1930s

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Counter-revolution from above

2 February 2012 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Air control, Australia, Books, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 5 comments

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.
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Duck and cover, 1942

31 January 2012 in 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Australia, Civil defence, Cold War, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Pictures by Brett Holman | 4 comments

Brighton Technical School, 1942

This is an image we might particularly associate with the United States in the 1950s, when schoolchildren were taught to duck and cover in the event of the flash of an atomic blast. But its use in civil defence drills predates the Cold War (albeit without a Bert the Turtle to help kids remember the message). I've seen scattered references to it being used in ARP drills in British schools in the the 1930s, and the same thing may well have happened in the First World War. But details, and photos, seem to be rare. The above photo was actually taken in Melbourne, at Brighton Technical School, probably in 1942. (Here's another Australian one from the 1940s, and here's one from London in July 1940.) It's really just common sense: if the roof and walls are about to come crashing down and there's no time to get to a proper shelter, getting the students under their desks when the bombs started to fall would give them some protection and might save their lives.

I wonder about the handkerchiefs or rags the boys have in their mouths? My guess is that it's intended to guard against being choked with dust and plaster. Also, soaked in water, they might help against some forms of gas attack, such as chlorine. Soaking them in urine would be more effective, but that would probably be beyond the scope of most school gas drills!

Source: State Library of Victoria (via Geoff Robinson).

Death from the skies

25 January 2012 in 1930s, Air defence, Art, Books, Civil defence, Film, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | 6 comments

Death from the skies

The images in this post are from Boyd Cable, 'Death from the skies', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 20-4 (see below).

The article itself is a short story describing an air raid in the next war. I won't summarise it in detail, but it argues for the futility of both air defence and civil defence. The RAF's interceptors never even encounter the enemy bombers (in part because they are stealthy thanks to their silenced engines, only 20% as loud as normal aircraft engines). Though the populace has been drilled well and resists panic, at least at first, they are too vulnerable. A first wave of bombers uses high explosives to block the streets with rubble, making it impossible for fire engines to pass; the second drops incendiaries which set the city ablaze and, crucially, force civilians out of their shelters; and the final wave drops poison gas, which starts killing the now-exposed people on the streets. Now the panic starts and the mob flees, their suffering increased by strafing raiders. The RAF now has its chance, but the city is doomed...

"Proof enough of what we've said so long," growled the one [Air Staff officer]. "Defence as such is a wash-out. Attack is the only useful form of defence."

"If we can hit them harder and faster and oftener than they can hit us, we win," said the other. "We can do it, too, if we have more bombers -- men and machines -- than they have."

"Yes -- if," said the other wearily. "That's what we were arguing as far back as the first R.A.F. expansion scheme in -- what as it -- 1935 and '6, wasn't it?"

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Anxious nation? -- VII

19 January 2012 in 1930s, Australia, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics by Brett Holman | No comments

I really thought I'd finished with this topic, but the primary sources demand one last post. In discussing the July 1938 Hobart mystery aeroplane, I suggested that it may have been a propaganda stunt by some person or persons worried about Tasmania's lack of air defences. And it turns out that there were precedents for this type of thing.

One was over London a year earlier, in July 1937. It was widely reported in the Australian press, but I haven't been able to find it in a British newspaper. Most of the Australian reports quote the Sunday Referee, presumably from the 18 July edition; and I suspect the Daily Telegraph also carried the story on 16 July. Flight also referred to a 'mystery flyer', though only in passing.
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Anxious nation? -- VI

16 January 2012 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Australia, Civil aviation, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Plots, Tools and methods, Words by Brett Holman | 3 comments

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

Aeroplane vs airship, 1900-1918

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.
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Anxious nation? -- V

12 January 2012 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Australia, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics by Brett Holman | 6 comments

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).
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Anxious nation? -- IV

8 January 2012 in 1930s, 1940s, Australia, Books, Ephemera, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Radio by Brett Holman | 12 comments

He's Coming South

The title of this little series is a nod to David Walker's Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850-1939. As the title suggests, Walker argues that Australia's relationship with Asia in the decades before and after Federation was largely characterised by fear about immigration, imports and invasion. Peter Stanley, in Invading Australia: Japan and the Battle for Australia, 1942, fleshes out the last of these fears through a discussion of novels and books from the 1930s which discussed the prospect of war with Japan (or at least an unnamed or Ruritanian Asian enemy). For example, in Erle Cox's Fool's Harvest (1938/1939), Australia is attacked and invaded by 'Cambasia' in September 1939, beginning with a massive air raid on Sydney which causes 200,000 civilian casualties. Britain is unable to help, as it has been attacked by Germany, Italy and France; a British fleet at Singapore is sunk. The Australian armed forces are ill-equipped to defend the nation, and after a month Cambasia is victorious at the last battle of the war, at Seymour in central Victoria. A resistance movement is eventually suppressed after increasingly brutal reprisals. The south-eastern part of Australia eventually regains a limited independence in 1966, but the majority of the population still labours under the Cambasian yoke.
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Anxious nation? -- II

4 January 2012 in 1930s, Air defence, Australia, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics by Brett Holman | 3 comments

In my previous post, I discussed a mysterious aeroplane seen over Hobart in 1938 which was interpreted in a context of concern about vulnerability to air attack. I said that by contrast a similar incident that year over Darwin was seen as a curiosity rather than a threat, but in looking at it more closely I find that the threat element was present in the press accounts more than I thought. Let's see if there's any discernable pattern.

There were actually two aeroplanes seen (and heard) over Darwin, or perhaps the same aeroplane was seen (and heard) on two different occasions.

Last Thursday evening [3 February] two men saw a machine fly over Darwin at a great height heading south. One of the men is employed at the aerodrome and it is considered unlikely that he could have made a mistake. Another man who is an aviation engineer also heard the drone of an engine and stated emphatically that it was an aeroplane engine.

The other sighting was initially a hearing. A foreman at Darwin's electrical power plant by the name of Maurice Holtze quite ingeniously used the sound of the plant's diesel engines as a sound detector:

This engine develops about 1000 revolutions at normal speed, and Holtze observed that the presence of any other machine in the vicinity developing more or less than 1000 revolutions is reflected clearly in the exhaust beat of the power house engine. At 4.30 a.m. yesterday [8 February] he was attending the engine when he noticed a distinct change in the note of the exhaust. Accustomed to the departure of air mail planes from the local aerodrome about 5 o'clock on three mornings of the week he at first paid little attention to the antics of his unofficial sound detector. Then he realised suddenly that no machines were scheduled to leave Darwin on Tuesday morning. He rushed outside and saw a machine in the air.

Holtze couldn't make out any identification marks on the aeroplane, but said that he could see the glow from the cockpit lights; it appeared to be a large, multi-engined machine. Apparently inbound from the Timor Sea, it circled over Darwin and then flew south. A former superintendent of police named Lovegrove also heard an aeroplane at 4.30am, while a post office employee saw 'strange lights moving across the sky [...] similar to those shown by aircraft'. The government was informed of these reports, and while Canberra appeared sceptical it ordered local representatives of the Civil Air Board and the defence forces to investigate.
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Anxious nation? -- I

2 January 2012 in 1930s, Air defence, Australia, Civil defence, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics by Brett Holman | 4 comments

At about 5.20pm on Friday, 29 July 1938, hundreds of people saw a mysterious aeroplane diving from high over Hobart. According to Pegasus, the Hobart Mercury's aviation correspondent,

A large crowd collected near the corner of Liverpool and Murray streets, and traffic was impeded. The machine descended to a comparatively low level, yet not low enough to enable the identification numerals to be read. It was a grey biplane, larger than a Gypsy Moth.

As the watchers were preparing to rush for cover to avoid the expected crash, the machine sheered away and disappeared in the evening mists towards the south-west.

Some observers thought that they could see the aeroplane's navigation lights. Engine sounds ('described as having a peculiar note') were heard in the posh Sandy Bay area (just southwest of Hobart's centre) soon thereafter, and a single-engined aeroplane was heard over Campania (20 miles to the north) by Dudley Ransom, pilot and owner of a private aerodrome, at 7pm. Enquiries at Tasmanian and Victorian aerodromes found no aircraft aloft that evening. Nor, apparently, did it belong to the RAAF.
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More like a trove

28 December 2011 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Archives, Periodicals, Tools and methods by Brett Holman | No comments

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?

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