Via Old is the New New, MONIAC, the MOnetary National Income Automatic Computer: an analogue hydraulic computer designed by A. W. Phillips, a New Zealander, while a student at the LSE in 1949. The prototype was apparently built out of spare Lancaster parts. And there’s one on display at the University of Melbourne, otherwise known as ‘my uni’, so obviously I had to go and have a look at it!

The MONIAC is currently on the 1st floor of the Economics and Commerce building (on the Parkville campus, off Professors Walk), just opposite the lifts, if anyone wants to visit (though it will probably move to the new building on Berkeley St when that’s finished). It’s a bit over 6 feet high. The bit of paper stuck to the door reads:

MONIAC stands for:
Monetary National Income Analogue Computer

The MONIAC is a hydraulic model of the economy which was used originally in the teaching of economies. Today, econometric modelling is undertaken in modern Research Computer Laboratories. Visit the Commerce Research Laboratory on this floor to compare the vastly changed environment for teaching and research.

The MONIAC was designed by A. W. Phillips, (an engineer turned economist of “Phillips Curve” fame) who constructed a working model of the Keynesian System utilising coloured water (representing incomes, expenditures, etc) flowing through pipes.

Only 3 or 4 models were built and this is the only known model in Australia. A working model is located in London. The cost of restoring this MONIAC to working has been quoted in the vicinity of $40,000+!

BY THE WAY:

The “Computer” had a reputation for leaking during demonstration!

Could this be the origin of terms used a great deal by Keynesian Economists namely, “Injections” and “Leakages”?

Expressions of interest in contributing to the restoration may be made to the Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Commerce.

However, Wikipedia says that there were 12 to 14 units made. MONIAC caused a sensation at the time (at least among economists!), and was lampooned in Punch. His creation probably helped put Phillips on the fast-track to a full professorship.

The working model in London would be one that’s at the Science Museum; there’s another at Cambridge, and the original prototype is being restored at Leeds.

The national income tank, with a blue pipe (on the left) feeding it in to the rest of the economy. Eventually, the tank gets replenished by greater or lesser amounts, depending on how much is diverted to other parts of the economy. One problem I can see is that it’s a closed system — there’s no way for the economy to grow. Though apparently somebody did link a couple of MONIACs together to show how two economies would interact!

This is where the blue pipe leads to. You can see that part of income gets siphoned off as taxes, the rest going into (naturally enough) income after taxes. The taxes go to government expenditure, income after taxes to savings and (mostly) consumption. There’s a diagram here, which explains it all better than I could.

Back when I was doing computational modelling in a very different domain (astrophysics), we’d sometimes refer to running a model as ‘cranking the handle’. It would have been more fun with actual handles to crank, like this one! Though of course, these would be used to modify variables (e.g. how much is paid in taxes) and not to actually run the simulation.

Here’s one of the outputs, showing national income over time: presumably the board would move from right to left and a pen would move up or down, recording the level of fluid in the income tank (shown in the second photo from the top). But probably more important than this graph was simply watching the fluid (money) pump around the computer (economy); apparently it gave a very vivid and intuitive understanding of the effects a change in one variable would have on another.

The on-off switches for the recorders and pumps, and the name of the manufacturer: Air Trainers Ltd, of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. Now this is interesting. As the name suggests, Air Trainers (later Air Trainers Link; later still, General Precision Systems; then in 1967 it was acquired by Redifon, another pioneer of aircraft simulators, and renamed Redifon Air Trainers) made flight simulators, which attempt to imitate the experience of piloting an aeroplane without the need to actually leave the ground. (Something like the Link Trainer, but more sophisticated.) In 1959, for example, they made a simulator for the new Vickers Vanguard, a turboprop airliner. They also made simulators for military aircraft too.

I’ve written before about something closely related to flight simulators, a bombing teacher and the idea of simulation. With Phillips’ help, admittedly, in MONIAC, Air Trainers seems to have gotten past the idea of simulation by imitation and gone on to simulation by abstraction, if still in a physical way. MONIAC would have drawn on some of the company’s strengths, not only in simulation but in hydraulics (an essential component of a flight simulator). And after MONIAC, Air Trainers/Air Trainers Link seems to have kept dabbling in the field of analogue computers. In 1958, they built MAC (simply, Mechanical Analogue Computer), which could solve 4th-order differential equations: Imperial College had one, which is probably the one now in the possession of the Science Museum. Probably related are two patents taken out by people working at Air Trainers Link in 1954 for ‘Improvements in and relating to analogue computers’. They were evidently also looking towards the digital future — there’s a 1959 paper in The Computer Journal from another Air Trainers Link worker about a method for separation of variables, which includes notes ‘on programming the problem for a digital computer’.

This all sounds a bit warfare state, doesn’t it? (Though whether in a deep way or a shallow way, I’m not sure). Consider: (i) Air Link seems to have specialised in simulators for civil aviation, but they also made military ones too. And presumably their expertise was developed during the war, perhaps with Redifon; and anyway Britain’s civil aviation industry was an offshoot of its military one. (ii) In Britain, analogue computers — admittedly electromechanical, not hydromechanical! — started out as aids in solving problems in atomic physics, but then were used for everything from code-breaking to dam-busting (Barnes Wallis supposedly used a Meccano computer for some of his calculations! Though this could just be a myth) (iii) Phillips built his prototype out of RAF surplus kit — pumps and a Lancaster’s windscreen wipers. Before the war, he studied electrical engineering in Britain and joined the RAF in 1940, which sent him to Singapore as a munitions officer. He spent the years 1942 to 1945 in a POW camp in Java, which was brutally used as a source of labour by the Japanese; those who knew him suggested that this experience led him to turn after the war from engineering to sociology and then economics. (iv) Before 1939, government expenditure in Britain was about 10% of GDP; this rose to a massive 54% in the war. So the idea of modelling a national economy must have been attractive to economists after 6 years of a semi-planned wartime economy. ‘At the level of national planning was the consequence, not the cause, of high arms production. It was a means of accomodation to the needs of the warfare state.’¹

A good source on MONIAC is Chris Bissell, “The Moniac: a hydromechanical analog computer of the 1950s”, IEEE Control Systems Magazine, February 2007, 69-74; on Phillips, see Robert Leeson, “A. W. H. Phillips M.B.E. (Military Division)”, The Economic Journal 104 (1994), 605-18 (JSTOR). Phillips was a remarkable man. In between New Zealand and Britain, he swagged his way around Australia (working as a crocodile hunter for a while), China (just as the Japanese attacked in 1937) and the Soviet Union (took the Trans-Siberian to Europe). His MBE was awarded for his actions during the evacuation from Singapore, when his transport came under air attack. His citation reads, in part:

he obtained an unmounted machine gun, quickly improvised a successful mounting and operated the gun from the boat deck with outstanding courage for the whole period of the attack which lasted for 3½ hours. Even when the section deck from which he was operating was hit by a bomb, Flying Officer Phillips continued to set a most valuable example of coolness, steadiness and fearlessness to all in the vicinity

While in the POW camp at Bandung (where he met the legendary Australian doctor ‘Weary’ Dunlop), he built a secret radio which enabled the prisoners to keep track of news in the outside world, and, perhaps even more impressively, an immersion heater so that two thousand POWs could have a hot cuppa before bedtime. The Japanese guards could never figure out why the camp’s lights dimmed every night at 10pm.

After a successful career in economics, Phillips switched careers yet again, becoming a Sinologist. He died in Auckland in 1975.

1. David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 72.

Long-time reader, second-time commenter Ian Evans was in the Royal Observer Corps in York at the end of the 1950s. Here he describes how the ROC, in addition to retaining something like its planespotting functions during the Second World War, took on the job of measuring the Third:

When I joined the ROC (1958) it was still pretty much an RAF auxiliary, officers with handlebar moustaches and all. We spotted, reported and plotted aircraft in a very similar manner to our WW2 predecessors, though things had been simplified and speeded up, with special procedures for fast low flying aircraft (Rats). The nuclear reporting role was just being introduced, the observer posts were given “bunkers”, a small underground room with bunks and stores, airlock and reinforced tunnel to the surface, a nuclear burst recorder (a souped-up pinhole camera), a pressure recorder to measure the blast strength, a Geiger counter to measure the fallout, and individual dosimeters (we were rather cynical about these).

The operating theory was that there would be sufficient political warning for the observers to man their posts, they would wait for the noise to stop, surface, extract the recording paper from their recorders, read off the bearing and altitude of the burst and the peak overpressure. This would then be phoned in to Group HQ where we would plot the (hopefully several) bearings, and get the position of the detonation. Then, using the reported overpressures, plus sets of tables and nomograms we woud evaluate the bomb power and report back to…..anyone still alive. After that the posts would report radiation levels at regular intervals until…

Which is quite a terrifying job description (luckily they didn’t have to do risk assessments in those days!)

But, of course, there was plenty of terror to go around. Long-time reader and commenter CK pointed out a 1982 BBC documentary called “Nuclear War: A Guide to Armageddon” (written and produced by Mick Jackson, director of Threads) about the effects of a nuclear war and how civilians should prepare for it.

(Parts two and three: `Are you prepared to use force to keep others out’ of your shelter?) One of the sources cited at the start is Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan’s classic The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (Department of Defense and Energy Research and Development Administration, 1977), which is now available online.

The title of this post, of course, comes from Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s 1984 classic “Two Tribes”:¹

Aside from the general Cold War theme, the link with the rest of this post is the voice at the start of the video which says, ‘… the air attack warning sounds like. This is the sound’, followed by a siren. The voice belongs to actor Patrick Allen, who had previously said similar things as the narrator of the British government’s series of civil defence films, Protect and Survive, successors of the ARP pamphlets of the 1930s. Inevitably, the films are also all available on YouTube.

Thank you to CK and especially Ian for their comments.

1. I didn’t realise that the title comes from the opening narration in Australia’s own great contribution to the end of the world, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior: ‘For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all.’

Sometimes I worry about the British.

Gary Smailes has put together Military History Carnival 8, and it’s a good one. The item which, inevitably, appealed to me most was Damned Interesting’s account of incidents where the world nearly stumbled into an accidental nuclear holocaust. (But wait, there were more!) Obviously, a scenario where the survival of a significant proportion of humanity, and of civilisation itself, depends upon accidents not happening is not a particularly good thing. But we got WarGames out of it, so on balance I think we’re ahead.

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) …

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

It’s 50 years since Sputnik I lifted off. Although I was airminded as a kid, I was much more spaceminded. So 1957 was always a crucial year in my understanding of history back then: it was where the modern age began. (In fact the very first historical work I ever I started — but never finished! — was a history of the space race from Sputnik on. I can’t have been older than 12 so it’s not exactly sophisticated …)

More than that, to me 1957 was where the future began. A future where humans would spread out into the solar system and then explore the universe beyond. And who knows? Maybe I’d even get to take part in that somehow! That future hasn’t quite worked out the way I’d envisaged it — yet — but of course, I’m in good company where failing to predict the future is concerned. There’s a good article by Michael J. Neufeld in the July/August 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, on Wernher von Braun’s proposals for manned orbital battle stations. In the early 1950s, von Braun predicted that these would be used to deploy nuclear weapons in orbit. For example, in a conference paper published in 1951, he wrote that

Our space station could be utilized as a very effective bomb carrier, and for all present-day means of defense, a non-interceptible one.¹

and that

The political situation being what it is, with the Earth divided into a Western and an Eastern camp, I am convinced that such a station will be the inevitable result of the present race of armaments.²

Neufeld makes the point that for all his expertise in rocketry — including leading the V2’s development team — von Braun’s obsession with space stations meant that he failed to realise that ballistic missiles actually made a lot more sense as a delivery platform for nuclear weapons, rather than space-launched hypersonic gliders — a space station being a relatively big and very predictable target, for one thing.³

Von Braun wasn’t the only one arguing along those lines. There were others. The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein co-authored a popular article in 1947 for Collier’s Magazine which suggested putting nukes in orbit. In a novel published the following year, Space Cadet, he expanded upon this idea. Now, I read Space Cadet probably a couple of dozen times when I was a kid, but haven’t for a long time so I’ll have to rely upon the Wikipedia page to explain:

The Space Patrol is entrusted by the worldwide Earth government with a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and is expected to maintain a credible threat to drop them on Earth from orbit as a deterrent against breaking the peace. [...] The cadets are taught that they should renounce their allegiance to their country of origin and replace it by a wider allegiance to humanity as a whole and to all of the sentient species of the Solar System.

It never occurred to me before now, but this is nothing more than the international air force concept, so beloved of liberal internationalists in the 1930s (it was included in the Labour Party’s manifesto for the 1935 general election, for example), but now updated for the coming space age! Only now instead of pilots of all nations standing by, ready to drop high explosives on any aggressor nation, it would be astronauts with atom bombs. Plus ça change … sometimes, anyway.

When I was 12, I understood that Sputnik I was part of a ‘Race for Space’ between two superpowers, as I put it, but I mainly saw it it as a straightforward — if impressive — technical achievement, which the Soviet Union managed to do first. I certainly didn’t have much clue about the bigger picture of the Cold War or the historical background to the decision to launch a small sphere into orbit, though. Now it’s hard for me to see things in any other way, as all of the above probably demonstrates. But sometimes it’s good just to forget about all that context and just appreciate the thing-in-itself.

So I’ll end by reverting to age 12 and saying wow, that is just so ace!

1. Quoted in Michael J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun’s ultimate weapon”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2007, 53.
2. Quoted in ibid.
3. But the fact that von Braun was still trying to sell the public on manned space stations in 1965 with no military role beyond reconnaissance suggests that it’s more that he just really, really liked space stations, rather than that he wasn’t aware of the potential of ballistic missiles.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

One interesting minor theme of my recent museum visits here in London has been, I suppose, the popular origins of wargames (as opposed to the intellectual origins): I’ve been coming across a number of games, produced in the first half of the twentieth century and aimed presumably at children, which represent war in some way. War games, but not yet wargames. So for example, one exhibit in the Science Museum’s aviation gallery was a First World War-era board game called Aviation: The Aerial Tactics Game of Attack and Defence. The board represents the sky, and the pieces are aircraft and squadrons. Here’s the box:

According to the caption, it was published around 1920, and the cover shows ’stylised First World War tanks and Handley Page H.P. 0/400 [sic] bombers’. It doesn’t look particularly like an O/400 to me; the corresponding game-piece is just called a Battle Plane (and the “tanks” are actually anti-aircraft guns on tank chassis, very advanced!)

The caption also says that the game itself was similar to Battleship. But as you can see above, each player can see their opponent’s pieces, which is kind of exactly unlike Battleship (where the point is to guess where the enemy ships are). I’d suggest that since the pieces are blank on one side, it’s more like Stratego, where you can see where the opposing pieces are, but not what they are. The pieces in Stratego have number values, and so do those in Aviation:

• Scout: 1
• Bomber: 2
• Bristol Fighter: 3
• Battle Plane: 4
• Troop Carrier: 4.5
• Airship: 5
• Three Battleplanes: 7
• Commodore’s Squadron: 8
• Vice-Marshall’s [sic] Squadron: 9
• Air Marshall’s [sic] Squadron: 10

There are also some pieces which don’t have any assigned values: Observation Balloon, Searchlight, and Anti-Aircraft Gun (3, 4 or 5 Miles). Presumably these correspond to some combination of the bombs, spies and flags in Stratego — guns for bombs, searchlight for spies and balloon for flag might make sense, although there is also a double-square labelled “Aerodrome” on each player’s side which doesn’t seem to have any obvious correlate in Stratego (they are too far back to be choke points, maybe they are actually the flags?)

It turns out I could have saved myself the trouble with a bit of Googling: the third message on this Stratego website confirms that Aviation is a Stratego variant; or rather that both are derived from a common French ancestor patented in 1909, L’Attaque! Aviation came well before the American game, and its maker, H. P. Gibson, also published L’Attaque in Britain, along with a naval version (Dover Patrol) and an air-land-sea version (Tri-Tactics). In fact, Gibson’s games were very popular and went through several editions into the 1960s. BoardGameGeeks has pages on all four of them, including photos of the components and even scans of some of the rules (for the later editions, though). So now it becomes clear that the enemy Aerodrome in Aviation is indeed the objective; you have to land one of your Troop Carriers on it to capture it. Interesting, but not exactly orthodox air strategy in 1920!

The Imperial War Museum had even more war-themed games on display. This one is called From the Ranks to Field Marshal, and is clearly basically Snakes and Ladders: you start out as a private, trooper, gunner or sapper, roll a die, move your piece along, and follow any instructions on the square.

Sometimes this is good (’Rescues a comrade under heavy fire. Promoted 1 rank, and receives Distinguished Service Order’), sometimes bad (’Court Martial. Tried for incompetence’ — 1 in 6 chance of being reduced 4 ranks). The first to land on 100 exactly becomes a Field Marshal and wins; though the game can end in other ways and then it’s the highest ranked player who wins. The IWM’s captions don’t say much other than repeat the game’s name, so I don’t know when exactly it was published. It was in a case on “The military and naval origins of the [First World] War” but it was clearly actually made during the war itself, between 1914 and the end of 1915, as French is one of the field marshals shown in the centre, alongside Kitchener; presumably Haig would have been shown after 1915. Not that either French or Kitchener rose through the ranks to field marshal (who had by then? Wully Robertson didn’t until after the war) of course, but it’s interesting that the game does make you start at the bottom, instead of giving you a plum commission in the Hussars. So it seems like it’s designed to appeal across the classes, and perhaps encourage young working-class lads to think they could make it to the top through hard work and straight shooting. (Though presumably the war would be over before the Snakes and Ladders-playing cohort reached military age!)

Moving on a world war, it seems that card games had become popular. It’s harder to work out what the rules for these might be, but presumably they again were adapted from already existing games. The above is an advertisement aimed at retailers for a game called Who’s Who or Food for Thought, ‘for delivery during October, 1939’, so quite likely was rushed into production just after the declaration of war.

OK, I think I’ve partly worked this one out: it looks like you have to try and collect triplets, where one card has an important figure’s name, another has an incomplete sentence describing that person, and the last one has an illustration and word which completes the sentence, which cleverly rhymes with the word in bold on the second card. So for example: ‘Winston Churchill’/'Shows he is the true fighting type, ignoring all Nazis [sic] scandalous’/'Tripe’ (and there’s a picture of some tripe — I assume). Sounds pretty trivial — I think I’d rather be playing From The Ranks To Field Marshal, to be honest!

This one is called Evacuation, I would guess from the first evacuation at the start of the war rather than the one during the Blitz, but can’t really be sure. There are at least three types of cards: Householder, Evacuee and (I think) Teacher — though the Evacuee cards seem to be subdivided with the red letter in the corner: B, G, M and perhaps A). Each has a comic figure — Mona Mudd is one of the evacuee children, for example, who has fallen into a puddle. Possibly, then, the game is depicting in light-hearted fashion the difficulties everyone involved had in adjusting to the new living arrangements.

But to return to the First World War period, and to board games, the most intriguing game out of all of these is War Tactics or Can Great Britain be Invaded? This time I’ve manage to find it in the IWM Collections database, as EPH 2701 and EPH 2702, and there it is dated to c. 1911. My initial thought was that it was from during the war, but on balance, I’d probably agree with the comment there that it reflects ‘the production and widespread popularity of anti-German ‘war scare’ literature of the period’.¹

The pieces here are Dread Nought (3 dots), Cruiser (2 dots), Torpedo Boat (1 dot), Sub, an unnamed piece which is obviously a monoplane, and one which has 16 dots on it and no picture — I’m guessing this is meant to be a ground unit. But what is most intriguing is the map:

The thing about Aviation and the other Stratego-style games, along with other stylised representations of warfare like chess, is that they are almost completely symmetrical. No matter which side you’re playing, the board is the same, the forces are the same and the objective is the same. About the only asymmetry is that somebody has to go first. This does make such games very evenly-balanced, and so the result will on balance come down to skill. But as a representation of warfare, it’s not in the least realistic (except in certain circumstances, particularly the more tactical you go, I guess). Each side in a battle or war has very different forces at its disposal, in terms of numbers, equipment, training and morale. And each side will be constrained by the geography it has to fight from or in, and each side will likely have different objectives in the war. Abstract games like chess or Stratego don’t have asymmetry, which is why they might be war games, but aren’t really wargames as currently understood.

But the map for War Tactics is clearly very asymmetric, as it’s based on the actual geography of the North Sea. Naval bases are placed not to make a “good” or “fair” game, but because that’s where they really were. The eastern coast of England does look inviting for the Germans because of the lack of bases, but then the British cities are spread out both north and south: which way to go? It also looks like the British can try to invade Germany, but good luck getting in close to the German coast. I’m not saying this is a particularly accurate depiction of the North Sea strategic situation ca. 1911 — for one thing it does look like the German and British forces might be symmetric in number and capability, which is rather unhistorical; and anyway I don’t know what the rules are — but it is at least a partial recognition that not all is fair in war, just as in love. So some props are due Lowe and Carr of Belvoir Street, Leicester, for creating an early ancestor of the strategic wargame.

I was going to leave it there, but I came across a couple of things on the net that I have to mention. One is from a Time article published on 14 December 1942, about the current vogue for military games. It talks about Gibson and the French origins of L’Attaque, but says he independently came up with Dover Patrol. It also mentions that the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes — who also rather liked very big aeroplanes — invented his own Little Wars-style wargame played on a huge table with 14 (!) players a side. Games could last for years — if you had the right stuff, that is:

The game occasionally took a tragic turn. Rear Admiral William B. Fletcher, long a regular player, lost eight capital ships one night and was so humiliated that he never returned. Another friend, after being court-martialed one evening for losing an entire army, lay on a sofa and cried.

Such are the burdens of command.

The other interesting thing I came across was that Dennis Wheatley, the best-selling author of thrillers in the 1930s who went on to write strategic appreciations for the Joint Planning Staff during the war (his Times obit claims it was his idea to remove all the signposts in Britain!), invented several strategy games which appear to be at least geographically asymmetric. One, called Invasion, was published in 1938, and was popular enough to go through a few editions. The publisher’s description is as follows:

ATTACK & DEFENCE
by Land, Sea and Air
A thrilling battle of wits in which 2, 3 or 4 players have as their playing pieces the armed forces of the Navy, Army and Air Force.
The Battlefield is a Map in the size of approximately 24 inches square, PRINTED IN SIX COLOURS with Capitals, Principal Towns and Forts named and a full Fighting Force of 160 Pieces with dice, shaker, etc.
You have to be ready to resist an invasion and at the same time send Expeditionary Forces to Allies.
A Game in which Young and Old can use their strategy to overcome the luck of the dice.

There’s a picture of the map here; it appears to be a Ruritanian representation of north-west Europe (the country off the coast is called Angleland, I think). It’s interesting that this came out in 1938; I can’t say I’m aware of much discussion of the possibility of an invasion of Britain at the time. But since Wheatley was helping plan anti-invasion strategies a couple of years later, Invasion perhaps should be considered as serious speculation, and not just a game.

Finally, just for completeness’ sake, I’ll mention two other war games I came across. From 1916 or so, there’s Trencho, ‘The Famous Australian War Game As Played in the Camps and Trenches’, which is apparently just Nine Men’s Morris. Can’t say I’ve ever heard of it, but “Trencho” does sound very Australian! As does Spotto!, for that matter (second from the bottom), and indeed judging from the web it was originally a Bingo-like Australian car journey game (make lists of things to watch out for, cross them off when you see them, then shout “spotto!” when you’ve got them all). But again, I’ve never heard of it. This one is an aircraft recognition version, ‘OF INSTRUCTIVE VALUE TO: SPOTTERS, A.T.C.[,] R.O.C.[,] HOME GUARDS, SCOUTS, A.R.P., POLICE, SAILORS, SOLDIERS, AIRMEN, Etc.’ so obviously it’s British, ca. 1940, and not Australian — anyway, we didn’t get many Heinkels down our way!

My brain is fried after all that, but one last thought. Some of these games are evidently intended to be simulations of war, not just representations in some abstract way: War Tactics asks in its title, “can Great Britain be invaded?” and presumably players are invited to think that the game does provide an answer to that question. Did they in fact think so? And if so, did their game-playing affect their fears about the future one way or the other? If the German player in War Tactics won 7 times out of 10, did the players (presumably children) take that as a warning of what may come? Or did they just treat it as a harmless bit of fun? No doubt some did see it as just a game, but possibly not all. As a teenaged wargamer, one of my favourite games was GDW’s The Third World War, about the potential land and air war in Germany between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, ca. 1985. It was considerably more sophisticated than the proto-wargames discussed here, but not necessarily more accurate. I certainly thought it was, to some degree, accurate, however. Playing such games was one way in which I tried to understand the Cold War and what might happen in the future, and I do remember getting anxious when the Warsaw Pact won. I wanted NATO to win, because I would want NATO to win in a real war if it ever happened. In fact, I must admit I would sometimes cheat a bit in solitaire games, re-rolling die rolls in important battles to get a “fair” result. Pretty silly, any way you look at it; but I could understand some overly-sensitive boy in 1911, probably already immersed in le Queux and An Englishman’s Home, playing War Tactics and thinking that perhaps “Der Tag” was nearly upon him …

1. For example, looking at the map, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Holland are marked as neutrals, whereas France and Belgium seem to be British allies; this suggests a WWI setting. Except that Luxembourg is also neutral, and most of Belgium’s territory should be marked as a German conquest. Perhaps more tellingly, there’s no naval base at Scapa Flow — the closest is Cromarty (ie Invergordon). Given the great importance of Scapa Flow as the harbour for the Grand Fleet throughout the war, it’s hard to imagine that it would have been left out.

The big trip to the UK looms. It’s my first and I’m greatly looking forward to it — all the more so because I have long been fascinated by the place and its history. Although I can’t say it was always my plan to do a PhD in British military aviation history, looking back, there were some clues:

Go ahead and laugh! This is a drawing I did when I was 9 or 10. It shows a Hawker Hurricane,¹ specifically PZ865, “The Last of the Many”, the final production unit. I proudly showed it to our neighbour across the road, who (as I recall) had been in the air force in the war (which back then, meant the Second World War). All I can remember of his reaction was that he said the nose was too long for a Hurricane, and well, he was right :)

I used to draw a lot when I was a kid. Later on it was mostly spaceships and robots, but at this stage there were more aeroplanes than anything else. They were mostly from the Second World War and, aside from a few German adversaries in the background, they’re all British. Not Australian, and certainly not American. This was a definite bias on my part: I was also a keen (if inept) maker of model aeroplanes, and when I was given a model of perhaps the greatest fighter of the war, the North American P-51 Mustang, I did not hesitate to stick the RAF decals on it instead of the USAAF ones.

So why was I so pro-British?² One big part of it must have been finding Paul Brickhill’s biography of Douglas Bader, Reach for the Sky (1954), on my grandfather’s bookshelf. I must have read it a dozen times or more. Of course the story of Bader’s triumph over the loss of his legs was inspiring, but the part I loved best was about the Battle of Britain itself. The gallant few against the enemy hordes. Dorniers and Hurricanes, Duxford and North Weald, Hugh Dundas and Denis Crowley-Milling. I didn’t understand it all but trying to work it out was part of the fun. And I definitely understood that the Brits were the goodies and Jerry the baddies.

So I grew up barracking for the British. This is probably a bit strange in Australia today, and perhaps requires some explanation, because Britain is nowhere near as important to us as it once was, on almost any measure you care to name. I knew they were on our side in the war, and probably had some vague idea that there was some sort of close relationship between Australia and the British going back to Captain Cook. I grew up in a smallish country town, and I suspect there was a residual affection for Britain there which disappeared much earlier in the more cosmopolitan cities. (When we moved down to Melbourne a few years later, nobody I knew cared about the war, much less 242 Squadron — which is when I turned to drawing spaceships.) But there was another, more important source of my Anglophilia: television. At this time — the early 1980s — there were many more British television shows airing in Australia that there are today, or at least it seems that way to me. British sitcoms, in particular, were common even on commercial channels, where today they are not to be found at all. (I don’t exactly miss shows of the calibre of Love Thy Neighbour, but what about something that’s actually good, like Spaced?) They only show American sitcoms now (Australian ones are almost never worth watching), which is perhaps surprising given that the Australian sense of humour supposedly has more in common with the British equivalent than the American.

There were many British shows I watched regularly at the time, but there were two I (along with all my friends) adored in particular, which were usually shown every weeknight on the ABC (the Australian equivalent of the BBC), almost continually repeated: The Goodies and Doctor Who. These were hugely effective vehicles for spreading ideas about British culture and history, usually stereotypical, distorted and out of context to be sure, but they did help me gain some sort of appreciation of this thing called “Britain”. Doctor Who is still well-known today, and deservedly winning new fans in its current incarnation, so I’ll talk more about The Goodies, which is much more obscure these days. The Goodies were three men, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden, and Bill Oddie, who were willing to do “anything, anytime, anywhere”, which usually ended up being some absurd job like setting up a pirate radio station and post office (in a submarine just outside the 3-mile limit, naturally), and nearly always involved oversized props at one point or another. One of the three would often end up catching megalomania, with the other two teaming up against him to cut him down to size, which is interesting when you consider that each character represented a social class (upper, middle, working) and if you take the whole thing too seriously, which you shouldn’t!

To be honest not all of it has aged that well (sitcoms often don’t) and I’m not sure if anyone would find it funny if they hadn’t grown up with it; but I still enjoy them, and if you’ve got half an hour to spare have a look at this episode, “War babies” (in three parts), which was originally broadcast in 1980 and is set during the Second World War.



There’s a lot in here, tropes and references which I absorbed impressionistically but only came to understand more fully many years later: newsreels, Neville Chamberlain,³ war fears, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, public schools, conkers, stereotypically dense German sentries, air raid sirens, gas masks, and above all, Winston Churchill: the voice, the cigars, the siren suit, the V sign, we shall fight on the beaches, never in the field of human conflict. And to cap it all off, a surreal replay of both 25 December 1914 and 30 July 1966, coming down to a penalty shootout between Churchill’s two-year-old bionic double and a German tank.

Hmmm, come to think of it, it’s probably a miracle I don’t have more misconceptions about British history than I already do …

1. As the cunningly-drawn faux brass plate at the bottom informs the viewer. LOL.
2. At least when it came to aeroplanes — I see that I did draw pictures of American tanks and other vehicles.
3. Quite possibly the first time I ever saw old Nev, and I still think he is quite the prestidigitator.

It’s not often that I happen across a discussion of knock-out blow novels outside specialist literature, so I was interested to see that Gideon Haigh (probably best known as a cricket writer, but also a fine essayist) talks about Nevil Shute’s What Happened to the Corbetts (1939) in the current issue of The Monthly. The article itself (which is not online; a precis of sorts is available from the Sunday Telegraph) is about On the Beach, published fifty years ago this month: ‘arguably Australia’s most important novel’¹ since it was the first really popular novel to deal with nuclear war and human extinction, selling 4 million copies worldwide.

In retrospect, 1957 was a hinge point in the Cold War, when passive resignation about nuclear arms began yielding to alarm and horror. It was the year that the CND was founded in Britain and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy was established in the US; it was the year that the National Council of Churches warned that the arms race might “lead directly to a war that will destroy civilization”. In 1955, fewer than one-fifth of Americans knew what fallout was; by 1958, seven in ten were saying they would favour a worldwide organisation to prohibit nuclear weapons.

How many people during that transition read JB Priestley’s ‘Russia, the Atom and the West’ in the New Statesman? Or heard the Nobel-winning chemist Linus Pauling rail against nuclear arms? And how many read On the Beach? Nevil Shute’s novel was the great popular work on the gravest matter besetting civilisation.²

Haigh is right to see that the two books have a great deal in common.

What Happened, like On the Beach, is a conventional novel on an unconventional, very nearly taboo, subject: the civilian experience of war, with its trials of disaster and displacement. It is not, however, an anti-war novel. To write against war when its coming was inevitable would have struck Shute as pointless posturing. He was arguing not for peace but for preparedness, to ready Britons “for the terrible things that you, and I, and all the citizens of the cities in this country may one day have to face together”. On the novel’s release in April 1939, a thousand copies were distributed to workers in Air Raid Precautions. It was “the entertainer serving a useful purpose”.³

But I don’t know that I agree that the subject of the ‘civilian experience of war’ was ‘very nearly taboo’. There were plenty of novels dealing with this subject written in the 1920s and 1930s, at least as it related to aerial warfare. It’s just that virtually all of the others were sensationalistic trash in comparison to What Happened to the Corbetts, as I have previously argued.⁴ Otherwise I like Haigh’s take on it.

And what happened to Nevil Shute? After moving to Australia in 1950 and buying the country’s first dishwasher, and writing a few more books, he died in 1960. And after that?

The decline of Shute’s reputation is unremarkable: it simply attests the perishability of popular art. Shute sold 15 million books in his lifetime, but he aspired to neither literary immortality nor critical approval: “The book which thrills the reviewer with its artistic perfection will probably not be accepted by the public, while a book which the public value for its contents will probably seem trivial and worthless artistically to the reviewer.” His obscurity also reflects the contours of the book market: the middle-class, middlebrow novelist of ideas is a discontinued line.⁵

Still, he wrote one book of almost geopolitical significance; that’s more than most writers can aspire to.

1. Gideon Haigh, “Shute the messenger: how the end of the world came to Melbourne”, The Monthly, June 2007, 52.
2. Ibid., 53.
3. Ibid., 47.
4. Haigh has clearly benefited from reading Paul Brians’ Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, but doesn’t seem to have any comparable sources for the knock-out blow literature. That’s ok, but you know, he could have asked me!
5. Haigh, “Shute the messenger”, 46.

The latest Fortean Times (June 2007) has a great article by Kim Newman on Hammer Films, the much-loved British horror film production company. While discussing the early 1970s, when Hammer’s fortunes were declining, he refers in passing to ‘the tragically unmade Zeppelin vs Pterodactyls‘. That’s all he said, but it was enough … could it have been a cross-over between two of my favourite genres — lost world movies and airship movies? Indeed it could. Here’s a poster Hammer mocked up to pique the interest of potential investors:

And I managed to find a very brief plot summary:

The story was along the lines of THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT, with a German Zeppelin being blown off-course during a bombing raid on London and winding up at a “lost continent”-type place.

Oh man … tragically unmade is right! What more you could want from a film, I ask you.

Still, it does remind me of two Amicus productions (which can easily pass for Hammer movies in a darkened cinema …), The Land that Time Forgot (1975) and its sequel The People that Time Forgot (1977). In Land (which I’m not sure I’ve seen), it’s a German U-boat which finds the lost world, during the First World War. In People (which I have), a steamship sets out to look for the survivors of the first film, and in the process its amphibian seaplane gets into a dogfight with a pterodactyl. So at least between the two they have some of the elements of the abortive ZvP. But nothing so gloriously cheesy as a Zeppelin (and anachronistic trapeze fighters) versus pterodactyls.