or its origins. This annoyed me, because the little that they did tell me about the popular fear of bombing was fascinating, and I wanted to know more: why was the public scared of bombing, and what were they afraid would happen? Hence the thesis!

However, it’s very difficult to measure public opinion itself, especially before the introduction of opinion polls (which means virtually all of the period I’m studying). You can get the occasional odd glimpse into what the average person really thought about the dangers of bombers coming over and blowing them up, but perhaps not enough to do a whole thesis on. So instead I’m focusing on some of the most important influences on public opinion: primarily books, journals and newspapers which discussed the air menace and what should be done about it. And to a lesser extent, I also use things like cinema newsreels, films and radio broadcasts. Concerned citizens — often professionals such as military experts, doctors, or scientists — used all of these forums to present predictions of what would happen to cities and civilians under air attack, along with their proposals about how to solve the problem. Novelists took the serious speculations of the experts and turned them into nightmarish visions of what future wars held in store for the inhabitants of great cities. These fictional scenarios in turn coloured much of the debate about bombing. In fact, fictional and non-fictional discussions about bombing were often remarkably similar to each other.

So, what was the threat? Most people today have probably heard of, for example, Guernica, the Blitz or Dresden, which are all still potent symbols of the horrors of total war. This is Guernica, a small town of about 5000 people in the Basque country in northern Spain. In April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War it was devastated by a German air raid.

London was bombed by the Luftwaffe on 57 consecutive nights from 7 September 1940, forcing more than 200,000 people to take shelter in the underground railway stations every night. Here are just some of them in Elephant and Castle.

And this photo was taken from a British aeroplane during the Allied air raids on the German city of Dresden in the middle of February 1945. The little points of light are incendiary bombs, which started a massive firestorm. About 30,000 people — men, women and children — were killed in these raids.

But as terrible as these events were — and there are many more I could have mentioned — they were nothing compared with the predictions made before the war. Essentially, the widespread belief in the 1920s and 1930s was that at the beginning of the next war, a huge fleet of enemy bombers would suddenly strike at London and other cities and destroy them with high explosive bombs, incendiaries, and poison gas, causing hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties within a matter of hours or days, shattering essential infrastructure and leading to mass panic. Under such circumstances, it was widely assumed that Britain’s government would be forced to surrender within days or weeks of the outbreak of war. This is what was sometimes called the ‘knock-out blow’, that is, the sudden blow which would knock Britain out of the war.

This graph shows the effects of the German air raids on Britain in the First World War. ‘Casualties’ means the number of people killed or seriously wounded, in this case in each month. Green shows the casualties caused by airships, and red the casualties caused by aeroplanes. Note that it peaks at about 600 casualties in any one month.

And this is the equivalent graph for the Second World War. The peak casualties per month has shot up to more than 16000. That’s September 1940, when the Blitz began. In all, there were more than 146000 civilian casualties in Britain during the war, around a third of whom were killed.

Now, here’s a comparison between what actually happened in 1939-1945 and what British government officials in 1938 predicted might happen if a war started in 1939 — that’s the knock-out blow: over a million casualties per month, half of them fatalities, over only two months. Nearly two orders of magnitude more destructive than what actually happened. These estimates were not plucked out of thin air, but they weren’t much more than naive extrapolations from the First World War experience: divde the number of casualties between 1914 and 1918 by the tonnage of bombs dropped, and then multiply by the number of bombers the enemy had and the amount of bombs they could carry. This turned out to be a huge exaggeration, but you can see why everyone was so worried!

In extreme versions of the knock-out blow, civilisation itself would collapse, as the complex webs of commerce, transport and social control which bind society together break apart, leaving people to fend for themselves as best they could. From the perspective of a later generation, this sounds a lot like the effects of nuclear war.

And in fact in 1966 Harold Macmillan, a former Conservative Prime Minister who had been a backbench MP in the 1930s, wrote that ‘We thought of air warfare in 1938 rather as people think of nuclear warfare today’. It could in fact mean the end of life as we know it.

I’ll now give you some typical examples of how this fear of the bomber was manifested in literature and the arts. The following quotes are from a knock-out blow novel published in 1934 called Invasion from the Air. Firstly, the enemy air force attacks suddenly, with little or no warning, just after or even before the declaration of war:

At five minutes to twelve on that fateful night Germany struck from the clouds. The blow was totally unexpected, for the declaration of war by Britain against Germany and Italy had no more than been conveyed to the departing Ambassadors [...] London’s bewildered eight millions were precipitated into actual war conditions before the majority of them knew there was a war.

Secondly, the attack is massive in scale:

Squadron after squadron assailed the cities and towns in waves, each wave having its separate duty and aims. Upwards of two hundred enemy aircraft — fighters, bombers and [poison gas] sprayers — were brought down that morning as against only fifty British machines, but eight hundred broke though all attempts to stop them.

And thirdly, it is devastatingly destructive:

Thousands of people were killed or burnt to death or died subsequently insane at the memory of that battle, while, as always after the raids, vast numbers developed later the agonies of poisoned
lungs and throats, eyes and nasal passages [...] When the battle had passed Regent’s Park was scarred with great pits where explosive bombs had fallen [...] the bodies of old and young, broken and mutilated, lay everywhere.

So the knock-out blow would bring the horrors of the trenches of the Great War into everyone’s homes.

The Fall of London: Waterloo, by James Boswell (1933)

Next, here are some drawings which were actually commissioned for the novel I’ve just quoted from, but in the end weren’t actually used. They show the aftermath of the attacks, as the terrified mob revolts and rampages through London. Wrecked trains at Waterloo Station.

The Fall of London: Corner House, by James Boswell (1933)

A patrolling soldier in gas gear tramping past the body of a woman.

The Fall of London: The Colosseum, by James Boswell (1933)

The rioting crowds, clashing with troops. An upper and middle-class fear of the unruly mob goes back at least to the time of the French revolution; more recently, since 1918 there had been an increase in working-class assertiveness and the example of the Russian Revolution to worry about. So the fear of the knock-out blow was not only about the possibility of war but also reflected other anxieties about British society.

Now, I’ll show you a clip from the 1936 film Things To Come, which was adapted from a novel by HG Wells. This was a history of the future in three parts, and was a big-budget spectacular for its day. The first part of Things To Come features a graphic depiction of a gas attack on a city called Everytown, which bears a suspicious similarity to London. It was Wells’ argument that the destruction of modern society by total warfare was a necessary prelude to its recreation into a technocratic, utopian world state.

So much for the threat of the knock-out blow. What could be done about it? Surprisingly, the obvious answer, the one that actually did work in the Battle of Britain — air defence by fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft guns, harnessed to a sophisticated command and control system — was given little credit. It was widely believed that bombers were too fast and too well-armed to be shot down, at least in sufficient numbers to stop an attack.

I’ll show you a graph which helps explain this pessimism. First here’s a map showing Britain in relation to Europe, and some of the directions from which enemy bombers might attack. Ideally, the defending fighters would intercept the bombers before they reached London, the biggest and most important city. But there weren’t nearly enough fighters to keep up a standing patrol, so they’d have to wait until an air raid was detected, and then take off to intercept it. However incoming aircraft could usually only be detected once they’d crossed the coast. And it’s only about 50 miles, give or take, from the coast to London. The problem was that as technology improved and bombers got faster, there was less and less time for the fighters to react.

This graph shows in blue the time in minutes it would take for a bomber to cross the 50 miles from the coast to London. In the First World War, this could take around half an hour. By the Second World War, this time was down to only 10 minutes or so. The points in red show the time taken for the defending fighters to take off and climb to the height of the attacking bombers. As you can see this time is generally less than the crossing time, so in theory the fighters would have time to find the bombers and hopefully shoot them down. But lots of things could go wrong — the bombers might be detected late, the detection might not be reported soon enough, the bombers might have changed course or be hiding in cloud and so on. So the greater the margin of safety the better. In the 1930s, this margin was only 5 to 10 minutes which was not reassuring at all. Air defence exercises in the early 1930s seemed to confirm the difficulty of intercepting bombers before they could reach their target.

As the former and future prime minister Stanley Baldwin pessimistically told Parliament in 1932,

I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through

A widely-quoted remark at the time and for years afterwards. He went on to offer the standard alternative: essentially to bomb the enemy harder than they bombed Britain.

The only defence is in offence, which means that you have got to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves. I mention that so that people may realise what is waiting for them when the next war comes.

One solution, then, was a bigger air force so that Britain could kill more women and children more quickly than any enemy.

This was a solution generally favoured by those on the political right, such as the Hands Off Britain Air Defence League. This is a leaflet they distributed in 1933 or 1934. As you can see, they ask ‘Why wait for a bomber to leave Berlin at 4 o’clock and wipe out London at 8?’

Their demand is for the creation of ‘a new winged army of long-range British bombers to smash the foreign hornets in their nests’. This was in fact the official Royal Air Force strategy at the time, pretty much, though due to years of disarmament and budget cuts, it did not have nearly enough aircraft to carry it out. The British governments of the 1930s did begin to rearm, but were reluctant to do so too quickly for fear of harming the economic recovery or offending the Germans.

There were also those, generally on the political left, who rejected the logic of two nations trading massive blows with each other, for it seemed likely that even the victor in such a war would be devastated. What alternatives were there? One was to mitigate the effects of bombing, by preparing Air Raid Precautions, or ARP as it was known. This could mean everything from training civilians in how to survive poison gas attacks, to the construction of deep shelters able to accommodate thousands of people during air raids. Although this sounds unobjectionable, some pacifists could and did argue that ARP was a mere palliative, and might actually invite war by making Britain feel over-confident about its ability to withstand a knock-out blow. So they favoured more radical solutions such as complete disarmament, or at least the abolition of military aircraft. But this in turn encountered problems. During the 1920s and early 1930s, the idea developed among aviation specialists that large civilian aircraft such as airliners could be easily turned into bombers, more or less by strapping bombs under the wings. This possibility undermined disarmament efforts because it was feared that once all nations had disbanded their air forces, an aggressor could arm its airliners and hold the rest of the civilised world to ransom. So, one proposed solution to this dilemma was to place the civil aviation industries of all countries under international control.

From there it was a logical step for many supporters of collective security to propose the formation of an international air force, a very popular position in the early 1930s for parts of the left and one which was under serious consideration at the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1932. An international air force would harness the devastating power of the bomber to uphold collective security, because if one country attacked another it would immediately be bombed itself by the combined air forces of the world. It was also attractive to some people as a possible foundation of a world state, which would end war forever by ending nations themselves.

So, I’ve explained what people thought bombing would do, and what they thought could be done about it. I would lastly like to talk about the discourse itself, how these problems and solutions were propagated from specialists to the public. In the ordinary course of things, most people don’t pay much attention to even existential threats such as terrorism, nuclear warfare, asteroid impacts, or indeed the knock-out blow. They may well be aware of them, and even anxious about them to some degree, but such information as they may pick up from the media, books or conversations with acquaintances will be random, fragmentary and possibly unpersuasive. It often takes some crisis, real or perceived, to concentrate people’s minds on the supposed threat to society, and here the mass media plays a key role in creating the perception that there is a threat, and in suggesting solutions to the threat. So I suggest that this process is very much like the concept of a moral panic, as proposed by the sociologist Stanley Cohen in 1972. Usually this is a media-driven panic about the danger posed to society by some group within it — like criminals, drug users, religious cults. But it seems to me that something closely analogous can happen in relation to external threats to society. To distinguish these incidents from moral panics, though, I call them defence panics. Defence panics seem almost endemic in Britain in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Initially these expressed fears about the loss of British naval supremacy and the possibility of invasion by a foreign power such as France or later Germany. The most famous expression of this was the great dreadnought panic of 1909, when an intense press campaign called for the laying down of 8 new battleships to pre-empt a supposed acceleration in the German naval construction programme. But only a couple of months later, there was a similar panic, this time time over German airships, and this panic was itself repeated on a larger scale in 1913. From then until the Second World War, the threat of air attack was unparalleled in its ability to create defence panics. Examples include scares over the size of European air forces in 1922 and 1935, claims about German preparations for biological warfare in 1934, the bombing of Spanish and Chinese cities in 1938 which were part of the background to the Munich crisis, itself a major defence panic, and finally the shocks of the Gotha air raids on London in 1917 and the Blitz in 1940.

In the end, the knock-out blow never took place, because the power of the bomber was greatly exaggerated. But the belief that it could happen itself shaped how the British prepared to fight the war that did come. The internationalist solutions such as disarmament or the international air force never worked, because few nations could even contemplate giving up their sovereignty like this. Britain did invest in trying to avoid the worst effects of a knock-out blow, with air raid shelters and plans to evacuate the cities. But their ARP schemes were never very comprehensive, and individuals did little to prepare for bombing on their own behalf until war came. Far more was spent on the armed forces, and most important here was air defence. Even though in the early 1930s nearly everyone was pessimistic about the fighter’s chances against the bomber, effort was still put into improving them, resulting in fighters like the Hurricane which I showed earlier. These played a essential part in blunting the bomber offensive in 1940, at least in daylight. But another crucial technological component of the solution to the the problem of the bomber came, bizarrely, from almost pseudoscientific attempts to find an electromagnetic death ray. Death rays didn’t help shoot down bombers, but radar did help find them.

A top-secret chain of radar stations around the coast was set up in 1939, just in time for the Second World War. This had an effective range of 120 miles. So instead of only being seen when they crossed the coast, bombers could now be detected far out to sea.

Returning to our graph showing how long it took for bombers to cross the 50 miles from the coast to London. With radar, this distance effectively increased to 170 miles.

I’ve factored that into this graph, and as you can see, from 1939 the defenders had a much greater warning time, 30 to 40 minutes. Radar tilted the balance greatly towards the defenders. No longer was it a certainty that the bomber would always get through.

So part of the answer to the problem of the bomber came from an unexpected quarter. But it didn’t just arrive by accident, it only came because people were worried about the problem and were looking hard for a solution. Sometimes, muddling through and hoping for the best just isn’t good enough, not when the survival of civilisation is at stake.

Image sources: Wikimedia Commons (Wright Flyer, Avro Lancaster); RAF (here and here); Gotha GIV; RAFA Costa Blanca; World-War-2-Planes.com; Guernica, specchio del Novecento; Caring on the Home Front; Wikipedia; Airminded (here, here and here); YouTube; Norman Macmillan, The Chosen Instrument (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1938), 21; eBay; David Davies, Suicide or Sanity? An Examination of the Proposals before the Geneva Disarmament Conference (London: Williams and Norgate, 1932); An International Air Force: Its Functions and Organisation (London: The New Commonwealth, 1934). I can’t find where the photo of the Hurricanes came from; but it’s almost certainly under Crown Copyright.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Nick at Mercurius Politicus has an excellent post up on the The Mowing-devil, an English pamphlet from 1678 which is famous among forteans because it contains an illustration of something that looks a lot like a crop circle, three centuries before the term was coined. If it is an account of the mysterious appearance of a circle in a farmer’s field, then it is evidence that crop circles long preceded the activities of circlemakers Doug and Dave, and so are presumably a real, and as yet unexplained, phenomenon.

But Nick’s analysis suggests that the anonymous writer of the The Mowing-devil was not presenting an account of a strange but true event, but rather a cautionary tale about class relations in rural England. He concludes that

In short, The Mowing-Devil is probably not the representation of an early crop-circle that enthusiasts want it to be. In focusing on the woodcut, they’ve missed a much more interesting side to the text that tells us something about late seventeenth-century popular politics and religion.

Deleriad, a folklorist, made an interesting comment:

Although your analysis of the narrative is pretty reasonable I think it’s also worthwhile applying Hufford’s notion of the experiential source hypothesis. Put simply, it works on the basis that people explain anomalous experiences within the pre-existing worldview of a particular culture. So for example, encounters which might once have been explained in terms of fairies are nowadays explained in terms of aliens, lights in the sky which were explained as zepplins at the dawn of the 20th century are now explained as UFOs and so on.

Now, I’m aware of David Hufford’s work, though mainly by reputation: The Terror That Comes in the Night (1982), a study of old hag folklore in Newfoundland, is a book I’ve heard much about. Hufford’s experiential source hypothesis (ESH) was put forward as an alternative to the prevailing cultural source hypothesis (CSH), which would explain supernatural claims almost entirely in terms of pre-existing beliefs, or else misperceptions, hoaxes or hallucinations.¹ According to the CSH line of thinking, as I understand it, The Mowing-devil is probably best explained by something like Nick’s suggestion, or maybe there was an early modern Doug and Dave having a laugh, or something like that. The ESH, by contrast, would posit that that something odd happened in Hertfordshire — for example, a circle appearing overnight in a field of crops — and that the writer of The Mowing-devil described it in terms that he and his audience could understand — for example, a devil with a flaming scythe who appears after a farmer’s ill-tempered rejection of a workman’s offer to mow the field. To simplify grossly, a CSHer would say there’s no reason to believe that anything freaky is going on here, so let’s look for a mundane explanation; an ESHer would respond that this attitude risks throwing the extraordinary baby out with the ordinary bathwater.

So what should historians make of all this? I don’t think we can make much at all.

Deleriad notes that ‘lights in the sky which were explained as zepplins at the dawn of the 20th century are now explained as UFOs’, a reference to the phantom airships which are one of my particular interests.² The trouble is that, in general, all we have in this case are the explanations themselves. When Hufford interviewed people who woke up in the middle of the night to find they were being suffocated by an old hag sitting on their chest, he could ask them if they’d ever heard of something like that happening before — that is, whether they were aware of the cultural tradition of the old hag. He found that a significant proportion were not, from which he concluded that perhaps the old hag was, in some way, something real. But I can’t do that with the phantom airships: these events took place nearly a century ago. There are still some people alive today who were alive back then, but even if any of them witnessed a phantom airship — which is extremely improbable — they would have been only very young, and it wouldn’t be very meaningful if they now failed to remember hearing about the airship menace before they had their sighting.

So, the best I can do is to argue from probabilities. I can show, for example, that airships were being constructed by the media as a threat to Britain before the phantom airship scares of 1909 and 1913, that such ideas were widespread. So it’s likely that phantom airship witnesses had come across the idea that German airships were something which one might see in the skies over Britain one day. I can also show that, in all but a vanishingly small number of cases, it’s most improbable that real airships were seen, either German or British: these are all accounted for. I can further show that, in some cases, phantom airships were probably misperceptions of mundane (or rather, celestial) phenomena. For example, in early February 1913, Venus was almost at its most brilliant (as in the photo at the top of this post), and lingered long after sunset in the western sky. And happens that many of the airships seen in the same period, in South Wales for instance, were flying to the west in the evenings, low on the horizon, and shining a bright searchlight. But nobody reported seeing Venus and the airship at the same time. Venus is so startlingly bright near maximum elongation that the explanation has to be that it and the airship were one and the same.

So far, so CSH. But there definitely other incidents which are less clear-cut. For example, on 21 February, a man saw an airship near Selby in Yorkshire. Since he saw it between 10pm and 11pm, it can’t have been Venus, which set at least half an hour earlier. Even more interestingly, his horse was startled by the airship’s light. It’s probably safe to assume that horses were not particularly aware of Germany’s growing Zeppelin fleet (!), and so would only have been spooked by something real. Another intriguing case took place on the last day of February. The captain and crew of the Hull trawler Othello had a close encounter with an airship in the North Sea: so close that they feared it would crash into their mast. It circled their ship twice and then — after flashing its searchlight in response to a blast on the siren — headed west. But in this case it certainly wasn’t Venus. Sailors would have been very familiar with the sight of the planet, and anyway they reported that the Moon and stars were not visible. It would seem they experienced something, but what?

Well, who knows? Maybe it was a scoutship from Zeta Reticuli. Maybe it was an interdimensional being. Maybe it was a fire-breathing dragon. Maybe it was a time-travelling flying disc from Nazi Antarctica. Maybe it was an old hag on her way to Newfoundland. But since none of these has been proven to actually exist, by scientists, folklorists, or anybody else, I can’t use them as part of a historical explanation. And it’s not my job to prove the existence (or, for that matter, the non-existence) of these things. As a historian, it seems to me, I must adopt a position of methodological naturalism as regards these events.

But this doesn’t matter in the least, because more interesting (to me, anyway) than what people might have really seen, is what they believed they saw — or at least what the newspapers told us they believed they saw. What does it tell us, that people thought there were airships flying around their night sky? Even if they witnessed a real, anomalous phenomenon but interpreted it within their own cultural reference frame, as the ESH would have it, why that interpretation and not another? And did this interpretation have any consequences?

Historicizing rumor [...] may reveal an intellectual world of fears and fantasies, ideas and claims that have not been studied before.³

By the way, I’ve met the old hag myself. I occasionally suffer from sleep paralysis, which sometimes happens in that hazy zone between sleep and consciousness. Your body is rigid, you can’t move or speak, and you feel a crushing weight on your chest, suffocating you. It’s quite terrifying, but it’s not uncommon: perhaps a fifth of the population experience it at least once in their lives. I’ve also had associated hypagogic hallucinations, which are somewhat rarer. On at least three occasions I ’saw’ the face of an entity, which I felt was malevolent. Once it was an old hag. Another time, it was a demonic figure. And another, a grey. In terms of the ESH, this is a bit confusing — it’s like the whole catalogue of old hag traditions in one brain. If there was a real entity attacking me, then why did I interpret it as something different each time? Simpler by far to go with the CSH: I was already well aware of hypnagogic hallucinations when I had my experiences, and I already knew something of the variety they can take (for example, they may help explain alien abduction reports). Easier to believe my mind was playing tricks on me than that all these different supernatural creatures were taking turns to scare me in my sleep. Or to put it another way, what’s the more parsimonious explanation: that I saw something real and my subconscious changed what I saw to fit some image I already held in my mind, or that my subconscious just created what I saw to fit some image I already held in my mind? I think the latter.

And that’s why I can’t quite see the point of the experiential source hypothesis: it’s not actually an alternative to the cultural source hypothesis, but actually requires it, in order to work at all. In the historical context, it seems unnecessary, or at least unprovable, which amounts to much the same thing. But I’m open to being persuaded otherwise.

Image sources: dermod; Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1781).

1. In other words, a sceptical viewpoint. David J. Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centred Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 13-4.
2. A quibble: strictly speaking, ‘UFO’ isn’t an explanation, it’s a non-explanation. An unidentified flying object is just that, unidentified. Of course, UFO is usually interpreted to mean ‘alien spacecraft’, which is an explanation.
3. Luisa White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, Los Angeles and California: University of California Press, 2000), 86.

A poster from the 1935 general election, showing, quite literally, the shadow of the bomber. The National Government was a coalition comprising the Conservatives and two splinter parties, National Labour and the Liberal Nationals. With Stanley Baldwin at its head, the National Government went to the people on a platform of peace and prosperity. The poster doesn’t spell out how peace was to be secured (no doubt one of its virtues), namely through a commitment to the League of Nations and collective security, and moderate rearmament, particularly in the air. It’s interesting that at this stage, aeroplanes were still evidently equated with biplanes. Monoplanes were certainly becoming prominent by this time, but they weren’t necessarily seen as more ‘modern’ than the familiar biplane. (As indeed they weren’t: Blériot used a monoplane to fly the Channel back in 1909.)

This election poster and others are available from the Conservative Party Archive at the Bodleian. There’s only one other which has an aviation theme:

This one takes a bit more explaining. It’s from 1909 or 1910, and would be for the general election held in January-February 1910 (there was another in December). Airship pilot ‘Herr von Lloyd George’ exclaims, in his best music-hall German, that he although he was trying hit the very stately home with his ‘budget bombs’, he has in fact some factories (including a ‘tobacco factory’, ‘motor car works’ and a ‘malthouse’). So, it’s obviously attacking the 1909 ‘People’s Budget’, which Lloyd George masterminded as Chancellor. He’s portrayed as a German because some of the social reforms he introduced, such as sickness benefits, were pioneered in Germany (which he had visited in 1908). Much of the controversy caused by the People’s Budget was due to the raft of new taxes needed to pay for the reforms (and dreadnoughts), one of which was a land tax — which is why LG was trying to bomb the mansion. I think the factories being hit instead is a reference to tariff reform: the Conservatives wanted to tax imports to protect British industries, whereas the governing Liberals believed in free trade. The airship is called ‘The Revenge’ because it was redistributionist in intent — taking from the rich through taxes and giving to the poor through welfare.

It’s only incidentally about airships, then, though perhaps the bomb-dropping German airship is also a swipe at government inaction in creating an air force (the first airship scare took place earlier in 1909; the RFC wasn’t created until 1912). And at the very least, it shows that the idea of Zeppelins being used as bombers was common currency in 1910 — even if it’s only being used for comedic effect. At any rate it’s a nice illustration of the popular idea of what an airship looked like, with a huge propeller at the back, a lantern in front, and an anchor dragging below.

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.)

Now, Thornton and Montagu’s romance seems to have been a bit, well, romanticised, by a few of the webpages about the Spirit of Ecstasy. Wikipedia, for example, says that claims that their affair was secret because of Thornton’s lowly social status, and that Montagu was forced by family pressure to marry a bit higher up the social scale (the daughter of a baron, as it happened). But I doubt this. I haven’t been able to find out when they met, but everything points to the 1900s. (The earliest date I have seen mentioned in this connection is that Thornton became Montagu’s secretary in 1902.) And the fact is that Montagu, born in 1866, married Cecil (yes, really) in 1889. Their two daughters were probably already born by the time he and Thornton met. So, enough of the star-crossed lovers/upstairs-downstairs/doomed romance cliches — for his part, he was a rich, powerful man who could afford both a wife and family, and a mistress, and was never forced to choose between them. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that the thought even crossed his mind.²

But he did love her, and in the end, perhaps even felt ashamed of the choices she had been forced to make. On 30 December 1915, Montagu and Thornton were on board the S.S. Persia, sailing across the Mediterranean towards Port Said in Egypt, where he was due to leave her on his way to India. But the Persia was sunk off Crete by a German U-boat. He survived, but she did not. In Montagu’s papers are some pretty clear, if restrained, expressions of grief at her loss. For example, in a letter to H. H. Asquith, the Prime Minister, written in May 1916, he seems to be apologising for an overly emotional declaration of his desire to help the government on aviation matters, and at the end says that the Persia incident was the sort of thing that ended selfish aspirations.³ This could admittedly just mean his own personal brush with death, but there’s more.

In Montagu’s speeches around the country, he often mentioned the need to mobilise women for the war effort. In others, he referred to their role as mothers or lovers, such as one speech for the Navy League in April 1916. Here, he spoke of the sacrifices they made, meaning the men they had loved and lost. Then he says that he too has sacrificed, that this is driving him on his campaign for national aviation, for if he can rouse the country then his sacrifice and his deliverance won’t have been for nothing. I think it’s pretty clear that Montagu is referring to Thornton’s death, and his own guilt at surviving.

Finally, in June 1916, Montagu gave a speech to the British Women’s Patriotic League. Here he again spoke on the problem of airpower, and praised women workers, who have proven their right to a greater (but unspecified) part in government. But he’s also worried about the falling birthrate. He pleads for a change in attitudes towards unmarried mothers, arguing that the shame of bearing a child out of wedlock is erased by the glory of bearing a child. When I first read this, I thought it just an interesting argument along eugenic lines (though Montagu was not talking about the upper classes being outbred by their social inferiors, but women workers). Now that I’ve read a bit more of the story of Eleanor and John, the real reason for this proposal has become clear. As my astute readers will no doubt have guessed, they had an illegitimate child together, a daughter named Joan. Whether or not the British Women’s Patriotic League realised it, I think Montagu was attempting to make amends in some way for his part in his love’s life and death. I don’t think he ever publicly admitted his relationship with her; their daughter was placed with a foster family, although he did stay in her life as an ‘uncle’. Montagu’s wife, Cecil, died in 1919; he remarried the following year.⁴

I wonder if he could ever bear to drive a Rolls again.

Image source: anataman.

1. Montagu of Beaulieu, Aerial Machines and War (London: Hugh Rees, 1910), 2.
2. Divorce was out of the question, given the laws of the day, unless it could be proved that his wife was also committing adultery. Though he could have abandoned her, and then she could have eventually divorced him.
3. I’d quote the letter directly, but I’d need the permission of King’s first … The passages I’m paraphrasing are from the Douglas-Scott-Montagu papers, 5/13, 6/10 and 6/21, King’s College London.
4. Incidentally, Montagu’s son’s sex life was even more historically significant: he was convicted of ‘consensual homosexual offences’ in a high-profile trial in 1954, which led to the Wolfenden Commission and the eventual decriminalisation of homosexual acts.

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?

Well, obviously, novels about aerial warfare regularly predicted the death of London, or at least its inhabitants. In fact, probably in no other genre was London blown up so regularly than it was in the knock-out blow literature, since this event was pretty much a genre convention and often the climax of the story. Thus, the city is totally depopulated by a Russo-German gas attack in the Earl of Halsbury’s 1944 (1926), and a goodly proportion of it is blown up by a terrorist aërostat in Hartmann the Anarchist (1893) by E. Douglas Fawcett. The onslaught on the city by aerial Russian hordes in Martin Hussingtree’s Konyetz (1924) heralds Judgement Day (with trumpets sounding and all); while in Shaw Desmond’s Chaos (1938), German biological and chemical attacks finally force mass evacuations from London after seven years of resistance, ending in the complete breakdown in law and order.

Most of those books are relatively late, though. The invasion genre, which preceded and overlapped with the air scare stuff, also often portrayed London under attack. Some even involved battles being fought in London itself, which surely would count as a disaster. The best-selling example of the invasion novels, William le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910 (1906), featured an intense artillery bombardment of the city north of the Thames, to break its resistance before the German regulars moved in to occupy it. Le Queux gleefully describes the damage done to major landmarks and helpfully even provides maps of Westminster and the City, showing which buildings were damaged (one is shown at the head of this post). He is perhaps less thorough in documenting the human cost but does make it clear that such a battle would kill thousands of innocent people. But here, as in most invasion novels, the goal of the enemy was to capture London, not to destroy it. Any damage to it was generally incidental and not intentional. (The model here was the siege of Paris in 1870-1, which was not exactly a fun time, but it bounced back soon enough.)

So none of this is really getting me closer to answering my question of when was London first destroyed. My trouble is that I’m much less familiar with Victorian literature of this type than that from the early 20th century, so I turned to my trusty Bleiler, an annotated bibliography of science fiction published before 1930.⁴ It’s not complete and naturally has a bias against the more mundane forms of disasters, but at least I now have a candidate: William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City, Being the Narrative of a Survivor, Written A.D. 1942, which was published in 1880. Hay seems to have been a British mycologist who lived in New Zealand at some point, who also authored a future history entitled Three Hundred Years Hence (1881). Here’s Bleiler’s summary of The Doom of the Great City:

A short recriminatory narrative, looking back from New Zealand in 1942, a la Macaulay, to the events of 1882 or so. * The narrator, who is eighty-four years old, tells of the horrible death of London, when divine retribution overtook its wickedness. Fogs had become worse and worse, what with increased industrialization, until one day about half the population of London suffocated from fumes. There was a hysterical mass exodus, which the narrator witnessed, and later a search through the dead area, seeking remains. * A rather interesting piece of fantastic reportage, if one can overlook the unpleasant religious and moral aspects. How God and the industrialization share responsibility for the deaths is not clear.⁵

It does sound very interesting, an anticipation of the killer fog of December 1952 which killed around 4000 people (though to hazard a guess, probably inspired by the killer fog of January 1880 — see here, the paragraph after the graph). And killing off half the population is certainly a disaster. But 1880 is fairly late. Did nobody think it would be interesting to write about the fall of London before then? This would seem surprising, since a genuine (albeit historical) disaster novel like Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) was hugely successful in its day, well before 1880; and since London had been through disasters before, it shouldn’t have been too hard to imagine that it might have to do so again.⁶ But maybe the date of Hay’s book is significant, at the height of Empire but with other powers beginning to rise in the world. This was also (roughly speaking) the period in which invasion literature began to flourish. Perhaps imperial hubris was a prerequisite for the emergence of disaster novels as a genre, just as it was for the invasion genre. Pride going before a fall does provide a satisfying narrative arc, after all.

Image source: William le Queux, The Invasion of 1910 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1906), 384.

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.
4. Everett F. Bleiler, Science-fiction: The Early Years (Kent and London: Kent State University Press, 1990). How many different kinds of awesome is a book which has entries like the following in the index?
   

   Human types, exotic. See Albinism, Amoeboid people, Balloon people, Blue-skinned people, Congenitally mute people, Dwarves, Four-armed men, Furred people, Giants, Horned people, Human heads that live independently of bodies, Human physical specialization for occupation, Humans with mixed skin colors, Humans with organic radios, Leonine people, Long-necked people, Oviparous people, Pygmies, Radiant-faced people, Sea and water people, Spherical people, Squareheaded people, Tailed people, Tiny people, Tusked people.

   My estimate is approximately 13 to 14 kinds.

5. Ibid, 355.
6. A very early near miss might be Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, a fictionalised account of 1665 which was published in 1722. It’s a near miss because after all, London survived that year (and the one after it) …

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?

This first one is an obelisk at the University of Melbourne. It’s tucked away in a shady corner of the South Lawn between Wilson Hall and the Old Law Quad. Probably, few people even notice it.

The inscriptions are entirely in Latin, which is unusual but presumably is intended to reflect the educated status of the University’s staff and students who fought in the world wars.

The inscriptions on the four faces read:

DE IMPERIO
DE PATRIA
DE ACADEMIA
BENE MERITIS
DOMI
MILITIAEQUE
1914 1918
1939 1945

A free, very rough and likely very wrong translation based upon my schoolboy Latin and my Googling skills might go something like this:

from the Empire
from the Dominion [or: their homeland, fatherland]
from the Academy
they served [or perhaps: they gave]
at home
and abroad
1914 1918
1939 1945

Anyone with more Latin than I, please help out!

I can’t find anything about this memorial on the web, though I did find that there’s another one on campus which I could have looked at. It’s a series of stained glass windows and two tiled tablets, erected in 1920 to commemorate the war service of the staff, students and alumni of the Melbourne Teachers’ College, which later became part of the University (the building now houses the School of Graduate Studies).

Next is an interesting, and I think unusual memorial: a statue of the goddess Peace in a small roadside shrine, backed by a grove of trees. This is the Honor [sic] Reserve in Snake Valley, a small town (population about 350) west of Ballarat in country Victoria.

Less Latin here, as you might expect, though there is some (’PRO PATRIA’, for the homeland) and of course Peace was a Roman goddess. Despite that, the inscription has a Christian flavour:

To the Glory of God
and in Honor [sic] of the Men
of this District
who fought in the Great War
1914-1918.

The names of those who served are arrayed on both sides of the shrine.

The local branch of the RSL closed down a few years ago, and the task of maintaining the memorial fell to the Snake Valley Historical Society. They’re trying to set up a separate organisation to deal with the task, as this will make it easier to attract funding. I wish them luck, it’s a beautiful little shrine and ought to be well-cared for.

The war memorial in North Melbourne, one of the inner suburbs of Melbourne, is more typical of local community efforts at commemoration. A simple obelisk, with the ANZAC crest, and the following inscription:

IN IMPERISHABLE MEMORY
OF AUSTRALIA’S SONS
– WHO DIED –
IN THE CAUSE OF FREEDOM
IN THE GREAT WAR
1914-1918

ERECTED BY THE MEMBERS
OF THE NORTH AND WEST
MELBOURNE RED CROSS SOCIETY
ON BEHALF OF THE CITIZENS.

The other sides list the major theatres where Australians fought in the First World War: ‘GALLIPOLI’, ‘FRANCE’, ‘PALESTINE’. Much more modern plaques list other wars Australia was involved in: the Second World War, Korea, the Malayan Emergency, the Indonesian Confrontation, Vietnam.

Unfortunately, as these photos show, the North Melbourne memorial is not situated in a tranquil location, suitable for introspection on the sacrifices made: it’s squashed into a triangle of grass, with busy roads on two sides and car parking spaces on the other. On the other hand, it is at least in the heart of the suburb, at the other end of the main street from the old town hall.

The Australian Hellenic Memorial is in Melbourne. It’s also in Canberra, or at least another one with the same name is, which is a bit confusing. I think the Melbourne one may be specifically for those who died (both Greek and Australians) in the Greek and Crete campaigns in the Second World War. I assume Melbourne got its own because of its strong ties with Greece through immigration after the war — it was conceived and constructed some time within the last decade.

Presumably there is some heavy classical allusion-making going on here. The upright columns evoke a Greek temple. I’m not sure about the urn and the rough-hewn rock with the temple-shape on top — an acropolis perhaps?

I’d forgotten about this next one (and the last one too for that matter) — I stumbled across while walking to the Shrine of Remembrance. It’s a memorial to the Victorian casualties of the Boer War, or South African War as it was then known. Unlike the uniformly classical designs of the post-First World War monuments, it’s a splendidly Gothic … whatsit. I’m not sure what the correct architectural description is! Like the Australian Hellenic Memorial, it is in the King’s Domain in the heart of Melbourne.

‘KING AND EMPIRE’ — my guess is that such a phrase would have been easier to use, less hollow, in AD 1903 than in AD 1919.

Unlike the other memorials here, this one was raised by the returned soldiers themselves, not their community:

ERECTED by Members of the
5th VICTORIAN CONTINGENT, V.M.R.,
in memory of their
FALLEN COMRADES in South Africa, 1901-2

I’m surprised that there were so many Boer War memorials — a probably incomplete list is here. On the other hand, it was Australia’s first war, after all — the Commonwealth of Australia came into existence during the war, in fact, while units from the various colonies (like the Victorian Mounted Rifles) were already over there fighting for King and Empire. So perhaps I shouldn’t be too surprised then. But it’s certainly been replaced by the First World War in Australia’s founding myth.

I’ve been going through the list roughly in ascending order of size. And now the monuments are starting to get appropriately monumental in scale. This is the Arch of Victory at Ballarat, a classical conceit if ever there was one. The Arch was completed in 1920. Oddly, the end date given for the war is 1919. My guess is that this refers to the Treaty of Versailles, which was signed in June 1919.

It’s also unusual for a war memorial to unashamedly proclaim ‘VICTORY’ like the Arch does …

… but this bombast is more than compensated for by the Avenue of Honour which starts from the Arch (which I was standing under when I took the above) and extends for 22 km. It is flanked on either side by a rank of trees, over 3300 in all. In front of each tree is a plaque (only barely visible in the photo, unfortunately) with the name, unit and number of a man from the Ballarat region who served in the armed forces in the First World War. It really is a dramatic and imaginative form of memorial, and it inspired over a hundred similar avenues in Victoria and the rest of Australia. It’s not, however, a uniquely Australian phenomenon, as I have seen claimed: there’s at least one in Canada, and they were quite popular in the United States after the First World War too. And it looks like there’s one in Leeds. Still, the Ballarat Avenue of Honour must be one of the longest and best-preserved in the world. (Another form of living memorial is noted at Trench Fever.)

Another Ballarat memorial, though this time it represents men and women from across the country: the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial. More than 35,000 names (including my great-uncle’s) are etched on two black granite walls, separated by six obelisks which bear the names of the countries where they were held, from the Boer War to Korea. Another is lying as if it has toppled, I suppose to represent those who died in capitivity (over 8000, mostly in the Second World War). The photo at the top of the post also shows the obelisks.

The day that I visited was by chance the same day that the annual ceremony was held, the third since the memorial was opened in 2004, which accounts for all the wreaths.

Last of all is the grandest of all, Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance.

As can be seen, it’s big. And once more, it’s classical. In fact, it’s inspired by one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. It really is a very impressive building, easily one of the largest war memorials in Australia — second only to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Not that size is everything, of course … but why is Melbourne’s so big? K. S. Inglis, in Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2005 [1999]) suggests that it’s partly because Melbourne was at the time of the Shrine’s construction (1928-34) still the de facto capital of Australia: Parliament only moved to Canberra in 1928, and most of the civil service remained here until after the Second World War. It may also have been a harkening back to the “Marvellous Melbourne” days of the late 19th century, when many grand structures were built. Finally, Inglis suggests that the influence (and interests) of Sir John Monash, a Melbourne-born civil engineer and the successful commander of the ANZAC Corps on the Western Front, played a part.

The inscription reads

THIS MONUMENT WAS ERECTED BY A GRATEFUL
PEOPLE TO THE HONOURED MEMORY OF THE
MEN AND WOMEN OF VICTORIA WHO SERVED
THE EMPIRE IN THE GREAT WAR OF 1914-1918

It still serves this function of a place of memory. Every year on ANZAC Day, a dawn service is held at the Shrine. Ten or twenty thousand people gather to shiver in the cold and to hear the Last Post being played. I went a few years ago, and it’s a very moving experience.

The winged woman here is the Mother Country; the tympanum as a whole depicts “The Call to Arms”. (The tympanum on the other face shows the Homecoming.) From her vantage point, she can see down St Kilda Rd, across the Yarra and down Swanston St into the heart of the city.

I think that’s enough for now — I have more photos from the Shrine area, statues, the Second World War Forecourt and so forth, which I may work into a post at another time. But hopefully I’ve shown something of the ubiquity and variety of Australian war memorials, and the ideals and values chosen for comemmoration — peace and victory, King and Empire, country and comrades.

For more information, see Inglis’s book, or the War Memorials in Australia site, if it ever comes back up.

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