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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's lots to be done.

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).

'The Hum' is a mysterious low-frequency sound just at the edge of hearing which seems to infect some places, but which only some people can detect. What causes it is unknown -- theories range from factories and air conditioners to gravitational waves -- and responsible authorities often deny that it exists at all. The most famous example from recent times is probably the Taos Hum from New Mexico, which seems to date to the 1990s, but the Bristol Hum in the UK was apparently around in the 1960s and featured in the national press in the 1970s. Before that, questions were asked in Parliament (one question, anyway) about a hum heard in East Kent; and there was the Manchester 'hummadruz' which was discussed in the local press in the 1870s but was heard in the 1820s; and Gilbert White heard something similar (though louder) at Selborne in the 18th century. I think there's enough evidence to suggest that something is going on, though whether the Hum is a real sound or just something human psychology tends to come up with time and again is debatable.

Here's an example I haven't been able to find a reference to: the London Hum during the Second World War. The following is from Philip Ziegler's London at War, from a chapter discussing the mid-war years so 1942 or 1943:

The absence of traffic, together with the rarity of raids, should have given Londoners some precious silence, but from all over the capital came complaints of a mystery noise which seemed to emanate from the same area but was curiously hard to track down. 'Not only is there almost incessant "hum",' complained Gwladys Cox, 'but a "shaking", for want of a better word; at night my very bed vibrates and I feel intermittent stiff "jerks".' One indignant victim pursued the matter with the police, the Home Office and the Ministry of Health, but got no satisfaction. Eventually he decided he had identified the culprit, a factory in west London, but was met with a bland assertion that, though they might be making a little too much noise, this was unavoidable in view of the essential war work on which they were engaged. So far as it could be established, the testing of aero-engines was responsible.

Unfortunately, Ziegler doesn't provide citations (though Gwladys Cox was a civilian diarist living in West Hampstead; her diary is held at the Imperial War Museum). A quick search of wartime newspapers doesn't throw up any obvious references to a London hum, but Ziegler's account suggests it was a widely experienced phenomenon. Perhaps the unusual lack of traffic noises made other sounds more noticeable; perhaps the habit of listening for bombers made people more sensitive to sounds they'd usually block out. Either way, I wonder why it seems to have slipped through the cracks of memory.

Let's turn now to Tolkien's The Hobbit and Smaug's attack on Lake-town (Esgaroth). In my PhD thesis I identified six characteristics of the ideal theory of the knock-out blow from the air: it would be a surprise attack, on a large scale, which would strike at the interdependent structures and civilian morale of its targets, and would wreak massive destruction with great speed. In the 1920s and 1930s, fictional and non-fictional predictions of victory through airpower would usually feature four or five out of these six. As I'll now show, The Hobbit has four: surprise, morale, speed, destruction. Of course, Lake-town isn't a modern, industrial society, nor is Smaug a technologically advanced enemy nation, so the fit isn't going to be perfect. It doesn't need to be, though.

There being so many editions of The Hobbit, it seems a bit pointless to cite page numbers here, but all my quotes come from chapter XIV, 'Fire and Water'.

Smaug's attack is sudden. Lake-Town has only a few minutes' warning after the Lonely Mountain lights up in flames:

Then warning trumpets were suddenly sounded, and echoed along the rocky shores [...] So it was that the dragon did not find them quite unprepared.

Smaug's attack shatters morale:

Already men were jumping into the water on every side. Women and children were being huddled into laden boats in the market-pool. Weapons were flung down. There was mourning and weeping [...] The Master himself was turning to his great gilded boat, hoping to row away in the confusion and save himself. Soon all the town would be deserted and burned down to the surface of the lake.

Smaug's attack is fast:

Before long, so great was his speed, they could see him as a spark of fire rushing towards them and growing ever huger and more bright [...] Still they had a little time. Every vessel in the town was filled with water, every warrior was armed, every arrow and dart was ready, and the bridge to the land was thrown down and destroyed, before the roar of Smaug's terrible approach grew loud, and the lake rippled red as fire beneath the awful beating of his wings.

Smaug's attack is destructive. It destroys Lake-town completely and kills a quarter of its inhabitants:

Fire leaped from thatched roofs and wooden beam-ends as he hurtled down and past and round again, though all had been drenched with water before he came. Once more water was flung by a hundred hands wherever a spark appeared. Back swirled the dragon. A sweep of his tail and the roof of the Great House crumbed and smashed down. Flames unquenchable sprang high into the night. Another swoop and another, and another house and then another sprang afire and fell; and still no arrow hindered Smaug or hurt him more than a fly from the marshes.

Not only do these broadly constitute a knock-out blow from the air, we can, if we're bold, point to more specific elements which are suggestive of contemporary reactions to or concerns about the bomber threat. The warning trumpets are like air-raid sirens. The panic as men drop their weapons and join the women and children fleeing onto the lake is like the terrified exodus which was predicted to precede and/or follow air raids. The filling of water vessels for use against fire was a standard part of air-raid precautions. Destroying whole towns and killing a quarter of their people is not far off what was feared would happen in the next war.

To the above, we may also add that Smaug will always get through, just as the bomber would:

Roaring he swept back over the town. A hail of dark arrows leaped up and snapped and rattled on his scales and jewel, and their shafts fell back kindled by his breath burning and hissing into the lake.

Smaug is only stopped because Bard, a captain of archers, learns at the last moment of a weak spot in the dragon's armour of jewels. He learns this by another type of Tolkienesque airpower (though admittedly not one which most airpower historians would recognise): a bird (specifically, a thrush) flies from the Lonely Mountain with this information. Note that as signals officer in his frontline service, Tolkien was responsible for his unit's carrier pigeon communications, so this seems like a link with his wartime experiences. But I say 'seems' because there's no direct evidence for it.

And that's the problem: there's no direct evidence that any of the similarities or parallels I've written about here are more than coincidences. Tolkien seems to have written little about the writing of The Hobbit, perhaps because it was done as a kind of side-project to his own elaborations of the mythology of Middle Earth. Later, when he was writing The Lord of the Rings, he corresponded extensively with his adult son Christopher about his progress, sending him drafts and so on. So there we have a lot to go on. But as far as I can see there's little like this for The Hobbit. (The various drafts for The Hobbit have been published, so that would be one place to look.) Nor have I found any evidence that Tolkien took much interest in discussions of the character of the next war, though I could easily have missed it if it exists. And it seems that while The Hobbit was published in 1937, the year of Guernica and about the height of bomber anxiety, it was substantially complete around 1932 or so, which is fairly early for a knock-out blow novel.

Conversely, it's easy to see, and to prove, that Tolkien was hugely influenced by northern European mythologies from Finland to Anglo-Saxon England. This was his bread and butter, after all. He himself often noted that the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf was a critical inspiration for his writing. In 1936, he gave an important lecture entitled 'Beowulf: the monsters and the critics'; the following year The Hobbit was published. It would strain credulity to suggest that the third and final monster defeated by Beowulf, an unnamed dragon, was not in Tolkien's mind when he created Smaug: it even leaves its lair for the same reason as Smaug, enraged because one of its treasures is stolen. And, also like Smaug, the dragon in Beowulf goes on an aerial killing spree (this is from a modern translation):

The despoiler was soon
spitting out flames
and burning down buildings,
bringing men death
and enormous dread;
it had no intention
of leaving anything
alive in that country.

Given this, it's reasonable to ask whether looking for contemporary influences from the fear of the bomber is worthwhile at all. I think it is, but it has to be done carefully. Just because mythology was Tolkien's dominant influence doesn't mean that there can be no others. Smaug is not the bomber, but Smaug is not Beowulf's dragon either: there are other dragons in there too.

This is why I keep coming back to Tolkien's own experience in war. I discussed in the previous post how his earliest attempt at writing the mythology of Middle Earth was written during the war (and was certainly influenced by it), while back in England recovering from trench fever. During his convalescence in 1916 he stayed in and around Hull, near the North Sea. Hull was raided by Zeppelins a dozen or so times; Tolkien witnessed one of these raids from afar and experienced another while staying in the town. I don't know if he ever wrote about what he saw, but another eyewitness did, Basil Liddell Hart (who was also sent there to convalesce after serving at the front). Liddell Hart was very much struck by the sight of civilians trekking out of Hull. In 1925, in Paris, or the Future of War, he wrote:

Who that saw it will ever forget the nightly sight of the population of a great industrial and shipping town, such as Hull, streaming out into the fields on the first sound of the alarm signals? Women, children, babies in arms, spending night after night huddled in sodden fields, shivering under a bitter wintry sky –- the exposure must have caused far more harm than the few bombs dropped from two or three Zeppelins.

This experience was one of the keys to Liddell Hart's belief in the power of the bomber in the 1920s and early 1930s; it and similar incidents were responsible for the idea that civilians would evacuate cities in panic when air raids took place. But it's hard not to think also of the people of Lake-town fleeing into the night onto the lake when Smaug attacked. So did the Hull raids also influence Tolkien when writing The Hobbit? I think it must have done.

In the next and last post, I'll look at what we can learn about Tolkien's attitudes to total war from his later writing.

I've been remiss in not noting the arrival of Military History Carnival #28 at Cliopatria. While it seems to be moving from a round-up of the best military history blogging to covering 'military history on the Internet' generally, there are still some good old-fashioned blogs therein. For example, Sellswords, mercenaries and condottieri presents a fascinating examination of the question: what was the reason for the inaccuracy of early modern firearms -- 'In other words, did soldiers use their firearms to its full potential?'

What I found particularly interesting were the details of experiments into musket accuracy conducted in the 18th century. For example:

Hanoverian experiments in 1790 showed that when fired at various ranges against a representative target (a placard 1.8 m high and up to 45 m long for infantry, 2.6 m high for cavalry) the following results were achieved: at 100 meters – 75% bullets hit infantry target, 83.3% cavalry, at 200 m – 37.5% and 50%, at 300 m – 33.3% and 37.5% respectively.

This statistical approach to thinking about combat seems close to what we would now call operational research, which has its origins in Britain in the Second World War (Bomber Command), the First World War (anti-aircraft gunnery), or maybe Charles Babbage's day (postal delivery), depending on who you talk to. But from my (admittedly limited) understanding of the methods of operational research, it probably could have arisen any time after the development of probability theory in the 17th century. The interest of 18th-century militaries in getting answers to questions susceptible to statistical analysis suggests that the impetus was there, so why didn't it happen sooner? For that matter (and it's a question I keep coming back to), why didn't the RAF develop them in conjunction with the bomber?

Military History Carnival #27 is now up at Cliopatria. One of the posts featured is from Zenobia: Empress of the East and concerns a recent scholarly suggestion (made by Simon James, an archaeologist) that in the 3rd century CE, Sassanid soldiers used chemical weapons against Dura-Europos, a Roman fortress city on the Euphrates. As a weapon, gas is associated with the First World War so strongly now that it's always surprising to think of it being used before then (or at least considered: I've long been meaning to write a post on Thomas Cochrane, Lord Dundonald, and his chemical warfare proposals in the Napoleonic and Crimean wars). The post at Zenobia is quite detailed, so I won't recap the argument here; instead I'll confine myself to a couple of remarks.

Firstly, the gas in question is sulfur dioxide, described as 'a poisonous gas, that turns to acid in the lungs when inhaled'. I'm not a chemist or a medical doctor, but while sulfur dioxide is no doubt highly unpleasant, it's not particularly dangerous. It would now be classed as an irritant or lachrimator (i.e. tear gas). I don't think it's ever been used as a weapon in modern times (though only because Cochrane's idea was turned down by the Admiralty). Secondly, one of the criticisms of Jones's idea made at Zenobia is that there is no written record of this stratagem being used at Dura-Europos or anywhere else, either by the Sassanids or the Romans. That's the sort of problem historians always have with archaeology, though; and it's precisely because the written record is so patchy that archaeology is necessary. The way gas was used at Dura-Europos, if it was used at all, meant that it could only be used in a very limited number of tactical situations and so might not have been used very often, or have interested contemporary writers. It's still probably doubtful that anything of the sort happened, but it's certainly intriguing to ponder.

A belated Anzac Day post.

Willunga is a small town in South Australia, not far south of Adelaide, not far from the coast. It was settled by Europeans in 1839, only a couple of years after the colony itself was established. It was a farming area, cattle mostly, and slate quarrying soon became an important industry. By 1860, it had its own militia unit: the Willunga Rifle Volunteers (or Volunteer Rifles, or Willunga Company -- the name varies from source to source). Why did a small country town need a defence force?

There are two reasons that occur to me. The first is, obviously, for defence. South Australia is a long way from anywhere, even the rest of Australia, so it's hard to imagine anyone invading it. But turn that around: it's precisely because South Australia was so far away from anywhere that South Australians felt the need to make some provision for their own defence. As a colony, South Australia was ultimately defended by Britain. But neither the British Army nor the Royal Navy had any units stationed there: the closest would have been in Western Australia or New South Wales (or, later, Victoria): a very long way indeed before interstate railways began to link up in the 1880s. (And even then each colony used its own gauge. The states still do.)

So as early as 1840 South Australia formed a militia force. As was the case in the mother country, however, enthusiasm for militias waxed and waned. Volunteer systems were disbanded when there was no plausible threat, only to be suddenly revived when a new international crisis came along, as they inevitably do. South Australia's original militia soon fell into neglect, but a new force was raised during the Crimean War. That was disbanded at war's end, but reformed in 1859. Further reformations followed in 1866, 1870 and 1877. Russia was seen as the main threat, as was the case for all the Australasian colonies. But other imagined dangers included Asian immigrants and revolutionary miners. (Aboriginal Australians, too, but by the time the Willunga Volunteers were formed, the frontier wars in South Australia were largely over.) The Willunga volunteers seem to have been disbanded some time in the 1870s, were reformed in 1885, and last heard of as a cavalry troop during the Second Boer War.

Obviously, the main target of any invasion would be Adelaide, the main settlement in the colony, not Willunga. But militia from outlying areas might have their part to play as reinforcements, as amateur strategists pointed out. The Willunga Volunteers seem to have taken their responsibilities seriously, judging from this 1861 account of one of their early battalion drills (together with volunteer companies from nearby McLaren Vale and Noarlunga.)

The battalion then broke into open column right in front, marching past in quick time. The Companies were then closed and the march past in close column was gone through and exceedingly well executed, the circle round the wheeling points being performed with much steadiness. Various battalion movements were then gone through, after which the Willunga Company was thrown out in skirmishing order, the other two Companies forming supports and reserve. The men went out with great care, steadily advancing and taking up the distance directed, the dressing and covering at the same time being well maintained. The skirmishers were then exercised in firing on the advance, and from the halt, and also in closing upon flanks and centre, both at the halt and on move. The old skirmishers were ordered to retire upon the supports; supports advanced and extended, closed and retired in succession, until each company had been exercised in every branch of this drill. The movements of forming, rallying squares, and squares to resist cavalry, were also gone through and well performed, the front face delivering a steady fire from the right. Independent and volley firing were also practised, and the latter branch of the platoon exercise was especially well done.

Of course, it's hard to say just how useful such a force would have been if the Russians really had come. But that brings me to the second reason for Willunga's defence force: building a community. This is hinted at in the rest of the article quoted above: more than half of it is given over to an account of the battalion dinner and ball held afterwards. Here's a sample:

Captain Atkinson was now to receive the prize which he had so well won. He had given him (Col. Blyth) a good beating that day at a private match, but he was not at all sorry for that, as he rejoiced to see good attainments in any man. Private John Mudge, junior, of the Noarlunga Company, was also to be presented with a handsome silver prize cup. He hoped he would never want a bottle of wine to fill it.

Three hearty cheers were given for Captain Atkinson and Private Mudge, to whom the breech-loading rifle and the silver cup were presented. The prizes were then handed round for inspection, the cup having been previously filled with rosy wine.

Private MUDGE, sen., the father of the winner of the cup, rose and expressed the pleasure and pride he felt in having a son who could beat him. He had three sons volunteers, two of whom could beat their "dad," but the third he could beat as yet. The patriarchal volunteer sat down amidst applause and sundry good-humoured jokes.

One toast proposed that

good harmony had hitherto prevailed amongst them, and he hoped it would continue, and that the good feeling which subsisted between the three companies might be promoted on every occasion when they met.

Clearly the militia force also performed a social role, as well as a military one. It enabled men to bond together, to display their prowess, to advertise their patriotism. Scores from their periodic shooting contests against other militia units were reported in the press as a cricket match might have been. Women could not directly take part in the militia movement, of course, but they too bonded over the Willunga Volunteers, as when they grouped together in 1860 to make a flag for the unit. On presenting the flag ('of rich crimson silk; in the centre a shield of blue, with gold and silver bars, between which are stars representing the "Southern Cross," with "Willunga" extending across the shield'), Mrs Henry Malpas said:

Captain Atkinson, and gentlemen of the Willunga volunteers, I am deputed by the ladies of Willunga to inform you that they -- fully appreciating your noble conduct in coming forward in defence of your country -- have taken the earliest opportunity of presenting you with a flag as a mark of their esteem and approbation. Gentlemen, although you are as yet unused to war, yet we trust that when your country requires your services in the field, you will be prepared to emulate the glorious deeds of your ancestors, who fought and conquered at Cressy, Ramilies, Salamanca, and Waterloo. We therefore deliver it into your hands, trusting that you will rally round it in the cause of liberty and in defence of your most glorious Queen and country; and may the God of battles give you the victory over all your enemies.

The Captain Thomas Atkinson (pictured above, ca. 1870) whom Mrs Malpas addressed, and who won the shooting cup in the battalion drill, was the commander of the Willunga Volunteers and also my third great-granduncle (his sister, Susanna Holman, is my third great-grandmother). He was born in Waddingham, Lincolnshire in 1822 to a farming family of some means (his older brother went to Rugby; their farmhouse at Snitterby is Grade II heritage-listed). Emigrating to South Australia at the age of 17, Thomas and his brothers were among the first settlers of Willunga in 1839. They started its first inn (initially called the Lincolnshire House, later the Bush Inn), and later on a bakery and general goods store, a slate quarry and a farm, Ashley. Thomas in particular seems to have been particularly community-minded, as his obituary notes:

He was one of the first Road Commissioners in Governor Young's time, and was a member of the district council for 28 consecutive years. In July, 1898, he retired from municipal affairs, his services being, at that time, recognised by the public presentation of an address. He was elected to Parliament as the representative of Noarlunga in 1878, but although his knowledge of the country was wide he was known in Parliament as "the Silent Member." He was a member of the Royal Agricultural and Horticultural Society, and was a committeeman and judge of horse stock for 14 years subsequent to 1850. Mr. Atkinson represented this State at the Melbourne and Sydney exhibitions, and was also a member of the local school board of advice. He took a keen interest in volunteer military movements, and in 1860 was appointed captain of the Willunga Rifle Volunteers, becoming in 1893 honorary captain of the Mounted Volunteer Force.

From this point of view, to take command of the local militia seems less like an expression of the fear of invasion than it does simply another one of the duties of the local gentry, much as it was back in his native Lincolnshire. There must have been many such people in early White settlements who took on such burdens, because that what was needed in order to build a community. (Of course, it added to his honour too: Thomas seems to have been almost universally referred to as Captain Atkinson.) So it seems to me that these types of social considerations should be given as much weight in explaining the Willunga Volunteers as we might give to the more familiar strategic reasons.

Image source: Onkapringa City Libraries.

Over the years, I've written a number of posts about various phantom airship scares (which I take here to mean things seen in the sky which weren't actually there). There are many more I might do in future, pending access to good sources (and maybe I'll even get around to writing something for publication!) but it seems worth collecting the links together at this point.

• 1892, Russia: German balloons
• 1896-7, Canada: a balloon
• 1899, South Africa: British airships, Boer signals
• 1909, Britain: German airships
• 1909, New Zealand: airships
• 1909, Australia: airships
• 1910, Australia: an airship
• 1912, Britain: a German airship
• 1916, Britain: a German airship
• 1917, Canada: a German airship
• 1940, Britain: German balloons, German paratroops, German paratroops
• 1942, United States: Japanese aeroplanes
• 1946, Sweden: Soviet rockets

Count Zeppelin clearly has a lot to answer for.

A tweet from William J. Turkel alerted me to the possibility of using 18th century-style fonts in LaTeX. The most noticeable difference from modern typesetting is the long s, but there are different ligatures too. There are a number of ways to do it but the easiest way is with the inbuilt Kepler Fonts package. (The Fell Types are far prettier, but look difficult, or at least tedious, to install. Font management is one of LaTeX's biggest weaknesses.) Just insert the following in your preamble and you're done:

\usepackage[fullveryoldstyle]{kpfonts}

Well, almost. This simply replaces every s with a long s, which is not right. Most importantly, long s is generally not used at the end of a word, so you need to replace these with 's='. Here's what the first paragraph of my thesis looks like when done this way:

I wish I'd known about this before submitting it.

Finally, something to justify the existence of the Internet. The Google Ngram Viewer takes the corpus of words formed by the Google Books dataset (i.e. books, journals, magazines, but not newspapers) and lets you plot the changes in frequency of selected ones over time. There are all sorts of interesting questions you could (in principle) answer with this tool, so let's give it a whirl.

Here's a pretty basic one. Blue is aeroplane, red is airplane, the period is 1890-2000. (The smoothing in all these plots is 3 years.) Aeroplane was initially the more popular term, but airplane has predominated since about 1925. Note the peaks during the world wars -- airplane was 5 times more likely to be used in the Second World War than in the 1990s.

But we don't have to use the English corpus: there's also American English and British English. Here's the American version.

Okay, it's very much the same and so not very interesting. Aeroplane was more common initially but was replaced by airplane in the early 1920s. Here's the British version:

This is very much not the same. Aeroplane has easily been the more popular choice throughout the period, only succumbing to airplane in the late 1990s. So I now have an empirical basis for preferring aeroplane. (Incidentally, that the English and American English plots are so similar tells us that American English dominates Google's English corpus.)

Let's try something else. Here's the ngram for bomber, 1900-1950. (From now on I'll stick to British English.)

So it would seem that not many people were talking about bombers until the late 1930s and then bang! The war starts and everybody is. But that's to be expected. We want to (at least I do) filter out that peak and see if there is anything meaningful in the pre-1939 data.

So there are three distinct periods here. First an initial but low level of usage from 1905 to 1912. Then an upswing in the First World War. Then from a post-war low in about 1924 there is an (almost) continuous climb until 1939. The latter section however has an inflection point in about 1934 when the word frequency rises much more rapidly.

What historical reality to these correspond to? The first one is a bit puzzling. Bombers in 1905? That seems a bit early. But since the corpus is drawn from Google Books we can search that to get an idea of where the word is occurring and in what contexts. (There are links to Google Books at the bottom of each Google Ngrams search result which makes this easier, though you may need to modify the years searched by hand.) And here we start to see some problems. Searching Google Books for bomber between 1900 and 1910 yields such sources as Flight, the Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, which seem respectable enough. Except the excerpts show that the particular issues in which bomber appears are clearly not from the period 1900-10. For example, the Australian Year Book excerpt begins 'Up till June, 1952 [...]'; Volume 5 of A History of the Azores Islands talks about the Battle of Britain. These journals and volumes are drawn into this search because they began publishing in the period 1900-10, not because they actually used the word bomber in that period. It seems that Google sometimes isn't able to index each issue or even volume separately, they're all lumped in together. This is not good. Being able to discard periodicals from the Ngram corpus would be a workaround.

Other than that, the explanation for the First World War bump is self-evident (though note that a bomber was also a soldier who 'bombed' enemy positions with grenades, and this sense would also appear in postwar memoirs and histories). Taking into account the 3-year smoothing, the postwar climb begins exactly where I would expect it, shortly after 1922 when P. R. C. Groves published his Times articles. The 1934 upswing is from the failure of the Disarmament Conference and the arrival of Hitler. So overall it makes sense.

Another phrase associated with the shadow of the bomber is poison gas. Here it is plotted over 1910-45:

Most of the discussion in the first peak would be about battlefield use of gas. I would expect much of the second peak to be about its use against civilians (it peaks in about 1938 which would be right). But there's no way to check correlations of terms (e.g. do they occur in the same page?) so I can only guess. Either way it's interesting that the phrase poison gas was used more often in the Second World War than in the First. But is it believable? It's hard to think so; it just wasn't something people would have written about as much. This suggests another bias in the sources of some kind. Perhaps more technical/medical journals are in Google Books for 1939-45 than for 1914-8 -- more places where doctors and engineers might discuss responses to poison gas in (unnecessary, as it turned out) anticipation of its use? A quick look in Google Books for 1942-5 bears this out: there's the Archives Of Otolaryngology and the Journal of Chemical Education. Also, of course, civil defence publications and things like Popular Science. But note again that these are American sources: I don't know if you can just search Google Books for British English books (but I'd love it if you can!)

We can also use the Ngram Viewer to revisit some old friends. Here's the rise of luftwaffe, 1933-45:

Well, it's not so much a rise as a plain. There's nothing at all. Aha -- it turns out that Ngram Viewer is case-sensitive. Putting in Luftwaffe instead of luftwaffe gives a much more sensible result:

Still, it's odd that searching on luftwaffe in the American English corpus yields a non-zero result. I can't believe that British writers and editors were uniformly strict about capitalisation where American ones weren't.

There are more oddities when we look at Coventrate: it does not appear at all in a British English search. Nor does it appear in an American English search. But it does appear in a simple English search! (The period is 1935-2000.)

Even if English is not simply American English plus British English, I can't see any reason why Coventrate would be used in other English variants and not the two major ones (especially since British English would have been the one to use it at all). So here is another glitch. Still, that before the war the graph is zero shows that the OCR is pretty good; I would have expected some confusion with concentrate but it doesn't look like that has happened.

Finally, to fulfil the promise of autogyros made in the post title. The rise and fall and rise and fall of autogyro between 1920 and 2000 is clearest in American English (read: I'm cherrypicking my data to fit the conclusion -- the second rise and fall is not at all evident in British English, and only just perceptible in English):

The initial rise and fall is the heyday of the autogyro, perhaps sustained after the war by hopes that it would fulfil hopes for practical personal aviation. But what is with the renewed popularity of autogyro from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s?

Getting back to the Google Ngram Viewer, it's not actually quite so useful as to justify the existence of the Internet: there are currently too many problems with it for it to be a killer app. But it is only a test product and it is useful enough as it stands. It's certainly something to keep an eye on.