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The last flight of the Patrie

19 April 2012 in 1900s, Aircraft, Maps, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Rumours by Brett Holman | 3 comments

Patrie

The Lebaudy-built Patrie, seen above, was France's first military airship. A descendent of the Jaune, in 1906 and 1907 it carried out a number of successful proving and publicity flights, including one where it carried the prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, over Paris. Afterwards it was moved to its operational base near the fortress of Verdun. Due to a mechanical failure during a subsequent flight it had to ground in the open, far from the safety of its hangar. A gale blew up, and even one hundred and eighty soldiers were unable to hold the stricken airship down. At 8pm on 30 November 1907, the Patrie floated off into the distance, fortunately sans crew.
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Future schemes of air defence

6 April 2012 in 1930s, Air defence, Aircraft, Art, Civil defence, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | No comments

Future schemes of air defence

MONSTER EAR TRUMPETS FOR AIR DEFENCE

During the last years of the Great War, sound detectors played an increasingly important part in the air defences of all the belligerents. Since those days they have undergone great development. Here the emperor of Japan is inspecting the huge trumpet-like detectors that work in conjunction with the anti-aircraft guns (seen right)

This last in a series on 'Things of tomorrow' draws upon Boyd Cable, 'Future schemes of air defence', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 310-6. (There was a seventh in the series, but by another author and on a non-military subject, that of stratospheric flight.) The previous posts looked at 'Death from the skies', 'The doom of cities', 'New horrors of air attack', 'If war should come' and 'When war does come: terrifying effects of gas attacks'.
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The Yellow

21 March 2012 in 1900s, Aircraft, Pictures by Brett Holman | 4 comments

Le Jaune airship, 1903

Paris, 20 November 1903: the ghostly form of an airship floats past an equally ghostly Eiffel Tower, before a very solid crowd of completely entranced spectators. It is Le Jaune, 'The Yellow', the first of the successful Lebaudy series of French semi-rigid airships.

The source of this photograph is a postcard sent to me by JDK (cheers!) I couldn't find a copy online so decided to post it here. There is, however, a very similar photograph on the Air & Space Magazine site which must have been taken just moments before and from almost exactly the same angle. It's also much clearer if you like that sort of thing.

Smithy and the mystery aeroplane

8 March 2012 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Aircraft, Archives, Australia, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures by Brett Holman | 3 comments

Charles Kingsford Smith

Charles Kingsford Smith was and remains Australia's most famous pioneer aviator. Among his feats: the first trans-Pacific flight, in both directions in fact (1928, east to west; 1934, west to east); the first non-stop trans-Australian flight (1928); the first trans-Tasman flight (1928). It's probably fair to think of him as the Australian Lindbergh in terms of his iconic status -- and his flirtation with far-right politics (he was a member of the New Guard, an early 1930s fascist paramilitary group) -- though his entrepeneurial activties and self-promotion remind me more of Sir Alan Cobham, with his ambitious attempt (with his frequent copilot, Charles Ulm) to get into the airline business. 'Smithy' was himself knighted, in 1932; in 1953 Sydney's major airport (and hence Australia's busiest) was named after him; for thirty years his image graced the Australian twenty dollar note. Like so many of the great pioneer aviators he met an early death, in his case in November 1935 after crashing somewhere in the Andaman Sea while trying to recapture the Australia-England speed record.

All of that is well-known. But what isn't is that in 1918, Kingsford Smith witnessed a mystery aeroplane flying over the Australian coast -- what in later decades would be called a flying saucer or an unidentified flying object. I can find no reference to this incident in a quick check of three Smithy biographies (admittedly none very scholarly); as it's buried in an archive with no obvious connection to his career it's possible it hasn't been noticed before now.
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Am I fake or not? -- III

15 February 2012 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Aircraft, Blogging and tweeting, Books, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | 2 comments

Gotha raid, 7 July 1917

N. A. J. Taylor recently asked me on Twitter if I thought the above photograph, purportedly of one of the daylight Gotha raids on London in 1917, was genuine.

I said no, due to 'Experience, intuition, lack of provenance, contemporary photographic technology. The photo has been retouched at very least.' But I'm coming around to the idea that it is real. A bit.
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Suspicious minds

15 December 2011 in 1910s, Aircraft, Archives, Australia, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Rumours by Brett Holman | 5 comments

I've recently begun some research at the National Archives of Australia (the Melbourne reading room of which is conveniently only about half a kilometre from my house) into the 1918 mystery aeroplane scare. It's always exciting to get to work on a new set of primary sources; and this is my first time working in a state archive so it's doubly interesting. I can already see that there's a lot of useful material, and my original idea of a short, simple case study is already starting to seem optimistic.

The main file I've looked at so far is NAA: MP367/1, 512/3/1319, 'Reports from 2nd M D during War Period on lights, aeroplanes, signals etc.', a big fat dossier of reports from the public and the results of military and police investigations into them. 2nd Military District seems to have covered New South Wales, so it's actually not what I ultimately want: most of the 1918 sightings took place in Victoria, i.e. 3rd Military District. But as NSW was the other big state (somewhat more people, more important industrially and commercially; but Victoria had the seat of government and defence headquarters) it'll be useful as a control.
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The problem of ærial propulsion solved

27 October 2011 in 1900s, 1910s, 1940s, Aircraft, Australia, Before 1900, Blogging and tweeting, Periodicals by Brett Holman | No comments

In the venerable tradition of lazyblogging, here is a storified version of an exchange of tweets today between myself and @TroveAustralia, concerning an apparently forgotten Australian aviation pioneer, W. T. Carter of Williamstown, formerly a member of the Victorian colonial legislature. In the mid-1890s, Carter dabbled in electric motors (with help from A. U. Alcock, who has been credited with inventing an ancestor of the hovercraft) and propellors (later patenting one in Britain), and seems in 1894 to have successfully demonstrated a flying model, a small drum-shaped object with two propellors at each end. Long after his death it was claimed that he had actually built and flown an aeroplane at Maidstone, a western suburb of Melbourne, again in the mid-1890s, but it's hard to believe this could have escaped the attention of the press (especially given his evident interest in self-promotion).
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A Guilty Man?

27 October 2011 in 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Aircraft, Books, Pictures, Reprisals by Brett Holman | 2 comments

Sir Kingsley Wood and a Blenheim Mk I

I'm sure everybody has a favourite story about Sir Kingsley Wood. Mine is the one from when he was Air Minister at the start of the Second World War, and he refused to bomb Germany on the grounds that it would damage private property. As A. J. P. Taylor tells it:

Kingsley Wood, secretary for air, met a proposal to set fire to German forests with the agonized cry: 'Are you aware it is private property? Why, you will be asking me to bomb Essen next.'

It's a great anecdote which perfectly sums up the dithering nature of Chamberlain's government during the Bore War, unable or unwilling to fight a total war (it took Churchill to do that), and it's understandable why it appears in so many books and websites. Piers Brendon includes it in a discussion of the weak men Chamberlain surrounded himself with; Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott in The Appeasers. And fair enough; Wood is one of Cato's Guilty Men, after all. The only problem is that it's not clear if it's actually true; or, even if it is true and Wood did say it, whether it accurately reflects British bombing policy before May 1940.
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The successful start which ended in failure

20 October 2011 in 1900s, 1930s, Aircraft, Australia, Civil aviation, Interviews, Pictures, Radio, Sounds by Brett Holman | 1 comment

VOTES FOR WOMEN

A common complaint about this blog is that it doesn't feature nearly enough pictures of airships. So here's one, a 27-metre long non-rigid which belonged to Henry Spencer, scion of a remarkably airminded family (sixteen aeronauts across four generations). Indeed, he built it with his brothers. The photograph was taken on 16 February 1909 and apparently shows the first ever powered flight from Hendon aerodrome, though neither Spencer nor his airship are mentioned in David Oliver's Hendon Aerodrome: A History (Shrewsbury: Airlife Publishing, 1994).

But much more interesting than the airship itself, it must be said, is what it was used for. The clue is the slogan emblazoned on the side of the envelope: 'VOTES FOR WOMEN'. Spencer had hired his airship out as a propaganda platform to Muriel Matters, an Australian-born suffragette who was very active in the Women's Freedom League (a non-violent breakaway from the better-known WPSU). Matters had won some publicity the previous year by chaining herself to the grille of the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Commons. Her airship flight was also designed to make Parliament take notice of the suffragist cause: the new session was opening that very day and it was her intention to fly over Westminster and drop Votes For Women leaflets on it. In the end Spencer and Matters didn't make it there, having been blown off course into a tree in Coulsden, well to the south. Three decades later, Matters herself gave a wonderful account of her flight to the BBC, which can be heard online here. (Ignore the photo there, which is of the Army airship Baby.)

The photograph above is from a scrapbook belonging to an American women's suffrage organisation, so the message did travel quite some distance, albeit to a receptive audience; I couldn't find any mention of Matters' flight in a quick search of the British press. It took nearly a decade for the WFL's demand to be partially fulfilled. And it's nice to see that the part Matters played in using airpower for progressive causes is still remembered in her native South Australia.

Dreaming war, seeing aeroplanes -- I

9 June 2011 in 1910s, Aircraft, Australia, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Rumours by Brett Holman | 6 comments

Wölfchen

While researching a possible British mystery aeroplane in 1936, which turned out to be nothing interesting, I came across a genuine mystery aeroplane scare which I'd never heard of before, from Australia and New Zealand in March and April 1918. I'm sure somebody else must have noticed it before now, as it was trivial to find using Trove and Papers Past. But I haven't been able to find mention of it in my usual sources, so here's what I've got so far.

Firstly, some context. In March 1918, it was getting on for four years since the start of the Great War. The soldiers of Australia and New Zealand had been engaged in combat for just under three of those years, two of them on the Western Front. The armies there seemed to be in a deadlock. All that can be done is to keep the two ANZAC corps supplied with men and munitions; but in Australia it is only a few months since the public rejected conscription for a second time, in a bitterly divisive plebiscite. If victory seemed to be a long way off, at least so did defeat.
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