A GIANT OF THE AIR. A HANDLEY-PAGE FOUR-ENGINED BIPLANE.

A Handley Page V/1500, the Kabul bomber. Below is (I think) a S.E.5a.

Image source: Harry Golding, ed., The Wonder Book of Aircraft for Boys and Girls (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1919), frontispiece. Painting by Geoffrey Watson.

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I’ve finally gotten around to adding Montagu of Beaulieu (pronounced ‘Bewley’, apparently) to my irregular series of biographies of airpower propagandists. He’s an important, but somewhat neglected figure, some of whose papers I’ve examined (those held at King’s College London). He helped found the Air League of the British Empire in 1909, and devised the influential ‘nerve centre’ theory, which argued that the destruction of critical infrastructure would be one of the chief dangers of aerial bombardment in the next war:

an attempt would certainly be made to paralyse the heart of the nation by attacking certain nerve centres in London, the destruction of which would impede or entirely destroy the means of communication by telephone, telegraph, rail, and road.¹

Later, in 1916, he stumped across the country giving speeches criticising the government for its failure to expand aircraft production sufficiently, and to call for the formation of an independent air force, the Imperial Air Service. He was a Conservative MP, then a Conservative peer, and all the time very wealthy (if you call 10,000 acres wealthy, anyway).

But today I’m going to talk about Montagu’s personal life, and the way it impinged on his public one. The photo above shows the ‘Spirit of Ecstasy’, the mascot adorning the bonnet of every Rolls-Royce — every one since Montagu put an early version on his Silver Ghost in 1911, that is, for he was a huge motoring enthusiast, and had his friend, the sculptor Charles Sykes, design it for him. Supposedly, the model Sykes used was Montagu’s own secretary and mistress, Eleanor Thornton. (Though there’s an alternate, and possibly more convincing, theory minimising the role of Thornton and Montagu.)

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

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

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

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

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

Image source: anataman.

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

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I spotted this ironic fusion of a peace symbol and a B-52 in the city¹ earlier in the year, and luckily it was still there when I went back with a camera this week.

It’s at the corner of Russell St and Bullens Lane. I assume it’s street art, and not anything to do with the bar advertised below it. No idea who is responsible for it, but well done, whoever it is!

1. That’s Melbourne, not London …

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While trawling through newspapers I keep an eye out for interesting aircraft-related advertisements. These are not uncommon, most obviously in relation to industries which could claim some relationship with aviation (after any record-breaking flight, there was usually at least one ad pointing out how much the triumphant pilot owed to some petroleum product or other). Other companies had to try a bit harder to make some aerial connection (Lyon’s swiss rolls, for example). But this magnificent example goes way beyond most! Actually, aviation is only one element of its vision of the future, designed to sell Field-day, a shaving lotion made from olive oil.

Here’s the text which appears below the image:

What of the future? What shall we wear? Eat? Drink? Shall we live in glass houses? Travel in Gyroplanes and wear Television on our wrists? Who knows? But we do know how we shall shave — for “Field-day” is one of the ‘Things to Come’ that’s here already! Revolutionary! Incomparably better! Different — not only from lather but from other ‘brushless’ creams. Fast — for the age of speed. Blades last longer. Simple and safe, too! Safe because you can see through “Field-day” as you shave instead of blindly guessing! Made with pure Olive Oil .. free from Caustic Alkali (an essential part of lather!) Made for the Future. On sale NOW. Are you going to wait — or be one of the ‘Moderns’? For the sake of your skin and your razor-blades do step out of that rut.¹

So how is the future invoked here in the pursuit of higher sales figures for Field-day? Most obviously, the city of the future has giant skyscrapers, with aeroplanes (and giant tubes of shaving lotion, ridden by a man who is clearly accustomed to boldly taking charge of his destiny in his dressing-gown) flying in between them. In fact, one of the skyscrapers is also an airport: there’s an aeroplane just taking off from it, and at the top of the tower is a windsock. Aside from the odd heliport or two, downtown airports have failed to materialise, but they remained a possibility in the 1930s.² The text mentions such wondrous technological possibilities as glass houses, autogiros, and wrist televisions.³

Then there is the rhetorical, almost ritual, use of the names of those two great novels about the future to come out of Britain in the 1930s, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1933) (or rather, the 1936 film-of-the-book, Things to Come). Neither of these can be said to look forwards to the future without any misgivings, however; the one is a dystopia (albeit one masquerading as a utopia), and the other might as well be, at least for the hundreds of millions of people killed along the road to a technologically-sophisticated, tunic-wearing paradise. So they might seem an odd choice for a straightforwardly optimistic (if not entirely straightfaced, perhaps) depiction of the future. But that’s par for the course: the titles of both books very quickly became a shorthand for the unknown future, often with little relation to anything in Huxley or Wells.⁴

Finally, there are all the key words defining the attributes which are to be associated with the future, and with Field-day: it will be revolutionary, incomparably better, different, faster, longer lasting, simple and safe. What man could resist a shaving lotion so laden with futurity? It is indeed the shave of the future, NOW. I do so want to be one of the Moderns, and I’d buy it myself, for sure — except that judging by Google, it looks like neither Field-day nor J. C. and J. Field, Ltd., its manufacturer, actually made it into this future. O brave new world, that doesn’t have such things in it!

1. Daily Mail, 8 May 1937, p. 14.
2. For example, in 1935 the Corporation of London was reported to be considering buying up land for a city airport along the south bank of the Thames, possibly near (or between?) London Bridge and Tower Bridge. Another possibility was to actually build a landing platform over the Thames itself. Daily Mail, 2 February 1935, p. 5. Even more extraordinary was the proposal made in 1931 by Charles Glover, an architect, for an elevated airport above the railway siding yards at King’s Cross and St Pancras stations. This would have taken the form of a wheel half a mile across, with the spokes acting as runways. There is a drawing and a bit more detail in Felix Barker and Ralph Hyde, London As It Might Have Been (London: John Murray, 1995 [1982]), 212.
3. So we’re still not in “the future” yet, although an increasing number of people effectively have a television in their pockets or hand bags, combined with telephone, still camera, movie camera, gramophone …
4. Yes, “brave new world” is itself lifted from Shakespeare, where it’s used differently; but The Times could only find occasion to quote the phrase twice in the almost-century-and-a-half before the publication of Huxley’s novel, and then used it at least 11 times in the rest of the 1930s (not including direct references to the book or to The Tempest).

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I don’t often link to interesting posts from Modern Mechanix because once you start, where do you stop? But I am compelled to point out this one which reprints an October 1934 Modern Mechanix and Inventions article about an American (presumably) idea for a solar-powered flying airfield.

It’s as simple as putting a landing strip for aeroplanes on top of an airship, and covering the rest of the top surface with ’solar photo cells’ (i.e., solar panels). The article suggests that one application would be that ‘Planes could land on the dirigible, floating over the sea, to refuel for trans-ocean passenger service’.

So, going one way, this links to other contemporary ideas for routinising flight over the Atlantic (in particular), such as the seadrome and Project Habbakuk. In another direction, it links to modern solar-powered airships designed for stratospheric surveillance. And finally, it links to real-life flying aircraft carriers such as the USS Macon and fictional ones such as HMS Whatever-it-was in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

There’s no information given in the article about whose idea this was. The suspicion arises that it was invented purely to justify putting an airship on the front cover … not too different from this post, really!

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For a long, long time, there was only Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls: the poster. Then there was ZvP: the movie mashup, followed by ZvP: the cartoon mashup. And now there’s ZvP: the webcomic, along with ZvP: the t-shirt!

I obviously wasn’t responsible for creating any of this. I wasn’t even the first to blog about ZvP. But through the stochastic wonders of the blogosphere, my post about it was picked up by blogs more popular than my own, which then spread the word to a much larger audience, with the results that you see above. So I do feel as though I can claim a very modest share of the credit for this ZvP revival!

And I may just have to buy the t-shirt …

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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

Sunday no. 4 was the occasion (after the spooky Big Ben) for my visit to the Imperial War Museum London, which of course was always going to be a highlight of my sightseeing here.

The building itself was not quite what I expected, however. While aesthetically pleasing, it doesn’t seem grand enough, somehow. What I didn’t realise, before my visit, was that it was not purpose built for the IWM: it was originally Bedlam. I suppose I’m comparing it with the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, and the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Both of these were built after the First World War; they are wholly or in part memorials to the war dead, and both are visually very striking. I am reliably informed that the IWM has a memorial function as well, at least in intention, but I have to say this didn’t really come across — not when compared with the AWM, for example, which although it too is mainly a museum, is centred around the Hall of Memory (with the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier), leading up to which is a long reflective pool and an eternal flame, enclosed by cloisters, along the walls of which are the names of over a hundred thousand Australians who have died in war. I wonder what it says about the different ways in which Australians and Britons remember their wars?

Those huge guns, by the way, are from the battleships HMS Ramillies and HMS Resolution and are of 15-inch calibre. And, to be fair, I must point out that the biggest gun at the AWM is only a 12-inch one, from the battlecruiser HMAS Australia :)

Alright, enough of that, get on with the cool stuff already. This is (part of) the Large Exhibits Hall, the first room visitors see. And yes, they are all large exhibits! In this photo there’s a He 162 “People’s Fighter” (though as far as I know, there wasn’t one in every garage) and a Sopwith Camel (to which the roundel at the top of the post belongs); below them, a Polaris sub-launched ballistic missile (AKA Britain’s “independent” nuclear deterrent); and around that, a T-34 tank, a Jagdpanther tank destroyer and a French 75.

I couldn’t work out what this was at first. It was obviously something aerial, First World War-era by the looks of it — I’m ashamed to say I had to read the sign to find out that it’s actually a Zeppelin observation car, which was dropped on a long cable underneath the airship in order to get location fixes below cloud cover. That is to say, with a man inside, who would give directions to the Zeppelin by telephone. It is thought to have been lost from LZ90 on the night of 2 September 1916.

Genesis of the Daleks? Well, no, actually it’s a Churchill Mark VII infantry tank.

Now this was rather impressive. It’s a British 1650-lb bomb — from the First World War, not the Second. It’s over 6 feet tall. According to the caption, four bombs of this type were dropped by O/400 bombers — presumably from Trenchard’s Independent Force — in an October 1918 raid on Kaiserslautern (which was to suffer much more destruction from the air in 1944). Behind are naval and artillery shells ranging from 14 to 18 inches.

A close-up of the Jagdpanther pictured earlier. According to the sign, it was knocked out by Allied gunfire and I assume these holes are the damage.

I spent most of the rest of the afternoon in the basement, in the permanent displays relating to the wars of the twentieth century — I thought they did a very good job of contextualising the items on display. This is a bronze eagle from the Speer-designed Reich Chancellery — Hitler’s office building — (in)complete with bullet holes from the Battle of Berlin.

Take cover — it’s a Zepp! Just kidding, it’s only a photo of a model of a Zeppelin, L33, which was forced down at Little Wigborough on the night of 24 September 1916 after a raid on London, and reverse engineered into the successful British airships, R33 and R34.

The badge and pennant of the Blackshirt Automobile Club; Malcolm Campbell supposedly displayed something like these on Bluebird.

Why, it’s an old friend, C 5422. The RAF Museum had a similarly huge reproduction on display. Somebody really should say something …

Some of the most interesting displays were those relating to ARP. I had no idea about things like the mustard gas detector paper shown above. Mustard gas is actually usually a liquid under normal conditions, with a boiling point of just 14° Celsius. So it is persistent and lies around in pools and drops, waiting for some unprotected soul to blunder into it. Hence the detector paper:

If after a raid you notice suspicious patches on walls, floors, doors, etc., fix of piece of Gas Detector Paper about 5 ins. x 3 ins. to a stick, and apply to the suspicious patches. If Mustard Gas is present the Gas Detector Paper will instantly turn PINK.

A charred roof tile from Hiroshima.

Back in the Large Exhibits Hall. A Spitfire showing off its elliptical wings.

A Be2c of the Royal Flying Corps. You can see the roundels on the top of the upper wings from underneath, which shows how thin the canvas is.

The Spitfire’s rival in beauty, the P-51 Mustang. Drop tanks ftw.

I didn’t catch what these were about — children’s drawings near the entrance, evidently something to do with the camouflage exhibition so maybe it’s this. They all seemed to have an anti-gun theme (not anti-war as such), so I wondered if that was spontaneous or had they been coached to draw to that theme? Still, they were rather touching.

I didn’t get a chance to see the IWM’s art collection, or the Falklands exhibition, or a bunch of other things. Nearly everywhere I go, I keep saying “I’ll have to go back”, but that’s looking less and less likely as my time here draws to a close!

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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

Yesterday I had occasion to pass Cleopatra’s Needle on the Victoria Embankment. It’s not really Cleopatra’s at all but Thutmose III’s, as it was he who caused it to be erected at Heliopolis, in around 1450 BC. It was eventually transported from Egypt to London and re-erected there in 1878, after trials and tribulations in the Bay of Biscay.

The sphinxes flanking the Needle are of course much more modern, and apparently are facing the wrong way, but the overall effect is rather nice — it’s as if a little piece of exotic, faraway Bloomsbury had detached itself and somehow ended up in ordinary old Westminster.

But what was really interesting to me are the pockmarks you can see in the base of the sphinx above. There are also some in the pedestal of the obelisk. These were caused by shrapnel from a German bomb which landed nearby during the First World War! I think I’ve seen photos of the damage before — perhaps in Frank Morison’s War on Great Cities (1937) — but I’d completely forgotten about it and so was surprised to see it.

As can be seen above, it’s even ripped through the metal of the sphinx sculptures. It’s a pretty effective demonstration of the power of a bomb to do harm: if it does that to stone and metal, you can imagine what it would do to flesh and bone.

So what’s my complaint? Well, it relates to the affixed plaque which explains about the shrapnel marks:

THE SCARS THAT DISFIGURE THE PEDESTAL OF THE OBELISK, THE BASES OF THE SPHINXES, AND THE RIGHT HAND SPHINX, WERE CAUSED BY FRAGMENTS OF A BOMB DROPPED IN THE ROADWAY CLOSE TO THIS SPOT, IN THE FIRST RAID ON LONDON BY GERMAN AEROPLANES A FEW MINUTES BEFORE MIDNIGHT ON TUESDAY 4TH SEPTEMBER 1917

There’s one word wrong here: “first”. The air raid of 4 September 1917 was not ‘the first raid on London by German aeroplanes’; there had already been two very damaging daylight raids by Gotha bombers in June and July that year, for a start. And there had also been a lone daylight raider over London on 28 November 1916, which I think was the very first aeroplane raid. (The first Zeppelin raid had been much earlier, on 31 May 1915.) It wasn’t even the first night raid by German aeroplanes; there’d been one on 6 May 1917. So my complaint is that whoever is responsible for putting plaques on historic monuments is putting out misleading information — Wikipedia repeats it, though somebody pointed out the mistake nearly two years ago — and as a taxpayer¹ I want something done about it!

1. Well, while I’m here I’m paying VAT …

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It’s Lord Baden-Powell, Chief Scout, who at one stage in the 1930s seems to have had a regular spot in the Daily Mail’s “Boys & Girls” section, teaching the future imperial overlords all about their wonderful Empire. In the 18 March 1938 issue, he contributed a piece called “Policeman aeroplanes”, along with the following rather cute drawing:

(I apologise for the blurriness, I don’t have access to a scanner at the moment and so a photo of a printout is the best I can do.) B-P explains how aeroplanes can keep restless natives in line:

The other day, in passing through Aden, we heard that two of the tribes of Arabs in the district had broken out into war against each other. Before they could get very far with it, the Royal Air Force had an aeroplane hovering over them like a policeman. The aeroplane dropped notices to tell them that they were to stop fighting at once, and make peace and go home.

So although aeroplanes have done so much in speeding up transport, so that people can travel and mails can go in a few days where it used to take several weeks, aeroplanes also have their uses in many other directions, and will go on becoming more and more useful when you fellows grow up to pilot them.¹

So RAF air control policies — the use of airpower in internal security roles — are, according to Baden-Powell, much like a firm but kindly neighbourhood bobby breaking up scuffling schoolboys. Nobody even gets hurt, isn’t that nice!

Well, maybe. According to a Times article about (what must be) the incident he describes, the policeman aeroplanes did in fact have to stick the boot in:

The second area of unrest [in Aden] involved the Sei’ar tribe, living in inaccessible country north of the Wadi Hadhramaut, whose raiding proclivities had been a constant source of trouble. Political negotiations having produced no satisfactory result, air action was ordered, and one bombing raid by three aircraft on January 20 [1938] produced the desired result. The dar of the chief offender was completely demolished in a spectacular fashion in full view of a number of Sei’aris, who were duly impressed and gave a guarantee to the Government of future good behaviour. Following their submission, the fort at Husn Al Abr, 100 miles north-west of Seiyun and an important point at the junction of a number of routes into the Hadhramaut, was occupied by Q’aiti local forces. At the time the fort was in the hands of Sei’ari raiders, who had with them a number of looted camels. Messages were dropped informing them that air action would be taken if opposition were offered to the occupation of the fort by Q’aiti troops. Having heard that similar action had been taken earlier by other Sei’aris, the raiders submitted quietly and handed over the looted camels.²

Since there were eyewitnesses to the bombing of the dar (which I think is Arabic for “house”, presumably a leader’s), there must be a chance that there were casualties — but we are not informed either way. The point, as far as the Times was concerned, was that the raid had the desired result without having to send British troops into harm’s way.

Getting back to Baden-Powell, even if this particular action did not result in casualties, it seems to me that he sugar-coated the realities of air control here, which could be quite brutal. OK, so admittedly his audience was young, but surely the Scouting movement was all about toughening up the youth of Britain in preparation for their later duties out in the Empire?

ObAirminded: B-P’s younger brother, Baden Baden-Powell (no, really) was an aviation pioneer, specialising in balloons and man-lifting kites, and who was an active president of the Royal Aeronautical Society in the crucial years 1902-9. There’s an excellent page on B B-P and Scout airmindedness at Scouting Milestones.

1. Daily Mail, 18 March 1938, p. 21.
2. The Times, 5 April 1938, p. 27. Emphasis added.

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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.

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