A comment from Melissa got me thinking about gender and the knock-out blow, which is admittedly not something I do very often. There are certainly a number of ways into this subject. The most obvious would be to look at the fact that airpower would bring war onto British soil for the first time since at least Culloden (ok, or since the Great War, if you want to be pedantic), thus threatening British women (and children) directly and on a large scale. Pointing this out was a powerful argument in favour of taking the threat of bombing seriously, and was widely deployed. So one could look at that construction. Or there’s the gendered language which was occasionally used to describe aerial warfare, such as Trenchard’s analogy of a football match, with victory going to the side which struck hardest and in their manly way made the defenders ’squeal’ first. Very playing-fields-of-Eton.

Another way would be the simple one of looking at what men and women wrote about the knock-out blow, and how it might have differed in style, content and reception. Certainly most of the writers on the subject were men, which is to be expected since only men had experience of air combat and so could plausibly present themselves as experts. But, particularly from the 1930s, a number of women writers did venture their opinions on the coming era of air war, generally from the pacifist viewpoint: H. M. Swanwick, Barbra Donington (with her husband, Robert), Sarah Campion, and of course Vera Brittain. (A notable non-pacifist, was the famous aviatrix Amy Johnson who wrote for the bellicose Daily Mail in the mid-1930s.) However, male writers could be dismissive of their arguments in highly gendered terms, when they bothered to note them at all. For example, W. Horsfall Carter wrote a pamphlet entitled Peace Through Police to rebut Swanwick’s works Frankenstein and his Monster: Aviation for World Service and New Wars for Old (both 1934). He thought that her attack on the idea of an international air force had ‘all the misdirected fervour of a militant suffragette’ and referred to her as a ’sentimentalist’.¹

All honour to the pacifists whose consuming idealism and “conscience” impels them to denounce war and all its works. But when the heart is stronger than the head the result is a peace babel totally ineffective for the realistic business of peacemaking.²

Read: don’t you worry your pretty little head about it, let us hard-headed menfolk sort things out!

But there was one woman who was not so easily dismissed, for she wrote the most influential attack upon the very idea of the overwhelming superiority of the bomber to be written in the interwar period. The Great Delusion: A Study of Aircraft in Peace and War was published in 1927, inspired at least one book-length rebuttal (Murray F. Sueter’s Airmen or Noahs: Fair Play for our Airmen; The Great “Neon” Air Myth Exposed, 1928), and was still being cited as a prime example of airpower scepticism over a decade later. Its author was pseudonymous. Who was Neon?³

Actually, that isn’t really a mystery at all. If you believe the British Library’s catalogue, Neon was the pseudonym of Marion W. Acworth. Aside from the fact that I have no idea how the British Library knows this, this isn’t immediately helpful, for this is not a name which otherwise appears in the annals of aviation, pacifism, strategy or anything else that I’m aware of. It doesn’t appear in the Times or the Oxford DNB. The only clue from this is that she shared her surname with a fairly well-known writer on strategy, the former submariner Captain Bernard Acworth. David Edgerton notes the similarity of their somewhat unusual surnames, and also that Bernard cited Neon’s book.⁴ Can we go further than this? Was there a connection between Bernard Acworth and Marion Acworth?

In fact, there is contemporary, though circumstantial, evidence that there was — indeed, that Bernard actually wrote The Great Delusion, or at least had a hand (or two) in its writing. J. M. Spaight, in Air Power and the Next War summarises Neon’s arguments in The Great Delusion and then immediately, and with uncharacteristic sarcasm, turns to Bernard Acworth where he writes that:

The mantle of “Neon” descended miraculously on Captain Bernard Acworth, whose book [The Navy and the Next War, 1934] was again a determined attack upon the air arm and all its works and a glorification of sea power […]⁵

This is a pretty broad hint that any similarity between Neon and Bernard is not coincidental!

Another piece of circumstantial evidence comes, oddly enough, from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which has put many documents of historical interest online. In a letter sent on 12 January 1928 to Stanley Bruce, the Prime Minister, his liaison in London R. G. Casey wrote:

If you happen by chance to have read a book called ‘The Great Delusion’ by Neon, which was published about a year ago, you may be interested to know that I hear confidentially that it was by a Mrs. Acworth, who has a brother-in-law in the Admiralty who is suspected (by the Air people) of having loaded her gun. It was, as you may remember, a violent attack on the Air Service and an implied boost for the Admiralty. It created considerable stir at the time.

So, maybe they were related by marriage?

Thanks to the magic of digitisation, I’ve now got a bit more information. It turns out that Marion was the wife of Joseph John Acworth, a chemist and developer of certain photographic processes. His obituary appeared in the Journal of the Chemical Society and provides a few details about her:

In his technical work, he was very capably assisted by his wife, who, as Miss Marion Whiteford Stevenson, had taken the Associateship course at the Royal College of Science and received her diploma (A.R.C.Sc.) in physics in 1893. She was the third woman to earn the Associateship, and the first in physics.⁶

So, it appears that here we have our Marion Whiteford Acworth. She was clearly an intelligent, educated and technically-minded person. And ‘neon’, one of the noble gases, makes some sense for a scientist’s pseudonym. Still, is she a likely candidate for the author of a diatribe against the aeroplane?

Let’s turn aside from Marion for a moment, and look at Bernard Acworth. If he was Marion’s brother-in-law, then Joseph would have been his brother. But this doesn’t work. Bernard’s 1937 Who’s Who entry says that he was born in 1885 and that his father was the Rev. Herbert Sumner Acworth. That must be this genealogist’s Herbert Sumner Acworth, born 1845, with a son Bernard born 1885. But if the Reverend was born in 1845, then he can’t be the father of Joseph, born in 1853, according to his obituary. They could be brothers, at best.⁷ So, perhaps Marion was Bernard’s aunt by marriage.

Now (and we’re nearly there, I promise), if Bernard did write The Great Delusion, he presumably chose not to publish it under his own name because he was still in the Navy. I’m not sure when exactly he retired, unfortunately, but he was in it for at least 24 years, so he can’t have left it any earlier than the mid-1920s. And he started producing the first of a steady stream of books (at least one a year up to 1940, bar 1931) in 1929. That suggests that it was shortly before then that he lay down his sword and picked up his pen. Which fits with Neon’s known publications in 1927 and 1928.

In his later writings, Bernard was apparently always a navy man, a sceptic of airpower and a controversialist by nature. This all fits with the style and content of The Great Delusion. In fact, his first book (under his own name, at least) sounds like it has some overlap with Neon’s: This Bondage: A Study of the “Migration” of Birds, Insects, and Aircraft, with Some Reflections on “Evolution” and Relativity (1929). According to Robin Higham, it contained an attack on the RAF (to the point of ‘hatred’) and on airships in particular.⁸ And according to my notes on The Great Delusion, the first nine chapters (out of fourteen!) are about ‘airships and how useless they are’. Even more intriguing, I notice that the first chapter is about air currents (as relating to flight), and Bernard published a letter on this subject in the Times on 15 August 1930, p. 8. All circumstantial, but all pointing only one way.

But even if Bernard published a book under a pseudonym while still in the service, as many officers did, what, then, did Marion have to do with The Great Delusion? Here follows complete supposition. The drafts of Neon’s book were evidently substantially complete by the start of 1927, because the preface (by Arthur Pollen, the inventor of a sophisticated naval fire control system) is dated 8 and 18 January 1927. And Joseph Acworth died on 3 January 1927. So, here’s my best guess: that Bernard put The Great Delusion under his newly-widowed aunt’s (pseudonymous) name, in order to earn her a bit of much-needed cash? Or maybe he was just especially paranoid about having the book traced back to him and so used his aunt for an extra layer of plausible deniability?

Well, far from exploring the subversion of gender norms in airpower literature by way of Marion Acworth, it’s seems I’ve ended up reinforcing them by way of her possible nephew Bernard Acworth! That is, Neon was probably Bernard Acworth, not Marion Acworth. Let the word go forth.

1. W. Horsfall Carter, Peace Through Police (London: New Commonwealth, 1934), 6.
2. Ibid., 3.
3. She also wrote at least one article: Neon, “The future of aerial transport”, Atlantic Monthly, January 1928, also in a sceptical vein.
4. David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 319. He also gives Neon’s full name as ‘Marion Whitford Acworth’, but I think this is a typo — see below.
5. J. M. Spaight, Air Power and the Next War (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1938), 50.
6. “Joseph John Acworth”, Journal of the Chemical Society (1927), 960.
7. Herbert and his siblings are listed on a page about the village of Rothley in Leicestershire, but as that information is drawn from the 1851 census, it can’t tell us anything about a possible brother born in 1853.
8. Robin Higham, The Military Intellectuals in Britain: 1918-1939 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981 [1966]), 61.

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Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, speech to the Lord Mayor’s banquet, 9 November 1897:

Remember this — that the federation of Europe is the only possible structure of Europe which can save civilisation from the desolating effects of a disastrous war. You notice that on all sides the instruments of destruction, the piling up of arms are becoming larger and larger, the powers of concentration are becoming greater, the instruments of death more active and more numerous and are improved with every year, and each nation is bound for its own safety’s sake to take part in this competition. These are the things which are done, so to speak, on the side of war. The one hope that we have to prevent this competition from ending in a terrible effort of mutual destruction which will be fatal to Christian civilisation, the one hope we have is that the Powers may be gradually brought together to act together in a friendly spirit on all questions of difference which may arise until at last they shall be welded in some international constitution which shall give to the world as a result of their great strength a long spell of unfettered and prosperous trade and continued peace.

Source: Lord Lytton, BBC Empire Service broadcast, 18 August 1938; quoted in Listener, 1 September 1938, 430. Emphasis added.

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A curious snippet from Margaret MacMillan’s account of the Paris Peace Conference, Peacemakers (2002):

Why not give it to Hughes of Australia, suggested Clemenceau.¹

The ‘it’ was Heligoland, a small island in the North Sea, off the north-western coast of Germany. For most of the 19th century it had belonged to Britain, which swapped it for Zanzibar to Germany in 1890 — when relations between the two countries were still friendly. But then the naval arms race started up, and Heligoland became a handy place from any attempt by the Royal Navy to approach the German coast could be interfered with. Which is why, in Paris in 1919, the question arose of what to do about it.

The Admiralty naturally wanted the island back, but presumed that the Americans would object. In the end, the compromise solution adopted was to destroy all of its fortifications. Presumably Clemenceau’s suggestion was that Australia, as a nation almost as far away from Heligoland as possible, be given a Mandate over Heligoland (to add to New Guinea and Nauru), so that neither Britain nor Germany would have control over the disputed territory. I don’t know how seriously he meant it, or whether it ever had a chance of getting up. But in my mind’s eye I could see Australia dominating the North Sea from its Heligoland base with our single battlecruiser … well, no. But what would have happened if Australia had been given a Mandate over Heligoland?

Well, for a start, I don’t think Australia would have been exactly regarded as a disinterested party by Germany: British Empire and all that. In practice, there probably wouldn’t have been much difference between Australia governing Heligoland and Britain governing it: precisely because we were so far away from Europe, we had nothing to gain from it and nothing to lose, except perhaps in terms of our international reputation. I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t use it to benefit our friend (and protecting power), Britain, in whatever way they wished.

What use would it have been to Britain? MacMillan notes that the coming of the aeroplane was another reason why Heligoland seemed newly valuable. She doesn’t explain, but seems to imply that this is because of their potential use as airbases for offensive action. I doubt that it would have been of much use for Britain in this way — it was too small to have a really big airbase (only 1 sq. km!) to be very powerful, and too close to Germany (only 70 km away) to survive for long.

But what Heligoland might have been very useful for was as a RDF (radar) station, to give Britain early warning of an incoming knock-out blow. It was actually ideally placed for this purpose.

This map, taken from The Chosen Instrument (1938) by Norman Macmillan (no relation, as far as I’m aware), shows the ranges from the various ‘heavily-armed air powers’ (France, Germany, Italy) to Britain. I’ve marked the rough range of a hypothetical Chain Home RDF station on Heligoland in red: it covers the entire German north-west coastline very handily.² So, assuming the Luftwaffe respected Dutch neutrality, any bombers they sent to Britain would have to pass through Heligoland’s detection radius. Heligoland could then give warning to London that a knock-out blow was imminent. At the cruising speed of a He 111, and depending on the flight path, that could be 1.5-2 hours additional warning (or even more if the bombers formed up in range of Heligoland). Very handy, even though the actual targets wouldn’t be known until the English coast was crossed.

Obviously, there are a whole bunch of caveats. I’m obviously assuming that, not only is Dutch neutrality respected (and the Low Countries not invaded, for that matter), but also that France has not been conquered. This is not our 1940, in other words, but a scenario often envisaged in the 1930s, where Germany suddenly attacks Britain without any warning. I’m also assuming that Germany doesn’t assault Heligoland first, or cut its communications with Britain (whether radio or cable).³ But even these acts would at least give warning that an attack was imminent, which is more than the British got in the usual nightmare imaginings. Finally, and perhaps least reasonably, I’m assuming that Britain (well, Australia) would not have handed it back to Germany. Heligoland in foreign hands would have been a major irritant to German nationalists, and unlike the case with the ex-German colonies, Hitler wouldn’t have been merely posturing when he said he wanted it back. So, very likely, giving it back to Germany would probably have been one of the first acts of appeasement.

The only reason to keep it, frankly, would be as an early warning post. Even then, would the Air Ministry risk placing such a valuable piece of technology as radar right under the German’s noses, where they could study its emissions at their leisure and quickly capture it in wartime?⁴ Probably not. Though even without RDF (which in any case was secret until 1941), the British public might gain some measure of confidence, whether false or not, just from being told that there were ‘observers’ on Heligoland who would give advance warning of a massive aerial armada heading their way.

Still, it would seem that, even in this alternate history, the Heligoland Mandate would have come to exactly nothing in the end, just as it did in ours. An interesting and diverting nothing, though.

Image source: Norman Macmillan, The Chosen Instrument (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1938), 21.

1. Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2002), 187.
2. Chain Home Low, for detecting low-level aircraft, had a much shorter range. But it would still cover a useful area of sea.
3. Another thought: a German army which had prepared for an opposed landing on Heligoland might also be a bit better prepared for an opposed landing in Kent …
4. Germany had radar too, of course, but they did not well understand the capabilities of the British system or how it would be used — even after the Graf Zeppelin II made several trips parallel to the English coast, loaded with radio detection gear, in what must have been among the first ELINT air missions ever.

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Military History Carnival #10 has been posted over at Walking the Berkshires. This month, the post I enjoyed the most was at Boston 1775, about various improvised weapon systems which ragtag insurgents hoped would turn the tide against the overwhelmingly superior forces of a colonial power. Ok, it’s a stretch to call these first submarines ‘improvised weapon systems’, as they were pioneering attempts at an entirely new mode of transportation. (The post is more about other proposed weapons, such as ‘Row-Gallies’. I want to talk about submarines though :) But they were also weapons of desperation, of the weak against the strong. The British didn’t need to invent submarines because they already ruled the waves. Why bother with such frail contraptions, more of a danger to their own crew than anyone else? Submarines have come a long way since then. They are integral parts of big navies, though for very different purposes than the Turtle (platforms for SLBMs, for example). Middle powers such as Australia like to have a few around to lurk about and deter any potential aggressors, and to add some heft to their offensive capabilities. It’s in small, coastal defence navies that submarines retain something like their original purpose, as force equalisers. It’s in the North Korean navy and its like that the true heirs of the Turtle are to be found today.

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Nanotechnology is now starting to move out of science fiction and into the real world, though currently it’s more advanced chemistry than the molecular-scale engineering foretold by K. Eric Drexler more than two decades ago. So no Strossian cornucopia machines yet, no swarms of nanobots swimming in our blood to clean out the cholesterol. But some people are already trying to think through the implications of what might lie over the technological horizon.

The November/December 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists contains a review, by Mike Tredar of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (blog here), of Jürgen Altmann’s Military Nanotechnology: Potential Applications and Preventive Arms Control (Routledge, 2006). The ‘potential applications’ of the book’s title are both direct, for example ’specially designed warfare molecules’; and indirect, with the application of nanotech manufacturing techniques to the production of weapon systems of all types.

Thus, he [Altmann] warns, “MNT [molecular nanotechnology] production of nearly unlimited numbers of armaments at little cost would contradict the very idea of quantitative arms control,” and would culminate in a technological arms race beyond control.

This is because anyone could — with access to a nanofactory and the requisite blueprints — construct vast quantities of very lethal weapons in very little time. Rogue states, terrorist groups, Rotary clubs. Anyone. There would be no way to police this. No hope for the future. Unless …

The book’s most controversial thesis is not that MNT is plausible and should be taken seriously; it is that the only coherent response to this technology’s military implications is to develop global governance structures that supersede existing national powers. “The traditional way of guaranteeing national security — namely the threat of armed force — may no longer be compatible with the advance of technology,” he argues. And since security “can no longer be reliably ensured by national armed forces,” he prescribes “strengthened international institutions and international law, in particular criminal law with prosecution of perpetrators, moving into a direction toward an international monopoly of legitimate force, strong enough to prevent or punish threats or use of illegal force.”¹

This idea that technology has become so dangerous that the world needs a sort of international military organisation, with a ‘monopoly of legitimate force’ to guard it against destruction, is one that keeps coming up. Robert Heinlein suggested something similar in the age of the atom; Lord Allenby and (more hesitantly) Stanley Baldwin did likewise in the age of the aeroplane. They certainly weren’t the only ones. (And see also Anthony Eden and Ronald Reagan on the extraterrestrial threat). And arguably, even before Kitty Hawk, there was Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in “Locksley Hall” (1842):

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.²

Though Tennyson is actually speaking of a world government, this is clearly very closely associated with a world military: in practice it would be hard to have one without the other, in some form at least.

So, we keep getting told that we must unify in the face of some dire new threat: bombers, bombs, ‘bots. And admittedly we’ve actually survived quite well (OK, maybe ‘well’ is not quite the right word here) so far, despite remaining approximately as fractious as ever. The doomsayers have all been wrong, thus far. Does that mean that they always will be? As I’ve suggested recently, in a different context, as a species we quite naturally tend to avoid taking the hard choices, at least until we are right up against it. So what happens if we ever do face a threat that really does require our unity — maybe nanotech, maybe something else? It probably won’t happen until it’s too late.

Am I being too pessimistic? I sure as hell hope so.

1. Emphasis added.
2. Emphasis added.

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No, really.

You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

Leo Amery (paraphrasing Oliver Cromwell’s dismissal of the Rump Parliament), in reference to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, 7 May 1940.

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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) …

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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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The degree to which science fiction accurately predicts the future is not really the point; its value is more as an exploration of what people might do and what society might look like if you change things in a few fundamental ways. (And for my purposes, it’s the assumptions underlying a given exploration which are most interesting.) Nevertheless it’s always fun when somebody does get it right. Take this description of Britain in 1920 — written in 1893:

Things had been looking very black in the closing years of the last century, but the pessimists of that epoch were the optimists of ours. London even in the old days was a bloated, unwieldy city, an abode of smoke and dreariness startled from time to time by the angry murmurs of labour. In 1920 this Colossus of cities held nigh six million souls, and the social problems of the past were intensified. The circle of competence was wider, but beyond it stretched a restless and dreaded democracy. Commerce had received a sharp check after the late Continental wars, and the depression was severely felt. That bad times were coming was the settled conviction of the middle classes, and to this belief was due the Coalition government which held sway during the year in which my story opens. In many quarters a severe reaction had set in against Liberalism, and a stronger executive and repressive laws were urgently clamoured for. At the opposite extreme flew the red flag, and a social revolution was eagerly mooted.¹

It’s not too far off, is it: the expansion of democracy, recent war (OK, wars) in Europe, a post-war slump (if you ignore the post-war boom just before that), a Coalition government, the decline of Liberalism, the rise of Labour (the narrator is a parliamentary candidate for a non-revolutionary socialist party), fears (or hopes) of revolution. The above quote is from the 1893 novel Hartmann the Anarchist; or, The Doom of the Great City;² the author, Edward Douglas Fawcett, mainly extrapolated two trends of his own day, the beginnings of organised labour and the anarchist terror. In the novel he allies these to a revolution in flight, an aëronef (the Attila) powered by coal-fired electricity and which derives its lift from hydrogen gas-meters and ‘an inclined plane driven rapidly through the air by a screw, a device first prominently brought into notice by the nineteenth-century experiments of Maxim‘.³ The inventor, Hartmann, and his band of merry anarchists proceed to shell, bomb and burn much of London, as the beginnings of their plans to destroy civilisation and replace it with anarchy:

“But how is the new order to take shape? How educe system from chaos?”
“We want no more ’systems,’ or ‘constitutions’ — we shall have anarchy. Men will effect by voluntary association, and abjure the foulness of the modern wage-slavery and city-mechanisms.”
“But can you expect the more brutal classes to thrive under this system. Will they not rather degenerate into savagery?”
“You forget the Attila will still sail the breeze, and she will then have her fleet of consorts.”
“What! You do not propose, then, to leave anarchy unreasoned?”
“Not at once — the transition would be far too severe. Some supervision must necessarily be exercised, but, as a rule, it will never be more than nominal.”⁴

There’s more than a hint here (though not much more) of both Kipling’s “As easy as ABC” and Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come. Other parts of the book anticipate elements of the knock-out blow, specifically the panic of crowds under air attack and the vulnerability of economies to bombing, so I’m going to have to say more about it in my thesis than I was planning to (that is, more than I was planning to before having read it!)

Edward Douglas Fawcett seems to have been an interesting chap himself. His younger brother Percy was later to become famous as an explorer; he disappeared in the Amazon in 1925 while searching for the lost city of Z. Douglas was a philosopher (writing several books about idealism) and a Theosophist; yet he evidently shared the physicality of his brother, for he was also a skilled mountain-climber, skier and motorcycle racer. He moved to Switzerland, and last completed a climb to the top of the Matterhorn at age 66, suffering a heart attack on the way up; he never climbed it again, but instead learned to fly so he could still be among the mountain peaks. According to his Times obituary, he was able to continue flying until 1950, when he was 84. The same obituary notes that Fawcett was ‘well ahead of H. G. Wells’ in his science fiction, not only for Hartmann the Anarchist in its depiction of the bombing of London, but also for ‘his The Secret of the Desert (1894) [which] was, surely, fiction’s first account of an armoured fighting vehicle in the modern sense’.⁵ Must … fight … urge … to look at … irrelevant books!

Image source: Silent S. F.; it’s from page 145 of the novel.

1. E. Douglas Fawcett, Hartmann the Anarchist; or, The Doom of the Great City (London: Edward Arnold, 1893), 4-5.
2. Which I see occasional commenter Jess Nevins found much less interesting than I did — in fact he calls it ‘A colorless and joyless novel with little to recommend it […] a must-avoid’! — but that’s the advantage I have as an airminded monomaniac :)
3. Hartmann the Anarchist, 88.
4. Ibid., 84-5.
5. The Times, 18 April 1960, p. 10.

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Military History Carnival Edition Four has clearly been timed to catch me in transition from the southern to the northern hemisphere, so I’m a couple of days late in posting about it. For me, the most interesting post was Philobiblon’s on the suggestion that the so-called Glorious Revolution was successful because the Dutch ships were more technologically advanced than the English ones — in particular, they were faster and so were able to sweep in and unload their troops before the Royal Navy had time to react. This reminds me of Palmerston’s remark in 1845 to the effect that steam power made the same scenario possible at that time. I wonder if 1688 influenced his thinking on this matter?

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