In the middle of the First World War, the Australian government found itself preoccupied with the possibility of civil unrest, perhaps even rebellion. In December 1916 the Hughes government passed the Unlawful Associations Act, which proscribed the Australian branch of the Industrial Workers of the World. The Wobblies had campaigned strongly against conscription in the October referendum, and proscription was Hughes's revenge for the No vote. But more than that, he believed that every IWW member was armed, and that many were of German extraction and thus potentially treasonous. Determined to be prepared for any eventuality, by the start of February 1917, the government had assembled 900 armed men, chosen for their political reliability, in each state's capital city, backed up with a machine gun. Melbourne, as the national capital, was the best defended. It had an AIF infantry battalion, a reserve company, the District Guard, two 18-pounder guns, two machine-gun sections, and 50 light-horsemen.

It also had two aeroplanes at its disposal, for 'their great moral effect':

(a) To overawe rioters by their presence in the air.
(b) To cooperate with the Artillery.
(c) To assist in dispersing the rioters by the use of machine guns and revolvers and by dropping bombs or hand grenades.

What was that last part again?

To assist in dispersing the rioters by the use of machine guns and revolvers and by dropping bombs or hand grenades.

I find this quite extraordinary, that an Australian government was preparing to strafe and bomb its own citizens for the crime of rioting. That's the sort of thing that dictators do. But should I be surprised? Let's look at some similar cases from around the same time.

Australia was certainly not the only democracy to make plans to use military force to suppress civil dissent during the war, though it may have done so earlier than others. From March 1918, France held four cavalry divisions behind the front for use against strikers and pacifists (and apparently did use them). Brock Millman has shown that after the Russian revolution in 1917, Britain too was worried about internal dissent possibly spilling over into outright revolt. Emergency Scheme L was drawn up in May 1918; Millman describes it as a 'doomsday scenario':

Scheme L, basically, was a plan for the formation of composite infantry and artillery brigades, and other units, from forces held in the UK but not dedicated to home defence. This would be followed by a levée en masse by battalions of volunteers, and the effective cessation of civilian authority in the British Isles.

A total of 19 infantry brigades would be formed in this way, along with supporting artillery and cyclist units. One group would cover Red Clydeside; another Tyneside, also the scene of labour unrest; and a third would assemble in East Anglia, near London. It's clear that this plan was not for defence against a German invasion (as were most other home defence plans), because the deployment to these areas was automatic and not contingent on where the enemy landed. But as an uprising could quickly spread from one flashpoint to the rest of the country, it makes sense that the Army would keep its options as open as possible while keep watch on the main danger areas. And with as large a force as possible, the better to overawe rioting workers.

Now, Millman focuses on the military aspects of Scheme L. But he also says that the RAF's VI Brigade would assist. This makes sense. VI Brigade formed the backbone of Britain's air defences, and so was the largest combat-ready air force in the country (even if ground support wasn't its forte). Unfortunately Millman doesn't give any details of how it was intended to be used against civil unrest (it might not even have been specified in the plans) but it probably would have been similar to the Australian plans the year before. We'll probably never know because there was no uprising in Britain in 1918 and Scheme L was never invoked.

Then again. Less than two years later Britain was facing a truly revolutionary situation, albeit across the water in Ireland. As of the summer of 1920 two RAF squadrons were deployed there; overcoming low serviceability rates they did useful work in reconnaissance, communications and logistics. Despite the repeated please of British commanders, for most of the war their aircraft were unarmed, apparently for fear of hitting noncombatants. But in March 1921, near the end of the fighting, the Cabinet did in fact authorise arming them for use only over rural areas and only when rebels were actually attacking British forces (or just about to or had just finished, which seems to admit of some uncertainty). According to David Omissi, the RAF flew only a small fraction of total flying hours armed, and 'probably' didn't cause any casualties.

So that's a lot more discretion than it sounds like the Australians were planning to use. Let's turn to a case where there were no rules of engagement at all: the Tulsa race riot of 1921. This was a very different context to the ones discussed above: the riots were more in the vein of a massive lynch mob than a military operation. And the aircraft were not used to put down the riots, but (so it is claimed) to support them. On the morning of 1 June, following an attempted lynching the day before, white mobs surrounded, attacked and set fire to the black district of Greenwood. Thirty-nine people were killed, twenty-six of them black. African-American eyewitnesses claimed that aeroplanes took part, by dropping incendiary bombs or liquids, perhaps petrol (alright, 'gasoline' then). There were also reports of rifle-fire from the aircraft against people on the ground. Here, unlike in Australia, Britain and Ireland, the aircraft in question were civilian, not military; at most they may have private aeroplanes used by the Tulsa police department. It's anyway unclear whether the air attacks did take place; unsurprisingly there was no official investigation. An analysis by Richard S. Warner concludes that:

It is within reason that there was some shooting from planes and even the dropping of incendiaries, but the evidence would seem to indicate that it was of a minor nature and had no real effect in the riot.

Technically, the attacks were in support of civil unrest -- that is, caused by white Tulsans -- not suppressing it, though it's possible that the perpetrators thought they were acting to prevent an uprising.

Then, of course, there's the practice of air control in British, French and Spanish colonies and mandates. Britain, for example, had been doing this in a big way since 1919, in Egypt, Somaliland, and the North-West Frontier, though it had first experimented with it in the Sudan in 1916. From 1922 it was used to pacify an Iraq-wide rebellion which had been boiling over since 1920. Spain and France bombed insurgents in the Rif War (and may have even used gas, though Britain did not [Update: Spain did use gas in Morocco: see Sebastian Balfour's Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War]); France bombed Damascus in 1926. It's hard to get a clear idea of the civilian casualties caused by these attacks -- the RAF in effect maintained that its operations were a kind of game which frightened but did not harm -- but Priya Satia argues that for the threat to work it had to be carried out from time to time. Air control is where the definition of civil unrest stretches almost to breaking point, but in a revealing way: the Europeans were not bombing their own people or even other Europeans, but Arabs and Kurds and Somalis. They were held to be almost incomprehensibly different to Europeans. As the British high commissioner in Iraq warned in 1931,

the term 'civilian population' has a very different meaning in Iraq from what it has in Europe [...] the whole of its male population are potential fighters as the tribes are heavily armed.

That is, they were othered. And so the aeroplane could be turned against them with few moral qualms.

To draw these strands together, it suggests that a government could not in fact turn its aircraft against its own people -- it had to exclude them from the national community first. The Australian government in 1916-7 viewed the Wobblies as traitors, and this presumably would have been the case for the British government dealing with insurrection in 1918; white Tulsan rioters in 1921 certainly did not see their black fellow-citizens as part of their community; colonial regimes in the 1920s and 1930s by definition saw themselves as utterly separate from those they ruled. Ireland in 1921 represents an interesting edge case: the restraint exercised by the British suggests that they themselves believed that their rule was illegitimate, that it was not 'their' country any longer.

The counter-revolutionary value of airpower was predicted in 1909 by L. Cecil Jane, the medievalist brother of Fred T. Jane. In an article entitled 'The political aspect of aviation', Jane argued that aircraft would be invaluable in suppressing revolutions, because by flying high above the rioting crowds their crews would have no opportunity for fraternisation. Anyway, they would tend to be owned by the better sort of people, not the sort to sympathise with rebellions.

But if it be true that aviation has thus given a new strength to the existing order, so far as resistance to forcible changes is concerned; if it be true that masses of people will no longer possess an inevitable supremacy, then we have indeed reached an epoch in the history of political development. The establishment in almost every country of representative institutions, of popular government in some shape or form, may fairly be attributed to the invincibility of the 'the Many.' [...] Popular government, like all other forms of government, rests ultimately upon the unanswerable argument of superior force. If that argument no long support [sic] it, it may be asked whether the institution will itself endure. Visions of a despotism may appear to be no longer mere wild imaginings, of a depotism [sic] of aviators, who will have the one final argument on their side.

He was right about the counter-revolutionary uses of aviation; but fortunately (for believers in democracy, at least) wrong about its 'unanswerable argument'.

And fortunately for Australia, there were no worker riots in 1917, and so our government didn't have to carry out its plans to bomb us.

Looking over the list of Australian mystery aircraft sightings suggests that some generalisations can be made.

In the 1910s, mysterious lights in the sky were usually described as being airship-like; after 1910 they were far more likely to be called aeroplanes. Perhaps not coincidentally, 1910 was when aeroplanes first flew in Australia; certainly a search of Trove Newspapers (using Wraggelabs' QueryPic) shows that 1910 was the first year when the word "aeroplane" appeared markedly more frequently than "airship". So that's easy enough to explain.

The same search shows that 1909 was the year that aviation really broke through into public consciousness. That's also the year of the Australian phantom airship wave. As it was the first burst of interest in aircraft, the first time that people started to learn about them, it's perhaps not surprising that people might think they saw them flying around where they weren't. The 1918 mystery aeroplane scare came after several years of increasing press coverage of aviation, obviously due to the war. So again that fits. Aeroplanes were something people were reading (and probably talking) about a lot. But that by itself is evidently not enough to generate a mystery aeroplane scare: there were a few seen in 1914, and a handful in the years after that, but nothing on the scale of 1918. There needs to be a plausible reason for aircraft to be flying about: and the reported visit of the Wolf and its Wölfchen to Australian shores provided that, though the desperate situation of the Allied armies in France was also a factor.

After 1918 there is a lull; I couldn't find any mystery aircraft sightings until 1927, when a few start to pop up. (Which certainly doesn't mean they aren't there to be found. I just found another one, albeit for 1928 as well.) Why might that be? Well, looking at the ngram above again is suggestive. This time the plot extends covers 1918 to 1942, and is for 'plane' as well as 'aeroplane' -- the former becomes more common from the late 1920s. After a relatively flat level of interest in aviation during most of the 1920s (actually falling considerably from the immediate postwar years), the number of articles using the word 'plane' almost doubles between 1926 and 1928, after which it is fairly stable until a dip in 1932 and 1933. So once more there's a buzz about aeroplanes (or rather planes), a widespread curiosity about aviation. Why was this so?

It was certainly nothing to do with fear of war in these Locarno years. I haven't tested this quantitatively, but it can't be a coincidence that these were the years of some of the great pioneering long-distance flights. Australia was the destination and, in some cases, the birthplace of many of the aviators who carried out these feats: the Englishman Alan Cobham flew from England to Australia and back in 1926, for which he was knighted; in 1928, Bert Hinkler, an Australian, was the first to make the trip solo. That same year, Charles Kingsford-Smith and Charles Ulm, also Australians, were the first to fly across the vast Pacific and then the smaller Tasman. The excitement that Charles Lindbergh's 1927 New York-Paris flight generated is well-known; something similar happened, if perhaps less intense, must have happened in Australia. The emotional investment in these pioneer aviators and their dangerous lives perhaps explains the number of false reports of aeroplane crashes around 1930.

And it wasn't just the big names either. Here's a plot of the number of civil aircraft registered in Australia from 1922 to 1939. Between 1926 and 1928, this increased from 55 to 90 or 63% (and then another 144% between 1928 and 1930).

Other statistics -- number of flights, number of hours flown, number of passengers carried -- tell the same story. There was a huge increase in flying in the late 1920s, followed by a bust (no doubt due to the Depression) and another boom in the late 1930s. So it makes sense that mystery aeroplanes began to be seen again from 1927-8 or so. It was the golden age of Australian aviation: far more people were talking about and flying in aeroplanes than ever before.

Apart from the air crash theory, other explanations for mystery aircraft in the late 1920s and early 1930s included opium smugglers and -- in 1934 -- a Japanese reconnaissance of the northern coast. Japan was invoked, either explicitly or implicitly, in the Darwin and Hobart sightings in 1938, and the Townsville incidents in 1942. This brings me back to my original purpose in starting this series, which was to see if Australian mystery aircraft sightings can be used as an index of public anxiety about national defence. And my answer is 'yes', but it's a heavily qualified 'yes'. It's quite obviously so in 1918 and 1942, but then the country was at war (and in the latter case actually under attack), so that's no surprise. In the late 1920s and early 1930s there was no cause for Australians to be alarmed, so again it's no surprise that mystery aircraft weren't seen to be hostile. The more difficult cases are in 1909 and, to a lesser extent, 1938. In 1909, the mystery aircraft were the object of curiosity, not suspicion. But that same year Britain was undergoing every sort of defence panic around: invasion, dreadnoughts, airships, spies. Australians were also very worried about invasion, albeit from Japan, not Germany. Why didn't Australians imagine Japanese airships spying from overhead, preparing the way for the Emperor's soldiers?

The answer must have something to do with perceived plausibility, which in turn depends on perceived capability and perceived intent. In 1909, Germany had Zeppelins; Japan had nothing. If Japan had been publicly and successfully experimenting with longrange aircraft in like fashion to Germany, then Australians might have believed that the 1909 mystery airships were Japanese, just as Britons believed that theirs were German. In 1938, things were different. Everyone had aircraft now; and Japan was closer, in the sense that it had forward bases in Micronesia as well as aircraft carriers. It was now plausible to imagine that Japanese aircraft could reach Australia.

I was going to suggest that it was also now more plausible to imagine that Japan intended to attack Australia: after the Marco Polo Bridge incident in 1937 (and setting aside the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 which seems to have made less of an impression) it was clearly in an aggressive, expansionist phase. But the above plot suggests that press interest, at least, in Japan actually declined after 1937. That's a very crude index, of course, but it's consistent with Augustine Meaher's argument that Australians were surprisingly unconcerned about Japan in the late 1930s, contrary to Peter Stanley's view.

This is starting to get confusing. But, paradoxically, considering another problem with mystery aircraft may help here. Why were there no big waves of mystery aircraft sightings after the First World War? This seems to be true worldwide. Between 1896 and 1918 there were a number of times where mystery aircraft are seen in many places by many people over a short period of time: the United States, Canada, Britain, New Zealand, Australia. Afterwards, while there were certainly mystery aircraft sightings, they tended to occur singly, appearing once or twice at one place and then disappearing. They were also interpreted in isolation: nobody seems to have connected the Hobart mystery aeroplane of July 1938 with the Darwin case in February, nobody saw them as part of the same phenomenon. I'm not sure why this is, but I suspect that a greater familiarity with real aircraft must have had something to do with it. Actual aircraft were very rare in all countries when mystery aircraft waves took place: airships and aeroplanes were imagined far more than seen. This ignorance made it easier to believe that a planet, a fire-balloon or a Reticulan battlecruiser was in fact a aeroplane: easier for the witnesses, easier for everyone they told to believe them, easier for the journalists covered the story to treat it seriously. The spread of the idea that Germans (etc) were flying around in the sky met no resistance -- at least for a while: when the press starts to get sceptical the mystery aircraft waves tend to collapse very quickly.

So, while the huge increase in flying in Australia from the late 1920s may have put aviation at the forefront of the national consciousness and provided imaginative fodder for mystery aircraft incidents, it seems to have provided an inoculation against mass waves of sightings. For that to occur there needed to be plausibility, curiosity, and ignorance. All three at once. Mystery aircraft do appear at other times, but don't lead to anything else and are soon forgotten.

I'm not happy with this post; it's long and rambling, unfocused and confusing. Partly that's due to me making it up as I go along rather than planning ahead; but it's also partly due to the fuzzy nature of the mystery aeroplane phenomenon (and indeed history) itself. In trying to find common factors and causes I run the risk of imposing my own order where there is none. Maybe there is really no point to this. Maybe the Scareship Age was no such thing. So people thought they saw aircraft flying around where they were none. So what? Sometimes I think I should focus my research on phantom airships and mystery aeroplanes: it's something that few other historians are interested in and so it's one area where I can make a distinctive contribution. But then again, maybe there's a reason why it's a fallow field.

So here's a very incomplete list of mystery aircraft sightings in Australia, along with how they were interpreted at the time. For the most part I've only included reports which were published in the press at the time (and not those which were reported to the authorities in wartime but not publicised).

1. Koroit, Vic, 1906: an odd object which at one point 'assumed a shape somewhat resembling that of an airship'.
2. 1909 wave, nation-wide: no single interpretation dominated but generally described as airships.
3. Minderoo, WA, 1910: an airship, either a secret Australian invention or from a foreign vessel off the coast.
4. SS Wookata, off Althorpe Island, SA, 1910: strange lights, described by one witness as being 'like German airships flying about'.
5. Ballarat, Vic, 1911: an 'air-ship' or 'biplane'.
6. Melbourne, Vic, 1911: an 'aeroplane'.
7. Cairns, Qld, 1913: a 'mysterious object resembling an aeroplane'.
8. Lameroo, SA, 1914: an 'aeroplane'. February, so before the outbreak of war.
9. Mullumbimby/Billinudgel/Lismore, NSW, 1914: this time it's October, and there seems to have been much debate about whether the 'aeroplane' seen over a period of days (or weeks) belonged to Germany (no, because it would have dropped a bomb) or the Australian Army (then why wasn't it flying in daytime?). Another article intriguingly mentions 'the aeroplane or Zeppelin' alongside an 'awful carronading out to sea' heard at Tweed Heads, but let's not get distracted...
10. Corporoo, QLD, 1915: an 'aeroplane' (though it is also described as an 'airship', I suspect this is as a synonym for aircraft). No defence implications.
11. 1918 wave, nation-wide though most reports were from Victoria and, to a lesser extent, New South Wales. The implication was very definitely that the aeroplanes (rarely, Zeppelins) were German, possibly from raiders offshore.
12. Broome, WA, 1927: two aeroplanes believed to be operating from a ship offshore, involved in opium smuggling.
13. Flinders Island, Tas, 1928: an 'aeroplane engine' was heard followed by the sound of a crash. A search found nothing. This was connected to the missing New Zealand airmen Hood and Moncrieff, who the same day had taken off from Sydney in an attempt to be the first to fly the Tasman Sea. Interestingly, there were similar false sightings in New Zealand -- all very Andrée-like.
14. Broken Hill, NSW, 1929: an aeroplane was seen trailing smoke and believed to have crashed, but an extensive search found no trace.
15. Needles, Tas, 1931: yet another mistaken report of an aeroplane crash.
16. Thursday Island, Qld, 1934: two aeroplanes seen by fishing boats, which also reported a 'Japanese sampan' nearby; the Defence Department was notified. Thursday Island is off the tip of Cape York, about as far north as Australia gets.
17. Bowen, Qld, 1935: an 'aeroplane' reported to be 'in difficulties'; believed to be a hoax report as no such aircraft could be identified and this wasn't the first time this had happened.
18. Darwin, NT, 1938: an aeroplane was heard and seen on two occasions, leading to many different theories being proposed. A long-distance reconnaissance from Palau was one of these, but the Japanese angle only had much traction in Darwin itself.
19. Hobart, Tas, 1938: not-very-convincing attempts to suggest that an aeroplane seen diving on Hobart was from a foreign ship off the coast, but in any case the incident was said to show the city's defencelessness.
20. Broken Hill, NSW, 1941: a 'mysterious object' seen in the air was thought by some to be 'an aeroplane'. This was reported on the very same day as the Japanese declaration of war, though no connection is evident (other than the article being surrounded by war news).
21. Townsville, Qld, 1942: Japan isn't mentioned here either, but it's pretty obvious that's who the 'number of unidentified planes [...] seen over the Atherton Tableland' were assumed to belong to, if only from the black-out and other air-raid precautions which were undertaken.
22. Townsville, Qld, 1942: this time two 'military type' aircraft were seen over Townsville; fighters and anti-aircraft guns failed to shoot them down. Despite the caveat ('If the planes were hostile') it does seem likely that these were Japanese aircraft. Townsville was bombed less than two months later.
23. Port Augusta, SA, 1947: not described as any sort of aircraft at all, actually, just as five 'strange objects' (about the size of 'locomotives'). That's quite unusual but these were quite unusual objects, described as quivering, 'oblong with narrow points' and casting a shadow (at 9am). The consensus seems to have been meteors (though the state astronomer disagreed and also rejected a mirage theory). A few months later the flying saucer craze started in the United States and the Adelaide Advertiser was able to claim that 'Port Augusta "started something"'.

What does it all mean? I'll discuss that in the (hopefully) final post in this series.

Aircraft don't have to be military to be a threat to the nation. The ability to simply fly over frontiers makes them attractive to anyone who wants for some reason to enter a country without observing the legal usual formalities -- smugglers, for example. Or at least, that seems to have been a widely-held belief among non-flying non-smuggling people. Where threatening mystery aircraft are not interpreted as belonging to a hostile foreign power, they have often been seen as smugglers, as happened in Scandinavia and Britain in the 1930s, for example. The smugglers theory was also briefly considered as one possible explanation among many for the Darwin mystery aeroplanes in 1938.

Smuggling was very much the frame used to understand another mystery aeroplane incident nearly a decade before the Darwin sighting, this time at Broome on the Western Australian coast. On 20 November 1927, aeroplanes were seen over the sea by two separate groups of people, the crew of a pearl lugger and a couple at their holiday house, but 'there are no 'planes in Australia which tally with the description of the machines seen in the West'.

Towards evening on a day in the middle of November, said Mr. [G.] Nelson, one of the coloured members of the crew of a lugger on which he was working turned to him, and said: "Look, very big bird." Mr. Nelson saw a dark object in the sky direct west from the lugger, and towards the setting sun. For a few moments it appeared to remain stationary, but when it changed its course to the north Mr. Nelson saw that it was a large aeroplane or a seaplane. As a lieutenant with the Imperial Forces during the war, Mr. Nelson was accustomed to estimating the altitude and courses of aeroplanes, and he judged that the machine was flying at a height of between 2000ft. and 3000ft. The machine was too far away for Mr. Nelson to detect the hum of the 'plane's engine. At the time the lugger was working at a point about seven miles south-west of Broome lighthouse.

The other people to see it, Mr and Mrs Percy, were also connected with the pearling industry, and the first to see it also initially thought it was a large bird. When they reached their holiday home at Gantheaume Point, the Percys grabbed binoculars from the old lighthouse there.

A few minutes later they saw a 'plane coming from the sea towards the land, but it was too far away for them to distinguish any markings. Soon afterwards they saw another 'plane flying round. Percy says the 'planes were three times as large as those used in the West Australian air service, and, in his opinion, they were taking observations of the coast line.

Although Percy was of the opinion that there must have been a mother ship out at sea, a West Australian Airlines pilot flying in the area the same day saw no vessels which could have served in this capacity, which 'discounted the possibility of the 'planes having been used by a foreign Power for the purpose of military observation, and strengthened the belief that they had come from an island in the vicinity of Java, or one of the adjacent islands, on some private mission' -- that private mission being somehow 'confirmed' by Nelson's statement as 'a scheme to smuggle opium into Australia'.

Across Australia, nearly all of the headlines for this story included phrases such as 'Theory of opium smuggling', 'May be opium smugglers' or 'Opium smuggling suspected'. Where this theory came from is unclear: one report said that 'The general opinion seemed to be that the aeroplanes were being used to smuggle opium into Australia', which sounds like it was idle talk rather than any expert opinion. Customs officials were publicly rather dismissive, with the Comptroller-General of Customs saying 'he did not regard as serious the suggestion that the aeroplanes were engaged in smuggling opium', and a local customs officer pointing out that 'there was no evidence to show that any contraband goods had been landed'. But almost no attention seems to have been paid by the national press to a report that defence officials were 'alarmed' by the mystery aeroplanes, with the RAAF carrying out its own investigation separate to that of Customs. A columnist for the Perth Western Mail didn't feel forced to choose between the two theories, contending that

The incident goes to show how defenceless we are against reconnaissance by hostile aircraft [...] The immensity of Australia's coastline means a bigger air patrol problem than faces most other nations, but face it we must. Civil aviation does much already, but it is not enough.

So on this reading, to defend against one aerial threat was to defend against the other: more airpower needed.

Errata: most of the years in this post, which I incorrectly had as 1928 instead of 1927!

I've updated my list of British newspapers online, 1901-1950 to reflect the new titles available in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA), a pay-site which was launched with some fanfare about a month ago. Although it has been digitised from (and in partnership with) the British Library's newspapers collections, I must admit to not having paid much attention at the time because it sounded like it only covered 1900 and earlier. While that's mostly true, there's actually enough to interest an early 20th-century historian, especially in terms of regional newspapers, and more titles and pages are promised. Having said that, the price structure isn't very appealing for what's on offer, so I haven't subscribed to BNA and probably won't until I have a specific purpose in mind.

Most of the 20th-century titles are available only up to 1903. But the Western Times (Exeter) is available right up until 1950, and the Tamworth Herald until 1944. Four other newspapers have digitised runs of over a decade: Cheltenham Looker-On (1902 to 1913); North Devon Journal (Barnstaple, to 1923); Nottingham Evening Post (1921 to 1944); Western Daily Press (Bristol, 1915 to 1930). You can download whole pages (though apparently not individual articles), though sadly without a text layer. The free samples are good quality -- of course, they would be, but keyword searches (which you can do for free) suggests that the OCR is generally good. There is also the ability to correct the text where the OCR fails; and you can tag or comment on individual articles. User accounts also come with a 'My Research' section which allows you to bookmark articles as well as view a history of previous searches performed and articles viewed. A potentially handy feature is the ability to perform a keyword search on just the articles you've viewed. Searching in general is fast and powerful; you can quickly narrow a query by period, area, title or section of newspaper. I'm impressed with BNA's user interface overall: it is a lot like (and I'm sure directly inspired by) the National Library of Australia's Trove Digitised Newspapers but with a few more improvements for the dedicated researcher in mind.

Now for the complaints. These all revolve around the non-free nature of BNA. I do have philosophical objections to state institutions handing over their nation's cultural heritage largely preserved at taxpayer expense to free enterprise to make a buck out of, but there are practical problems too. The facilities for tagging, commenting and correcting are great, for example, but I question whether these are going to be used much in a non-open environment like this. Especially corrections: Trove has a community of eager text-correctors who make over a hundred thousand corrections a day; but then Trove is free. Expecting people to pay BNA for the privilege of improving their product is a bit much to ask, it seems to me. Apparently the current commercial arrangement will last for ten years, after which it may become open; but by then the technology will no doubt need updating and probably another commercial arrangement to fund it. I realise that digitisation and hosting costs money and it's not the British Library's fault it had to go down this route if it wanted to make its newspaper collection available to all; but I much prefer the Antipodean ethos on this one. Some of the problems resulting from the non-free, non-open nature of BNA could be fixed, though. As I noted above, given the limited number of titles currently available for the 20th century, subscribing for a whole year is not attractive to me. Why not have a cheaper option for just the 20th century?

The RAF Displays held at Hendon between 1920 and 1937 were unique, in that no other air force attempted to project a vision of itself, its capabilities and its responsibilities in so public a way, on such a large scale and over such a long period. Of course, that's largely because there weren't many air forces around. Or rather, they did exist, but not independently of their nation's army and navy. Putting on such a big show was important for the RAF precisely because it was newborn: it needed to convince everyone (parliamentarians, journalists, the public, the other services, other nations) that it was necessary and/or that it was successful. Hendon seemed to have fulfilled this very well, judging by press attention and attendance numbers.

But viewed another way, the RAF Displays weren't unprecedented at all. Both the British Army and the Royal Navy had their own forms of public display. The Army had long performed in public, in fact, such ceremonies as trooping the colours, and the 19th century witnessed a huge growth in the popularity of military reviews, according to Scott Hughes Myerly 'the most popular and elaborate public manifestation of the military spectacle':

The action on the field consisted of evolutions of drill, musket volleys with blanks, and cannon salutes. Often a sham battle or mock, siege would be staged between two opposing units, or a bayonet or cavalry charge would be a part of the show.

I'm not sure of the actual content of these mock battles, though the fact they they were performed during the Napoleonic Wars suggests an obvious ideological function. For it's part, the Navy also developed fleet reviews into what Jan Rüger has termed 'a new form of public theatre'. This happened much later in the century, however, dramatically increasing in frequency after the review held for Victoria in 1887 on the occasion of her golden jubilee. By their nature, naval reviews afforded fewer opportunities for presenting narratives of actual combat. There were some, though, for example a 'mock-attack carried out by torpedo boats and submarines' at the 1909 Spithead review. Like the RAF later, and doubtless the Army before it, the Navy rather dubiously insisted that these were not mere spectacles but training for war.

Although Hendon itself was a pre-war site of aerial spectacle, that was a private enterprise and had nothing to do with the RFC (which probably would have been hard pressed to compete in qualitative terms anyway). So it was only after 1918 that it got into the game. The Navy held its first review in ten years in July 1924, shortly after the fifth Hendon, but as before the opportunities for creativity were limited. The Army began holding its own annual pageant in 1920, the Aldershot Command Searchlight Tattoo, a revival of an smaller event dating to the 1890s which now continued right up until the eve of war in 1939. There are many similarity with Hendon, which began the same year; the RAF seems to have even participated in Aldershot to some degree by providing aeroplanes as required. Like Hendon, Aldershot became very popular, growing from 22,000 spectators in 1922 to 300,000 by 1929 and gaining in social cachet. Again like Hendon, they were carefully choreographed and stage-managed, perhaps even more so -- there were systems of flashing lights backstage to give soldiers their cues and photographs were taken in rehearsal at 1 second intervals to see if anyone was out of step! But while there were some attempts in the early years to depict modern warfare, from 1925 the focus moved to historical re-enactments of the Army's past triumphs, especially Waterloo. So even as the Army was mechanising and experimenting in armoured warfare, to the public it chose to project an outdated style of warfare, dressing its men in redcoats rather than khaki. This is very different to the RAF's instincts when it came to public display, and it would be interesting to know what the reasons were. In any case, by dwelling on the past there was less chance of offending someone (apart from the French).

Another way to compare Hendon is internationally. Was there anything comparable to Hendon overseas? Yes, and Hendon seems to have been the direct inspiration. David Omissi notes that Italo Balbo, the senior Italian fascist, aviator and no mean impresario of aerial propaganda himself, attended Hendon in 1927 and 1932, declared that 'the RAF Display was the finest thing in aviation'. After he became Air Minister in 1929, he laid on two Giornata dell'ala, 'days of the wing' in 1930 and 1932, which sound very like Italian Hendons -- right down to mock air raids on Arab villages. But otherwise I don't know of anything quite like it. According to Peter Fritzsche, Germany had 'Carefully choreographed Nazi airshows' which attracted big crowds, but what messages they attempted to propagate beyond the obvious (i.e. airpower makes Germany powerful) is unclear. Maybe the Soviets? Scott Palmer has described in some detail Soviet airminded propaganda activities, but for the most part these revolved around big flights and agit-flights (that is, long distance record or proving flights and flying visits to remote villages). The exceptions, such as a 1927 'aerial parade in which more than three-dozen aircraft, flying in formation, spelled out the names of [Communist] Party luminaries' -- 'the largest aviation spectacle organized to date in the Soviet Union' -- don't seem to have involved anything like a Hendon set-piece. It's interesting that I'm reaching for comparisons with dictatorships here; they would seem to be the natural home for Hendon-like military aviation spectacles, and indeed the other democracies don't seem to have gone in for them. So what does that say about Britain and aviation between the wars?

It must say something, for Hendon wasn't the only form of official airminded propaganda in Britain -- far from it. The RAF was involved in a whole panoply of flying displays and other spectacles. It participated in flying displays put on by private flying clubs, such as the Birmingham Air Pageant in 1927 which had a hundred thousand visitors over two days. This included the bombing and destruction of a fake castle. A jubilee air review put on for George V in 1935 heralded more mass flypasts in the years of rearmament, helping to emphasise the RAF's strength of numbers. More significantly, in 1934 the first Empire Air Day was held at the suggestion of the Air League of the British Empire. This was the RAF's 'at home' day, where the public could visit their local military aerodrome and see what the flying life was like. Recruitment was surely a motivation, as perhaps was the desire to avoid a less-overtly warlike form of display (like Aldershot, Hendon was under increasing pressure from pacifists and the left for promoting militarism, especially to schoolchildren who were given free admission to the dress rehearsal). The latter concern may have curtailed the spread of displays resembling the Hendon set-pieces in the 1930s. As I discussed here recently, in 1924 and 1925 the RAF staged a mock aerial bombardment of London for the enjoyment of paying customers. The annual Air Defence of Great Britain (ADGB) exercises held between 1927 and 1931, which were public partly by virtue of being held around London and partly by being reported by accompanying journalists, were from 1932 held in more remote locations because they were too visible and open to misinterpretation, according to Tami Biddle. But it's possible that these types of practical propaganda simply transmuted into civil defence drills once ARP preparations began in 1935. The 1935 ADGB exercises, for example, involved practice blackouts in port cities like Chatham and Portsmouth, as Marc Wiggam explains, for the purpose of seeing how easy it was to hide a town in darkness rather than educating the public on how to prepare for air raids. This would necessarily involved aircraft flying overhead, playing the role of enemy bombers. But did RAF aircraft also take part in later, more civilian ARP exercises to increase their realism to the participants on the ground? That seems to have happened overseas, in Italy and Germany, but I'm not sure if it did in Britain.

There's lots to be done.

Airmindedness is a word which gets bandied around a lot these days -- okay, not actually a lot, but it's not just me either. But I think it's too broad a concept; at the very least, it needs to be divided into positive airmindedness and negative airmindedness. I mostly write about negative airmindedness. This more or less is the attitude 'Aviation is vitally important to the nation because it is incredibly dangerous'; the previous post is a good example of this. In Britain, I would argue, this was the predominant form of airmindedness in Britain between the wars, due to the perceived danger of a knock-out blow from the air. But mixed in with that there was also positive airmindedness: 'Aviation is vitally important to the nation because it is incredibly beneficial'. (Before 1914 this was stronger, though the phantom airship panics would suggest that even then negative airmindedness held sway.) Above is an example, a 1926 London Underground poster by Montague B. Black.

LONDON 2026 A.D. -- THIS IS ALL UP IN THE AIR
TO-DAY -- THE SOLID COMFORT OF THE UNDERGROUND

It presents a vision of London a hundred years' hence, the far-off year of 2026, drawing on the futurism of aviation to sell the (sub)mundane transport of today. (Airmindedness was very often about the potential of aviation than its reality, the future rather than the present.)

The sky is full of exciting promises: autogyro airtaxis! Airships to Australia! A London Bridge Air Depot! These are all good things (except if you value London's architectural heritage, perhaps).

But as I say, this kind of positive airmindedness is not typical of Britain. I think it is safe to say that it was much more typical of the United States, for example, a reflection of that nation's more optimistic attitude towards technology in this period. That's why when talking about airmindedness it's critical to pay attention to the national context: as brilliant as Joseph Corn's The Winged Gospel is, for example, it would be a mistake to think its portrait of positive American airmindedness applied to Britain where negative airmindedness held sway. Different countries had different forms of airmindedness at different times.

I would add one caution: the distinction between positive and negative airmindedness is not quite identical to that between civil and military aviation. For example, military aviation can be seen as positive if you believe that it will deter war or end them quickly and with a minimum of bloodshed (AKA 'the bomber dream'); and civil aviation can be seen as negative if you believe that they can be quickly converted into bombers and used in a knock-out blow (AKA 'the commercial bomber'). It's all in the context.

Additional image source: The Retronaut.

I may or may not have been right in guessing that the Soviet Union was the pretend enemy in the 1928 RAF Display set-piece, but as we shall see I think I'm on safer ground with the next year's edition (for some reason held slightly later in the summer than usual, on Saturday, 13 July 1929). The tenth 'Grand Finale or Set Piece' had an unusually elaborate geopolitical backdrop and an unusually elaborate set. The scene was 'Hendon Sea Port' AKA 'Hendon-by-the-Sea', which

represented a foreign defended port overseas, and consisted of a harbour with a quay terminating at a fort at the seaward extremity and various buildings at the landward end. Alongside the mole with waves rippling against its sides (these waves, by the way, were the silk of old parachutes, pegged to the ground and fluttering in the wind), was an imposing troopship, with smoke already issuing from its black and orange funnels; troops were embarking and stores were being transferred from lorries.

Outside the harbour various vessels, complete with waves, cruised about, while other craft, including an ammunition lighter, were anchored inside. This was the "peaceful" but active scene we looked upon at the start, and one could hardly believe it was not real.

It's clear that the RAF put a lot of effort into these sets which were destined to be blown up (see the British Pathé newsreel above), even allowing for the fact that they were built from scrap metal and old parachutes.

This attention to detail was matched by the plot:

The British Government was in diplomatic correspondence with this foreign power in relation to the disputed boundary of a British overseas possession, and had referred the question to the League of Nations. Without waiting for the report of the League of Nations, the foreign Power committed a definite act of aggression against this country, and intelligence reached the British Government that following up this act, the foreign Power was despatching an expedition from the port against British territory.

As a result, the Government despatched a force of heavy bombers, together with an aircraft carrier, to British territory within range of the port to resist the despatch of the expedition.

That's a lot for the watching public to soak in, and it's quite possible that they didn't and instead merely enjoyed the spectacle. This included: an Atlas army co-operation aeroplane reconnoitring the port and radioing back target information (and providing loudspeaker commentary for the crowd); the obligatory launching of an enemy observation balloon; and the equally obligatory shooting down of said balloon, on this occasion by carrier-borne Fairey Flycatchers which then proceeded to strafe the port.

A squadron of enemy fighters ("Siskinskys") next arrived, and matters began to get exciting, for in the distance we saw a squadron of British bombers [Hyderabads] approaching in formation. Before they got over the harbour the enemy fighters attacked, resulting in losses on both sides -- but the bombers got in a few "pills" with good effect.

So 'Siskinsky' = faux Russian for Armstrong-Whitworth Siskin, which seems to identify the enemy here pretty clearly. After a bit (or a lot) more of this, the RAF gained air superiority, following which a squadron of Fairey IIIFs 'neatly tidied up the port, including transport, mole, and buildings, and then gracefully retired'. Finally, an enemy 'ship' entered the harbour then retreated, laying a smoke screen for cover and drawing a curtain over proceedings. All in all, this set piece involved elements of seven squadrons (plus the School of Balloon Training) and must have been the biggest to date.

For some reason the set-piece for the eleventh RAF Display, held on Saturday, 28 June 1930, substituted the gritty realism and excitement of failed arbitration by the League of Nations with pirates! Yes, pirates! Flight described the plot as 'almost Edgar Wallacey -- but not quite':

These pirates, the crew of a vessel carrying munitions and aircraft, had seized the ship and taken refuge in a sparsely populated part of British Colonial territory. Having installed themselves in a planter's house (and murdered the planter and his staff!) they proceeded to erect the stolen aircraft with the intention of conveying (and ultimately disposing of) the booty to various destinations.

The RAF is sent in to put a stop to this with a mixed force of fighters, bombers (the Horsleys are seen above), and troop carriers.

As one of the pirate aircraft (impersonated by "Hyderabads" from Nos. 10 and 99 Bomber Squadrons) took off, the British fighters appeared on the scene and attacked the pirate aircraft in the air and on the ground. As a result some of the pirates forthwith surrendered, rushing out into the open and waving white flags.

Bombers 'effectively destroyed' the remaining buildings, after which 'the troop carriers (Victorias, above) arrived and deplaned a small force of irregular regulars, who made prisoners of the surviving pirates and recovered the booty'. I'm not sure that the possibility of air piracy was really something the Air Staff had ever given much thought to; but really this is pretty much one of the earlier air control set-pieces with a fantastic scenario slapped over the top.

The next RAF Display was held at Hendon on Saturday, 27 June 1931. Flight seems to damn the set piece with faint praise, calling it 'a straightforward story well told'.

War had broken out, and a long-range gun -- Big Bertha's little sister -- was cleverly hidden amongst deserted farm buildings alongside a small wood, together with shelters, ready-use ammunition dumps, decauville [sic] railway, etc. This gun has been shelling an important military base, which it threatened to make untenable. Its position, however, was discovered, and a bombing attack was prepared to destroy it.

The story is straightforward. The defences consist of two fighter squadrons (both with Siskins) and an anti-aircraft battery. Interestingly, the attacking bombers (Hyderabads -- above -- and Harts) have no fighter escorts, but despite some losses still manage 'to unload their missiles and complete the destruction of Big Bertha's little sister, the ammunition dump, the farm and Uncle Tom Cobly and all'. The clearly European setting is also intriguing; perhaps increasing instability in Germany made another nearby war seem more likely. Or maybe it was just Europe's turn for a Hendon set-piece again.

The seventh RAF Display was held on Saturday, 3 July 1926. By now it was, as Flight noted, 'amongst the foremost of the functions of the London social season'. Their Majesties the King and Queen were in attendance, along with representatives of three other royal houses (including the King, Queen, Infante and Infanta of Spain, possibly drawn by the appearance of the Cierva autogyro), 'Several Indian Princes', nearly one in three of the combined Houses of Parliament, and about 150,000 less exalted guests. (The graphic above shows the growth of 'Miss Popularity Hendon' since the beginning.) The main feature of the day was massed formation flying: at one point, six fighter squadrons comprising fifty-four aircraft in total were in the air. The set-piece seems to have suffered by comparison. Flight's description seems rather muted when compared to previous years:

After this came the Set Piece -- during which the Royal Party made a tour of inspection of the machine park. The "Story" this year was the combined attack on a hostile aerodrome by fighters and day bombers. It commenced with a low bombing attack with light bombs by the fighters, which followed up with a machine-gun attack to silence the ground defences. Next came along, higher up, the day bombers, with the fighters above them in attendance. The bombers then very effectively finished off the aerodrome and previously-damaged aircraft.

That's all; you'd need to read the photo captions to even find out that the aircraft involved were Gloster Gamecocks and Fairey Fawns. This year's Pathé newsreel also did not feature the set-piece very prominently, though that may be because the surviving copy looks like unedited footage (the action starts around ten minutes in):

Perhaps the 'Story' was lacking? A straightforward attack on an enemy aerodrome lacks the drama of, say, the rescue of a beleaguered garrison. And the apparent lack of a named enemy probably didn't help either: the previous time the set piece featured an aerodrome it was clearly a German one, but this is now the Locarno era and it wouldn't do to pick on Germany. Then again, the RAF organisers may have wanted to downplay the set-piece this year for some reason; unusually they scheduled another event afterwards (a competition between flight instructors representing RAF flying schools) which was itself followed by the arrival of the first night bombers to finish a 500-mile cross-country air race which had begun earlier in the day. If the set-piece was intended to be the climax to the Display it was poorly placed in the programme.

Maybe I wasn't the only one to think so, because in 1927 the set piece was back to its usual form. In a pre-show commentary, F. A. de V. Robertson noted that 'advance stories of [the set-piece] have aroused the indignation of various bodies who decline to believe that non-Europeans could ever display unkindness towards missionaries', but predicted that the crowd will 'none the less enjoy the banging of the guns and bombs, and the glorious flare-up of the village of the disappointed gourmets'. Robertson may have got his story wrong, or perhaps the RAF bowed to its critics, for on the day (Saturday, 2 July) the set-piece seems to have been slightly different: the scene is 'the Eastern village of Hunyadi Janos, in Irquestine' but there are 'European settlers' in it alongside the indigenous inhabitants. Irquestine sounds like Iraq plus Palestine, both areas under British control, but the name of the village suggests Eastern Europe. Perhaps something can be read into the fact that that Hunyadi was a great (European and Christian) commander who held off the (Islamic) armies of the Turks.

Anyway, the Europeans in Hunyadi Janos come under attack for some reason:

as the white women and children (quite healthy youngsters, the latter) escaped into the open, No. 12 Squadron (Fox bombers) flew over from Andover and commenced a repeated series of attacks on the village and natives.

As 'the Europeans, hard pressed by the pretty-coloured natives, were starving', provisions are dropped to them from DH.9as via parachute.

While the Foxes continued to bomb the village -- by now well alight, even to the "mud" fort -- three "Queen Victorias" (as per loud speaker) arrived on the scene, deplaned reinforcements with machine guns, emplaned the women and children, and flew off with them to a place of safety. The sounding of the "Cease Fire" by R.A.F. trumpeters, and the departure of Their Majesties marked the end of a perfect day.

British Pathé this time featured the set-piece prominently in their Hendon newsreel:

So it was both an exciting drama and served as the end of the day's entertainment. Interestingly, it did have a competitor in the form of a mock 'air battle or daylight attack on London', which Flight described as 'splendidly "staged," and immensely thrilling'. The bombers (DH9as and Hyderabads) did not get through the Grebe fighter defences. Advance publicity for Hendon (in the form of a newsreel -- check out the special effect searchlights!) promised that 'The supreme thrill will be an "Aerial Battle in the defence of London"' and showed aircraft flying at night, so perhaps this is further evidence of a late change to the programme.

I don't think the above was official advertising for the ninth RAF Display: it doesn't have the date, Saturday, 30 June 1928, on it, which would be pretty poor event planning. It's on the cover of Flight's own souvenir programme which formed part of the issue published just before the Display. They clearly went to a lot of trouble over this (there are large photographs of all the aircraft involved, one to a page, so that spectators can identify what they are looking at), and it was doubtless their highest-selling issue of the year. Hendon by now was the biggest event in the airminded calendar, even if crowds seem to have plateaued at 150,000.

The bombing attack on London was repeated this year, though Flight doesn't describe it as such in its account. Perhaps that's because, as Robertson noted before the event, that the air defence exercises held around and over London the previous summer had shown the public that their defenders were all too easy to evade.

In any case, the actual set-piece received star billing, even if it didn't quite live up to its advance publicity. This was, as seen above, a mock attack on an oil refinery. So this immediately tells us we're back in the realm of total war, rather than air control. The role of Fleet Air Arm aircraft seems to have been bigger than in the previous naval-themed set-pieces, suggesting that co-operation has trumped substitution, for now. (Although the FAA was still part of the RAF.)

An oil refinery containing the enemy's supply of fuel was the objective of a British aircraft carrier, which despatched ships' fighters (Fairey "Flycatchers") to attack the adjoining anti-aircraft defences so as to disorganise them whilst the bombing machines arrived. An enemy observation balloon sighted them and gave warning, but it was attacked and shot down in flames, the observer, "Miss November," descending by parachute.

Sadly it seems that the burning balloon set the refinery on fire before the bombers could do it,

but the tanks themselves still required annihilating, and when the Fairey III.F reconnaissance machines arrived from the aircraft carrier they were partly blown up. D.H.9a's from a shore base then appeared, dropped their loads, and the whole destruction was thoroughly and neatly completed.

While in some ways this is a reversion to the aerodrome set-piece of 1926, at least there is a bit more of a narrative, and some human interest in the form of 'Miss November'. Although I must say I don't understand this reference. Why a female observer in the balloon? Why is she called 'Miss November'? Maybe it is meant to be a hint that the enemy in the set piece is the Soviet Union: I'm thinking of the Women's Battalions formed in Russia in 1917, though they were not Bolshevik units, and that the October Revolution took place in November in the Gregorian calendar. But maybe I'm reading too much into too little; it's probably just some obscure pop-cultural reference which would be obvious to all then and nobody now.

The fourth RAF Pageant took place on Saturday, 30 June 1923. The 'turn of the afternoon', as in the previous year, was 'another little Eastern drama, based on actual happenings during the War'. Once more the Wottnotts were the enemy, and once more the co-operation of air and ground forces was the theme. The main difference with 1922 was that this time the RAF was coming to the aid of a besieged garrison:

On the centre of the "stage" one saw an impressive railway bridge and sundry buildings. The small military garrison protecting this post was suddenly attacked by our old friends (or enemies?), the Wottnott Arabs. The garrison, being outnumbered, W.T.'d for help, which, before you could say "Jack Robinson," appeared in the form of three Vickers troop carriers, escorted by five Sopwith "Snipes."

But something had to be be blown up, and so the troop carriers are used ferry troops who destroy a bridge and thereby save the day.

The troop carriers landed beside the bridge, small parties of machine gunners emerging from their interiors and rushing to the assistance of the garrison. In the meanwhile the "Snipes" hold back the Wottnott Arabs with machine-gun fire, whilst the garrison emplanes in the troop carriers, and a demolition party charges under the bridge for the purpose of its utter destruction. When all was ready, the guard blew his whistle, and the troop carriers sailed away for safety. Then the bridge blew up, which so annoyed the Wottnotts that, after all falling down dead, they got up and made a dash, to the accompaniment of wild yells, for the public enclosures.

What remained of the spectators after the horrible slaughter then witness the final event of the day [the usual smokescreen-laying].

There was a change of scenery in the final for the next year's Pageant, held on Saturday, 30 June 1924. Spectators were invited to make believe that the grass at Hendon represented the sea, upon which were two enormous 'ships', essentially flat stage props cunningly painted to give the illusion of three dimensions (at least from where the spectators were standing):

One was 'an English cargo ship, the "John Henry" of Newcastle, and the other a peaceful-looking, but armed enemy merchant cruiser, the "Slevic".' The scenario here was that the Slevic ordered the John Henry to stop and prepare to be boarded. Luckily, a RAF Supermarine Seagull appeared on the scene and radioed for help. This came in two waves. The first consisted of three Fairey Flycatcher 'ship's fighters', which strafed the Slevic and put its guns out of action.

Then the second wave arrived:

Suddenly, five Blackburn "Dart" torpedo 'planes arrived on the scene, and making for the "Slevic" launched their torpedos. The latter were observed to fall one after the other and travel a short distance towards their object before finally disappearing from view in the grass (sorry! sea!!). Then a few awful moments passed, when, suddenly, with a loud boom a column of smoke and "water" shot high up into the air at the "Slevic's" bows, exposing to view, immediately after, a huge ragged hole in her bows. Almost at the same time the other torpedoes found the mark, one right amidships. There was a terrific explosion, a mass of dense black smoke mixed with flying fragments of "Slevic" following by a column of what appeared to be a mixture of smoke and steam. Gradually this cleared away -- and the "Slevic" had completely disappeared!

Thus concluded what in Flight's opinion 'was, undoubtedly, the best scenic display the Pageant has yet given -- equal to any other we have seen'. British Pathe liked the sinking of the Slevic too, choosing it to open their newsreel coverage.

So successful was it, in fact, that the finale to the next Hendon -- held on Saturday, 27 June 1925, and now renamed the RAF Display -- was very similar. The commerce raider this time was found sheltering in a tropical river rather than sailing on the open sea, so the RAF didn't send in torpedo bombers. Instead, the Seagull and the Flycatchers reprised their 1924 roles, and then:

After a short interval a fleet of heavy bombers, consisting of three Avro "Aldershots," and nine Vickers "Virginias," arrived on the scene from a base conveniently situated close at hand, and with few Oh very direct hits put an end to the cruiser's nasty bad habits.

If there's a theme to these set pieces, it's substitution: i.e. the substitution of airpower for military power and seapower. Anything the Army and Navy can do, the RAF can do better. It can patrol the Empire's reaches more efficiently and more effectively, bringing greater force to bear more quickly than can even tanks and battlecruisers. (Indeed, another Hendon standby at this stage was the bombing and destruction of a tank.) Certainly, as Major F. A. de V. Robertson, noted, 'The public probably never stopped to inquire how nine "Virginias" and three "Aldershots" [based in Britain] arrived off the coast of Africa, or wherever it was'. But that's precisely why the Hendon spectaculars made such powerful propaganda for the RAF.